Feast day: February 1

St. Brigid of Kildare

Abbess · c. 451–525

Patron of Ireland

One of Ireland's three patron saints, she founded the great double monastery of Kildare and became a byword for boundless generosity to the poor.

Brigid was born about 451 in Ireland, in the very generation that St. Patrick was completing the conversion of the island, and she became, with Patrick and Columba, one of its three great patron saints. Tradition makes her the daughter of a chieftain, generous and headstrong from childhood, forever giving away her father's goods to the poor — so freely that he despaired of ever marrying her off advantageously.

Refusing all offers of marriage, she chose instead to consecrate her life to God and received the veil as a nun. Gathering other women around her, she founded, by tradition under a great oak tree, the monastery of Kildare — the name means 'church of the oak' — which grew into one of the most important religious centers in all of Ireland.

Kildare was unusual: a double monastery of both monks and nuns, with Brigid as abbess presiding over the whole, an arrangement that gave her, and the abbesses who followed her, extraordinary authority in the early Irish Church. It became a great school of learning, art, and craftsmanship, famous for its illuminated manuscripts, and a perpetual sacred fire was kept burning there in her honor for centuries.

Countless stories of her kindness and her miracles — multiplying food and drink, healing the sick, clothing the poor — made her the most beloved of Irish women saints, the 'Mary of the Gael.' Her simple cross of woven rushes is still made in Irish homes on her feast, the first of February, which in Ireland marks the very beginning of spring.

Stories say she gave away so much — her father's sword, the milk, the butter — that her charity became legendary; she is patroness of Ireland alongside Patrick.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/02784b.htm