Gerald

ON ST. GERALD, ABBOT AND BISHOP OF MAYO IN IRELAND.

CIRCA AD 700.

Historical Synopsis.

Gerald, Abbot and Bishop of Mayo in Ireland (St.)

BHL Number: 3416

Section I. The foundation of the Mayo monastery before Gerald: the first part of his Life, fabulous or doubtful.

[1] The side of Ireland which faces the setting sun is shown by the Geographers to be divided into three provinces, of which the middle is Connacht, having the county of Mayo, The veneration of St. Gerald in Mayo as its center, a pleasant region abundantly rich in cattle, deer, hawks, and an abundance of honey, as Camden testifies; who also says that it takes its name from Mayo, a small episcopal town which is called Mag-eo in the Roman Provincial; but it is now annexed to the Archbishopric of Tuam. Colganus found in the List of Churches of the Diocese of Tuam that the feast of St. Gerald the Abbot is celebrated on the tenth day of March and noted in the records of that Church; but he suspects that an error has crept into the numbers, both because his Life says that the Saint rested in peace on the Third before the Ides of March, from the Martyrologies, and because whatever hagiologies make mention of him show the thirteenth day designated for his veneration; namely the Martyrology of Usuard augmented and printed by Hermann Greven in the year 1521, exhibiting nothing beyond the bare name of Gerald the Abbot; the Florarium (manuscript) of the Holy Abbots, making mention of Guido and Gerald, of whom the former is entirely unknown to us;

and the same Canisius, in his German Martyrology, uses the same brevity as Hermann, but promises to treat of him more fully on August 12. On that day at Bourges a Gerald celebrated by the same name is indeed venerated, and is also named by the author of the Florarium for March 13; but (as Canisius himself later noted upon better consideration) he is very different from the one who is venerated in March. And he is noted in the Tamlacht Martyrology for the twelfth day in these words: Gerald of Mag-eo with his companions; and by Marianus Gorman on the thirteenth day: Gerald of Mag-eo of the Saxons, Abbot and Bishop.

[2] Why it is called Mag-eo of the Saxons, it is worthwhile to learn from Bede, St. Colman and at the same time to know the origins of that monastery, quite different from what we read, not without annoyance, in the badly stitched together Life of St. Gerald. Bede, therefore, after having set forth in book 3, chapter 25, of his Ecclesiastical History the outcome of the disputation about the Paschal controversy held before King Oswiu, begins chapter 16 thus: When the conflict was ended and the assembly dissolved... Colman (of Lindisfarne, sent as Bishop of the Church by the Abbot of Iona in the year 660 or 661), seeing that his teaching was despised, defeated in the dispute about Easter, and his sect looked down upon, took with him those who wished to follow him -- that is, those who were unwilling to accept the Catholic Easter and the corona tonsure (for there was no small question about this too) -- and returned to Ireland, to discuss with his people what should be done about these matters... This question was raised in the year of the Lord's Incarnation 664, which was the twenty-second of King Oswiu's reign; and the thirtieth year of the episcopate of the Irish, which they held in the province of the English; since Aidan held the episcopate for seventeen years, Finan for ten, and Colman for three.

[3] and migrates with his followers to Ireland, So much in that chapter; then in book 4, chapter 4, he continues the narrative he had begun. Meanwhile Colman, who was a Bishop from Ireland, leaving Britain, took with him all the Irish whom he had gathered on the island of Lindisfarne; but also about thirty men of the English nation, who were both imbued with zeal for the monastic life. And leaving some Brothers in his church, he first came to the island of Iona, whence he had been sent to preach the word of God to the English nation. Then he withdrew to a certain small island, separated not far from the western coast of Ireland, and having settled the Irish on Inisbofinde, called in the Irish tongue Inis-bofinde, that is, the island of the white heifer. Coming therefore to this place, he built a monastery and placed there the monks whom he had brought, gathered from both nations. But since they could not agree with one another (because the Irish in summer, when crops were to be gathered, left the monastery and wandered through places known to them; but when winter came, they returned and wished to use in common what the English had prepared), Colman sought a remedy for this disagreement, and searching all around, near and far, he found a place in the island of Ireland suitable for building a monastery, which in the Irish tongue is called Mag-eo. He purchased a small part of it for building a monastery there from the chief to whose possession it belonged, he transfers the Saxons to Mag-eo, on the added condition that the monks living there would offer prayers to the Lord also for him who provided them the place. And immediately building a monastery, with the chief and all the neighbors also helping, he settled the English there, leaving the Irish on the aforesaid island. Which monastery indeed is to this day held by English inhabitants; for it is the same which, now having grown from small to great, is commonly called Mag-eo; and with all now long since converted to better practices, it contains an outstanding swarm of monks, who, gathered there from the province of the English, after the example of the venerable Fathers, live under a canonical rule and Abbot, in great continence and sincerity, by the labor of their own hands.

