ON ST. EUNAN, BISHOP AND CONFESSOR,
AT RAPHOE IN IRELAND.
Perhaps in the eighth or ninth century.
CommentaryEunan, bishop and confessor at Raphoe in Ireland (S.)
J. S.
Raphoe is a city of the county of Donegal in Ulster, a province of Ireland, episcopal under the archbishop of Armagh, The Saint's bishopric, formerly called Rathbotha, which now also I find named among the geographers Rapa, Raphyra, Rassa, and Raposa, but commonly Raphoe or Rapoe. The first bishop of this city is believed to have been St. Eunan, of whom I find nothing else besides the cult lately fixed on this day. James Ware in the Commentary on the prelates of Ireland, page 73, reckons St. Eunan first among the bishops of Raphoe; for after he had observed that the monastery of Raphoe was built by St. Columba the abbot, of whom there was treatment among us at the IX of June, he subjoins the following: The church of this monastery was erected into a cathedral church, as it seems, by St. Eunan, who is judged the first bishop of this see. But at what time he lived I have been able to find by no search. There was shown at Raphoe not long ago his bed. Colgan in the Trias Thaumaturga, page 509, enumerates some bishops of Raphoe, but none more ancient than the tenth century, and passes over Eunan. I suspect that St. Eunan flourished in the eighth or ninth century, because the monastery is said to have been restored by St. Adamnan, whom Colgan asserts to have died in the year 703.
[2] and his cult on this day. Castellanus in the Universal Martyrology recorded St. Eunan among the Ahemeri, or those Saints whose cult is not attached to a certain day, and there he has this of him: St. Eunan, first bishop of Raphoe in Ulster, a province of Ireland, where there is a church dedicated to his name. Among the proper Masses of the patron Saints of France and Ireland, which were printed at Paris in the year 1734 by order of the supreme Pontiff Clement XII, at the VII of September there is read a Mass of St.
Eunan, and this title is prefixed to it: On the feast of St. Eunan, bishop and confessor, general patron of the church and diocese of Raphoe. This Mass proves that at least now St. Eunan is venerated on the VII day of September, and indeed as patron of the diocese of Raphoe. For the rest, that Mass has nothing about the Saint's deeds, and for that reason I transfer nothing from it hither. I only observe that the Gospel is read from chapter 10 of Luke, on the mission of the Seventy-two disciples of Christ: from which it may somehow be gathered that St. Eunan is held for an apostolic Man who promulgated the faith among his own people.