The Feast of St. Brigid
The stories about St. Brigid as a girl sound surprisingly familiar. She gave her father's stuff away without asking, so he tried to sell her to the king. While he was there negotiating the sale, she appropriated the king's sword and gave it away without his permission.
Brigid died before the founding of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and in fact it's unclear how much of her story can be separated from pre-Christian myths. The story about the cloak, for example, is a commonplace one. Sometimes it's an ox-hide, and the way it gets bigger is by being cut into strips that can then surround a much larger portion of land.
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4 comments:
It's nice to know more about St. Brigid.
Still, I thought the Catholic Church claimed to have been founded around AD 33, with St. Peter as the first pope. Am I mistaken?
Sorry, that phrasing was ambiguous. "Before the founding of the Catholic Church" does sound like I meant "anywhere, at all." It should have read, "...in Ireland."
And even that doesn't mean there weren't Christians, as the story makes clear: the local king was already a Christian. It's just the formal structure of the Catholic Church that was not present.
Oh, right. That would make sense.
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