[4] So far Bede, according to the most accurate Cambridge edition of the year 1644, collated with many manuscripts both Latin and Saxon, The Life which makes St. Gerald the founder there, in which, finishing his History at the year 731 and writing about events of the century in which he himself was born, undoubtedly greater credence should be given to him than to a Life composed more than seven centuries later by Augustine Magraidin, as Colganus believes, an Augustinian Canon of the monastery on the Island of All Saints, which is surrounded by the river Shannon on the western border of the county of Longford. James Ware in book 1 on the writers of Ireland, chapter 11, says that among other fruits of his studies he wrote the Lives of the Saints of Ireland, and that he died on the Wednesday next after the feast of All Saints in the year of our Lord 1405. We received this Life from the manuscript of the same island, communicated by the most courteous Father Hugh Ward, and we excerpted it for January 20, treating of St. Fechin, and promised it should be given on this day of March. But now, having examined it more fully, we think it sufficient that it exists among the Acts of the Saints of Ireland published by John Colgan, lest a writing be needlessly disseminated by multiplied editions whose first and principal part contains more, and those most serious, errors than paragraphs -- so that if any grain of sincere truth lurks in it, it is impossible to separate it from the rest in such a heap of chaff.

[5] For to say nothing of the first chapter, which contains a nativity very similar to fable, this author writes in the second chapter that upon the death of St. Columba on the island of Iona, Colman succeeded him, disciple to master; he imagines Colman as the first Abbot of Iona after St. Columba, but that he was driven from the island of Iona by a conspiracy of the nobles and arrived at the land of England. But Bede has it that he was sent from there to preach the faith and was ordained Bishop, at least sixty years after the death of St. Columba; and we have from other sources that SS. Baithen, Fergna, Suibhne, and Cumine succeeded him in continuous succession -- by whose authority Colman defended himself in the Paschal controversy, saying: Surely we cannot believe that our most reverend Father Columba and his successors, men beloved of God, who celebrated Easter in the same manner, held or practiced things contrary to the divine scriptures? elected Archbishop of all England, This biographer then adds that the people and clergy of England, upon discovering the signs of Colman's holiness, made him by unanimous consent Archbishop of all England -- whom we know from Bede was sent by the Abbot of Iona to the Northumbrians alone, according to custom, and did not have greater jurisdiction than his predecessors Aidan and Finan. Afterwards he names a King Cusperius and a Queen Benicia as Gerald's parents, names entirely unknown to all Anglo-Saxon history -- except that the more northern part of Northumbria, extending into modern Scotland, is attributed to the Bernicians, from which the name Benicia seems to be drawn. To these he adds that the youthful age of St. Gerald and his three brothers was instructed by the same Colman both in the liberal arts and also in theological learning, and that the monastic habit and ecclesiastical Orders were conferred upon them -- namely within the space of three years, during which alone Colman was in England.

