Feast day: November 14

St. Lawrence O'Toole

Archbishop · 1128–1180

Patron of Dublin

Archbishop of Dublin during the Norman invasion of Ireland, a reformer and peacemaker who fed the poor by the hundreds and tried to shield his people from the upheavals of conquest.

Lawrence O'Toole — in Irish Lorcán Ua Tuathail — was the great archbishop of Dublin in the turbulent twelfth century, the first Irishman to hold that see. Born about 1128, a chieftain's son, he was handed over as a boy as a hostage to a rival king and treated harshly, before being placed in the monastery of Glendalough, where he embraced the religious life so wholeheartedly that he became its abbot while still in his twenties.

Renowned for his austerity, his charity to the poor — whom he fed in great numbers during famine — and his reforming zeal, he was chosen archbishop of Dublin in 1162. He set about reforming the clergy and the life of his city, himself living as a strict monk amid the duties of high office, wearing a hair shirt beneath his robes and retreating when he could to a hermit's cave at Glendalough.

His episcopate coincided with the Norman invasion of Ireland. Lawrence found himself repeatedly cast as a peacemaker and negotiator between the Irish kings, the Norman lords, and King Henry II of England, travelling on dangerous diplomatic missions to protect his people and his Church.

On one such mission to Henry II he fell ill and died in Normandy, in 1180, far from home. Canonized in 1225, he is honoured as the patron of Dublin and a model of the holy bishop in a violent age.

He negotiated between Irish kings and the invading Normans, fed huge crowds of the starving from his own table, and died on a peace mission far from home.

Image: Andreas F. Borchert (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/09091b.htm