[6] and then expelled by the English themselves, These so many absurdities heaped together in one chapter are followed by another much more absurd: namely, that Gerald was appointed Abbot at Winchester on account of his holiness, where, although the fame of his miracles, spread all around, had united many monks under his obedience, he nevertheless wished to migrate from there to Ireland -- both because the Prelates of England, together with the Clergy, conspired against the holy Archbishop Colman as a foreigner and rashly expelled him from their borders, with Gerald following with 3,000 men, whom Gerald with his brothers and three thousand men of good will wished to follow; and also to avoid the company of his wicked father, who, after his mother's death, kept another woman in sin. Winchester is not far from the southern

Winchester is an ancient city not far from the southern coast of England, three hundred miles distant (which is the entire width of England) from the island of Lindisfarne, where Colman resided; where, if Gerald was either an abbot or a monk, his disciple and Abbot of Winchester, he was far enough from the company of his infamous parent, who supposedly lived in the extreme north of England under Bishop Colman. Nor could Gerald have had anything in common with Colman before they met in Ireland, where Bede would not have failed to mention that three thousand men followed Colman, if he could have truthfully written this. That Colman was by no means expelled by the English, but, stung by zeal or shame, he petitioned and obtained from the King permission to depart, is sufficiently clear from Bede, who says that he sought and obtained leave to depart from the same King, so that the Brothers who preferred to remain in the church of Lindisfarne when the Irish departed might have the most reverend and gentle man Eata placed over them -- one of the twelve boys whom Aidan had accepted from the English nation to be instructed in Christ at the beginning of his episcopate.

[7] then at Mayo in Ireland: Such are the beginnings of this Life, which the author pursues in the same style through the first seven chapters. After narrating the miracle of a king's daughter raised from the dead, with her sex changed as well, and after another even less plausible narrative about a deer which gave the monastery of Elither in Connacht its name, he finally comes to the origins of the monastery of Mayo and narrates how Gerald received from Ragallus, King of the Connachtmen, land offered for building an abbey, which was afterwards called Mayo (the manuscript has Mainz). Colganus thinks this can to some extent be reconciled with Bede's History by saying that the first founder of the monastery of Mayo was indeed Colman, but that Gerald should be considered the author of the greatness to which it later grew, as Bede himself mentions. I indeed think that Colman returned within not many years to his Irish monks in the monastery of Inisbofinde, with the affairs of the Saxons now established at Mayo and the administration entrusted to St. Gerald. But I see that one of two things must be chosen: who, however, must either have been there long before Colman, namely, that either Gerald did not come to Ireland with Colman in the year 664, much less was his disciple in Northumbria; or that he did not participate in that Synod, gathered under Kings Diarmaid and Blaithmac, in which St. Fechin judged that a plague should be sought from God as a remedy for famine, with Gerald (as the Life has it) striving against this.

[8] For the plague which followed this deliberation carried off the principal of both Princes and Prelates, as Bede testifies in book 3, chapter 27. It also followed that eclipse of the sun noted by the same Bede in the year of the Lord's Incarnation 664, which occurred on the third day (Petavius, Riccioli, or he could not have attended the Synod of the year 664, and other experts in astronomical laws assert it should be written "first") at about the tenth hour of the day. Colganus saw this difficulty in this place and wished to appear to have resolved it by saying that the plague, though begun in the aforesaid year, had not ended but had lasted until the following year -- which, though asserted by him without proof, we willingly concede to him. But we do not see how that answer bears on the question; for the question is not whether Colman arrived in Ireland with his followers while that mortality was raging, and Gerald might have followed him, but whether he could have arrived before that calamity fell upon mortals -- and indeed so long before as must be supposed by one who asserts that Gerald was already then an Abbot of such authority among the Irish that he presumed to oppose the opinion of St. Fechin in a public assembly of the entire kingdom. This certainly does not stand with such a recent arrival, even if you say the disputation about Easter was held at the very beginning of the year, and before Easter of the same year, and therefore before the plague had arisen, Colman and Gerald himself had arrived in Ireland.

Section II. The life and miracles of St. Gerald in Ireland.

[9] Having set out from Winchester into Connacht around the year 630, Therefore, lest we say there is nothing at all in this entire Life that has any appearance of truth, I say that in the province of Winchester, Gerald was not indeed an Abbot (for no reason at all supports this), but that he either served his novitiate in the monastic life there, or at least was born and lived there, until, led by love of a holier and more solitary life, with those three (who in his Life are called his brothers according to the flesh, but whom it is sufficient to believe were joined to him by the brotherhood of holy living) -- Balonus, I say, to be commemorated on September 3, Berikertus on December 16, and Hul-britannus on April 24 according to the Irish martyrologies -- and perhaps a few other companions of the same purpose, he left his homeland and crossed to Ireland; which you may suppose took place around the year 630 of the Christian Era and his twentieth year of age. Whether, upon landing in Connacht, Gerald found there some King named Ailill whose daughter he raised, and indeed with her sex changed to male, I have no way to determine. I see that the Elitherian monastery, which the author wrongly believed was named from Elith, a deer, he founds the Elitherian monastery from a fable invented to prove this, was truly and fittingly named from elitheir, meaning "pilgrim"; and that traces of its name still survive in kill-an-elitheir chapel, as Colganus says, in the county and diocese of Galway in Connacht. Where also Gerald obtained another place, which he named Techna-Saxon, that is, the house of the Saxons, from other disciples coming from western and eastern Saxony, and placed St. Balan in charge of it, who by the deposit of his sacred body would make that church venerable to posterity, as is gathered from Marianus Gorman and Cathal Maguire.

[10] Perhaps also in the plain of Mayo that famous King Ragallus of the Connachtmen (whom the Irish Annals write flourished around the year 640 around 640 he receives a place in Mayo from King Ragallus: and died in 645, as Colganus himself testifies, although he admits that, given the truth of these Acts, they erred) conferred some possessions upon him, where Gerald built another oratory, with some portion of his new disciples transferred there; which would have been the reason why the most celebrated monastery of Mayo was believed to have been erected by him, especially since he himself obtained burial and veneration there, and it is probable that he had supreme authority over it and the other places dependent on it, and was therefore believed to be Colman's disciple because he was known to be his successor in the abbatial dignity -- although in reality, long before the monastery was founded by Colman, Gerald's name was already famous in Connacht, from the times of King Ragallus onwards; and his authority was as great as the events at the Synod of the year 664 require; which, from the Acts themselves, we have in these words, together with some miracles which preceded and followed them, we can, while nothing else is opposed, believe this author.

[11] By these and many other prodigies shown by the man of God Gerald in the same place, he breaks up a rock troublesome to fishermen the King of the land and the other people of the territory regarded the holy man as worthy of reverence and powerful for things humanly impossible. Whence the King complained about a certain very hard and large rock situated in the middle of a river called Muaydh, which caused no small trouble to fishermen and others sailing there. The stone of stumbling, he said, and rock of scandal to all of us is this aforesaid rock; for it prevents schools of fish wishing to swim from the sea to fresh waters, and it frequently tears the fishermen's nets. Therefore we unanimously beg your fatherly piety that, through the power given to you by the Lord, this rock may be removed from the midst of the river, and through this your God may be praised in His miracles. Then St. Gerald, wishing to strengthen the people in faith in the Trinity, cast the small stone which he had carried with him from his mother's womb upon that great rock, and at once the great stone was divided into the smallest pebbles. Then all who were present burst forth in praise of Almighty God and His Saint, and the King offered St. Gerald and his successors forever a tithe of the fishing in that river.

[12] In the same region there was a certain famous druid, who had many disciples of his art; a druid coming against him he also lived on a certain hillock near the monastery of the Saints with his followers, claiming a hereditary right in the same land; whence to this day it is called the Hill of the Druids. The holy monks who lived with the man of God, with fervor of spirit, looking at the beautiful thickets here and there, built a very large fire. The aforesaid druid, seeing the smoke of this fire, said to his companions: From the magic art I have learned that this fire lit today, unless it is extinguished quickly, will not be extinguished until the end of time. Going out, therefore, and taking up arms, he mounted a horse to extinguish the fire more quickly. But by God's will it happened that the feet of his horse were held most firmly on a certain immovable rock, as if they were fixed to the stone, and the druid himself so adhered to the back of his horse that he could in no way move himself from it. The druid, therefore, astonished at what had happened to him and sensing that divine power prevailed over his strength, said to his people: Observe, my friends, that whatever kinds of spirits support the magical arts are conquered by the prayers of these men before the God of heaven. Therefore humbly supplicate these followers of Christ, that they may release me from this intolerable torment, and I vow myself and all my offspring to the service of them and their successors forever. When the vow had thus been made, he with his horse was miraculously released from their bonds; but in the same rock the hoofprints of the horse remain indelibly impressed to this day.

[13] After this the holy man divided his brothers into three groups; he organizes the monastic life: one he assigned to the English lands, to bring from there necessities of life for the brothers who were laboring; another group he set to the construction of walls around the monastery; and the third he assigned likewise to devoutly chant Masses and Canonical Hours and to pray with a pure heart for the Christian people. By such arrangements infused into him from the heavenly Dispenser, under the pious shepherd Gerald, the Lord's fold grew in the height of honor and reverence, and he himself finally completed it.

[14] he recovers stolen oxen by drying up a lake: After this, nine robbers who were related to each other came to the territory of the man of God and seized the oxen from there. When the man of God had investigated the sequence of events and followed them closely, he found them on the island of a certain lake, where they were accustomed to hide their plunder. Since they would not grant him entry of their own will, God, who dried up the Red Sea at the pleasure of His servant Moses' will, dried up that water as if no stream had ever been there.

Seeing this, those nine robbers prostrated themselves before the man of God, did penance, and vowed to serve him and his successors in the future. Then St. Gerald said to them: I do not refuse your service and allegiance, but lest the justice of God seem to have lost its rigor, your offspring after you shall not grow beyond the number nine.

[15] At a Synod gathered to seek a remedy for famine, At the same time two Kings of Ireland, who then co-reigned, namely Dermitius and Blaithmacus, issued an edict that all clergy and laity should come to the city of Tara to hear the reason for the royal edict. For there was then a great famine in the land; for the multitude of people was then so great that the land did not suffice for agriculture. Whence to each farmer as a legitimate portion were given nine acres, or seven of flat land, and eight of rough land, and nine of forest. And therefore the elders of the land took counsel that the people should come together to one place, and all, both laity and clergy, should fast and pray to God that the burdensome multitude of the lower people should be removed by some pestilence, so that by this the rest might live more comfortably. And when the people and clergy had come together, the matter is entrusted to him and St. Fechin, and the holy men who were present had felt differently about this matter, they chose two famous Abbots distinguished for holiness, namely St. Gerald and St. Fechin, so that whatever those two should judge about the matter to be sought, all would unanimously agree. But they did not entirely agree with each other in their judgments, because St. Gerald said that it was not a just petition that God should remove people by some plague, who, against Gerald's opinion, since He is powerful enough to feed very many from a small supply of grain, just as the children of Israel in the desert from manna, and just as five thousand men from five loaves; and also from small and few grains sown in the earth, the whole human race annually.

[16] Fechin, however, asserted that the multitude of petitioners should be believed, persuades them that a plague should be sought from God, because all the elders of the land were asking that the excessive multitude of the common people should be removed through some illness, because the number of the people was the occasion of famine. When the majority prevailed in seeking pestilence, behold, an Angel of the Lord appeared in dreams to a certain man, saying: Alas that you did not seek food from the giver of all good things; for He would not have denied this to you. For it is no more difficult for God to multiply food than to multiply people. But because you sought against God's will the death of the lower people, therefore by God's just judgment the greater ones will die. Which is what happened. For the wrath of God, raging against the promoters of that counsel, killed those two who co-reigned over the whole land, together with the King of Ulster and the King of Munster, and many others through an illness by which he himself and all the leading men are destroyed, called jaundice; for this illness is called in Irish "budhe Connaill." By this pestilence so many people died that not a third of the population remained. By that same affliction St. Fechin also died, because he had given his consent to the others, and many other clergy. And the Angel added: But because St. Gerald the Abbot, who is upright in the eyes of the Lord, judged rightly, the divine mercy will spare him. All of which, just as the Angel predicted to him, came to pass.

[17] After this, St. Gerald, hastening to the land of Connacht, in the region called Corann, Gerald frees the people of Corann from this, found a great multitude of people held by the same pestilence. A certain famous chief named Etranus presided over that multitude, who had incurred the same illness with the rest. And because their infirmities were multiplied, they hastened to the physician who was and is able to take away their infirmities. For seeing that the man of God Gerald had come into their territory, and firmly believing that he had sufficient power over the disease which oppressed them, behold, they ran to him from all sides, saying: O holy man of God, have mercy, have mercy on us, and heal our ailments, for you are powerful; for our illness is severe, and we will soon die unless you help us. And the pious Shepherd said to the chief: You with your offspring hasten under the covering of my cowl and place yourselves beneath it. While the chief with his offspring was fulfilling the commands of the pious Abbot, behold, all the others from the people ran and attempted to place themselves under the garment of St. Gerald. But since the small cowl could not cover all or contain them within itself, behold, by divine power it conferred such width upon the garment that it sufficed to contain all within itself. As many, therefore, as were touched by the cowl of St. Gerald were healed of that illness. Lest, therefore, they should seem ungrateful for the benefit of their liberation, they promised their personal service, and that of their offspring after them, to St. Gerald.

[18] his sister Segresia, After this the holy Abbot went to his monastery called Elitheria, where, upon hearing of the death of his sister Segresia and of one hundred nuns of her company, together with fifty of his own disciples -- all of whom had died from that pestilence -- he came with his followers to the Church of Mayo. Corann is a well-known region in northern Connacht beyond Boyle, known to us from the Acts of St. Columba; but Colganus admits that this Segresia is unknown to him, unless she is the one called Segneria by Marianus Gorman of Domnach-kerne, listed under December 18.

[19] Colman founds the Mayo monastery around the year 670, All these things perhaps happened before Colman's migration to Ireland, certainly some years before the beginnings of the monastery built by him at Mayo; for the above-mentioned passage of Bede about the disagreement of the Irish and English monks requires more than one year of cohabitation at Inisbofinde. Wherefore I believe that around the year 670 Colman first sought a dwelling for his Saxon companions, and that Mayo was preferred all the more because Gerald had settled in that region with his monks, whose proximity, on account of the bond of their common homeland, would be less fearsome to this new colony. I also believe that St. Gerald, captivated by the outstanding holiness of Colman -- which the reader finds brilliantly demonstrated from Bede and others under February 18 -- submitted himself and his monasteries to him and after a few years yields it to Gerald, as Bishop of the English and his elder, whence it happened that Mayo became the head of many, and was increased by great growth of resources and persons; especially after Colman returned to his Irish monks and the government of all the Saxons in the region of Mayo was transferred to Gerald. This must have happened a few years after the monastery was founded, if indeed the Annals of Ulster, in Ussher's chronological index, correctly reported the death of Colman on the island of the White Cow to the year of Christ 676.

Section III. The death of St. Gerald: his companions.

[20] After Colman's return to Inisbofinde, the holy man Gerald, lingering in the monastery of Mayo to the end of his life, St. Adamnan persevered in the love of God and neighbor, as the Life so often cited has it; and no less, as we believe, in the observance of the schismatic Easter handed down to him by Colman, excusable for some time on many grounds which Bede alleges; until the holy Abbot Adamnan, after visiting all Ireland, went to St. Gerald, to form a fraternal bond with him. To him St. Gerald granted a piece of land with a clear spring and commended his church to him, so that he might defend it from the persecution of laypeople after his death -- all of which St. Adamnan promised to complete and did complete. These things receive light from chapter 16 of book 5 of the Ecclesiastical History written by Bede, who speaks thus:

[21] taught the canonical Easter in England, At this time (namely when Aldfrid, King of the Northumbrians, held power among his people), a very large part of the Irish in Ireland, and also some of the Britons in Britain, accepted, by the Lord's gift, the rational and ecclesiastical time of the Paschal observance. For Adamnan, priest and abbot of the monks who were on the island of Iona, having been sent by his nation on an embassy and coming to Aldfrid, King of the English, and staying for some time in that province, saw the canonical rites of the Church; and being carefully admonished by many who were more learned not to presume to live contrary to the universal custom of the Church, either in the Paschal observance or in any other decrees, with his very few followers placed in the farthest corner of the world, he was changed in mind, so that he most willingly preferred what he had seen and heard in the churches of the English to the custom of himself and his people. For he was a good and wise man and most nobly instructed in knowledge of the Scriptures. When he returned home, he endeavored to lead his people who were on Iona, and those who were subject to that monastery, to the path of truth which he had recognized and which he himself had embraced with his whole heart; but he was unable to do so. He sailed to Ireland and, preaching to them and declaring with modest exhortation the legitimate time of Easter, he teaches many Irish to abandon their error, he corrected and brought back to Catholic unity most of them, and nearly all who were free from the dominion of the Ionians, and thoroughly taught them to observe the legitimate time of Easter.

[22] and probably also the English at Mayo: That among these were also the monks of St. Gerald (although, subject to the Ionians, they followed the institutions of St. Columba handed down to them by Bishop Colman) will easily be believed by anyone who considers that most of them, with their Abbot, were Saxons, not Irish -- especially if (as is probable) those elders who had stubbornly followed Colman departing from England in their received rite are believed to have been partly overcome by the number of new monks arriving from England, accustomed to the Catholic rite, and partly carried off by death. Why Gerald, dying, should commend his monastery and the other monks subject to him in various places to St. Adamnan is easy to explain: because Adamnan was the head of the entire Order.

[23] But since Bede, continuing his discourse about Adamnan, ends in this manner: he dies in that same year in his Iona monastery, around the year 700 After celebrating the canonical Easter in Ireland and returning to his island, and most insistently preaching in his monastery the Catholic observance of the Paschal time, yet being unable to accomplish what he attempted, it happened that he departed from this world before the circle of a year was completed -- divine grace assuredly disposing that a man most zealous for unity and peace should be snatched to eternal life before, at the return of the Paschal season, he should be compelled to have a more serious discord with those who refused to follow him to the truth. These words of Bede, I say, establish that only one Easter, and that in Ireland, intervened between Adamnan's departure from England and his death on the island of Iona; and since from the same Bede, book 5, chapter 19,

it is established that King Aldfrid (to whom Adamnan had come as legate) died in the year of the Lord's incarnation 705, not in the year 743 it does not appear how either the Chronology of the Four Masters, by which Gerald is said to have died in the year 736 and Adamnan in 743, can be saved; or the penultimate chapter of the Acts of St. Gerald, in which the author continues what was begun above thus: Not long after, after innumerable miracles and monasteries built, St. Gerald rested in peace in the Church of Mayo on the third day before the Ides of March. after seven years of the prelacy of Mayo. After his death, St. Adamnan governed the Church of Mayo without rest for seven years, instructing the cloistered monks in perfect charity, causing volumes to be written, and writing with his own hand the book of the four Gospels; he also caused bells to be made for the reverence of the church. Thence he went to the Abbey of Iona, and there he died happily in the Lord and was buried.

[24] Unless perhaps we should wish to suspect that some Adamnan did indeed succeed Gerald, who held the governance for seven years, Gerald likewise not in 731 or 736, but one different from the Abbot of Iona, whom the Biographer, not very accurate as is clear from what has been said, was unable to distinguish on account of their having the same name. Even granting this, another difficulty still remains, by no means new with regard to the Irish Saints: namely, that if the Bishop of Muighe-Heo of the Saxons, Gerailt (as Tigernach has in his annals cited by Ussher in his index for the year 697) died in the year 731, or, as the Four Masters have it, 726, it follows that either whatever we said was done by Gerald in Ireland before Colman's crossing to Ireland was not done by him at all -- but that he, being very young, but seems to have died around the end of the seventh century, having followed Colman only in the year 666, was scarcely capable of governing a monastery before the end of the seventh century; or that he surpassed the hundredth year of life by twenty or thirty years before he died. Wherefore, until a more certain light shines from elsewhere, we say that SS. Gerald and Adamnan appear to have died around the end of the seventh century or the beginning of the eighth.

[25] famous for miracles even after death, Furthermore, St. Gerald (to weave in here this last chapter from the Life as well), although he performed many miracles in his life, showed no fewer after his death, where the faith and devotion of those who asked was not lacking. After his death, Turgesius, a very cruel Norwegian tyrant, devastating all Ireland, finally came to the Church of Mayo, and burning destroyed the church which the Saint had built there, covered with lead boards, in contempt of God and the Saints. In this church, moreover, a certain man, fleeing from the face of the persecutor from the fire, escaped unharmed like another Daniel through the merits of St. Gerald. A certain poor widow, also through the merits of St. Gerald, sustained by water alone with herbs for the course of a year, remained there. For when the commotions of wars compelled the citizens to leave that church, so that during the persecution they did not dare to return to their homes for a year, God thus miraculously fed through His Saint that widow alone, who was unable to walk across the fields on foot after the others. In these and many other signs God glorified that holy Abbot Gerald, by whose merits and prayers may the divine mercy deign to have mercy on us. Amen.

[26] Note here that the one called Tergerius is the same as the Turgesius commonly found elsewhere, about whose unhappy end -- he was slain in the year 860 -- see what was said on March 6 in the Acts of St. Gorprey, number 12. Ussher is our witness, in his chronological index for the year 697, that just as in the small town of Mayo a church consecrated to God in Gerald's name survives to this day, so also there had been in the same place, in the time of Adamnan and St. Cormac, a dwelling of one hundred Saxon Saints, according to the compiler of the book of Ballymote. By no means content with this number, in his fifth book of opuscules in Colganus, Aengus writes thus about the Saints of this monastery: St. Aengus increases them to 1350 and makes them Saints: Three thousand three hundred who were with St. Gerald the Bishop, and fifty Saints from Lugnia of the Connachtmen, who inhabited the monastery of Mayo, through Jesus Christ I invoke, etc. I do not think, however, says Colganus, that so many Saints lived at the same time in that monastery, which was otherwise grand and magnificent; but either successively at different times and under different Abbots, or at least at the same time in various other monasteries subject to that archmonastery, under the same supreme Archimandrite Gerald.

[27] We add that the Irish would not have been so generous in canonizing their people in droves, from which the Irish abuse is noted, with those who died with some appearance of greater virtue in the eyes of the common people, if they had followed the custom of the universal Church throughout the world, which grants the prerogative only to Martyrs that, without considering the merits of individuals in their former life, all whom death suffered for the love of Christ has united, it wishes not separated by any distinction of honor -- since the cause of their dying renders their blessedness undoubted and makes us certain that they are not invoked by prayers in vain. But those who are not known to have obtained the crown of martyrdom have the beginning, middle, and end of their life weighed individually, as well as the miracles that accompanied and followed it, and individually they are added to the number of Saints to be duly invoked, either by Pontifical decree or by public consensus of the Christian people, led by clear and frequent prodigies into a certain opinion about someone's sanctity. who too rashly ascribe the title of sanctity to their own, Since the pious simplicity of the Irish observed this law, so congruent with right reason, so little, that from such groups of Saints to be invoked together the entire fifth book of Aengus' opuscules was formed, and we may rightly suspect that no greater circumspection was used by those who compiled the Irish Hagiologies, although the Saints themselves, although ancient; whom therefore we cannot follow, we are therefore necessarily compelled to require other and more weighty testimonies of public and ecclesiastical veneration, customarily given by the universal Church to Saints alone. When these are lacking, we accept the title of Saint in Irish authors no differently than if we found the epithet "of pious memory" or "of happy recollection" or "Servant of God" prefixed to the name of someone who died in a Christian and pious manner, according to present-day usage.