Women in the Early Irish Church
In the west of Ireland, to this day, Christian churches are adorned with the unsettling stone image of the Sheela-na-gig.
A grimacing, grotesque woman, squatting in the ancient bearing-down position of giving birth, the Sheela is puzzling motif for a Christian church, and a throwback to an earlier, pagan era. Very different than images of the gentle Virgin Mary, she’s a throwback to the ancient Irish goddess
Christianity may have spread in Ireland without bloodshed, but the old religion didn’t go down without a fight. The Sheela-na-gig flourished through the Norman invasion and up until Cromwell, the rise of Puritanism, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. She offers a glimpse at women in the early Irish Church. Like the Sheela, Christian women were powerful and persistent, deeply tuned into nature.
Like their pagan mothers and grandmothers, early Christian Irishwomen lived in an environment where women played a prominent role. It wasn’t a feminist paradise by modern standards—society was ruled, after all, by an aristocratic warrior class—but women who became Christians continued to play prominent roles in the new religion. And Brigid is one of the most important examples.
Women were nuns. Patrick himself, in his fifth-century Letter to Coroticus, remarks that the number of Irishwomen “becoming virgins for Christ was beyond number.” And not long after Patrick, not only had they founded major monasteries, they were (unlike their European counterparts) traveling widely, preaching to pagans, befriending bishops, performing miracles, receiving grants of land from kings, and setting up major monasteries.
Unlike their European sisters, they refused to be enclosed in a cloister, subservient to male priests and bishops. Instead, they were considered founders of Christianity on the island of Ireland. They were abbesses—the early medieval version of Wonder Woman, who wielded their crozier, or bachall, the staff that still serves as a symbol of authority of the still-male bishop.
They were in charge of larger, more important monasteries, including “double monasteries” of both monks and nuns, like the ones in Kildare or Armagh, ruled over enormous federations of daughter houses, provided employment to lay people living in the region, and educated both men and women.
They provided hospitality to traveling bishops and kings, and they received hospitality in turn when they traveled on their own. They negotiated peace treaties between warring noblemen. They provided charity to the poor and ministered to the sick, not just in their own monastery but in the surrounding communities.
They heard confessions and dispensed absolution to their nuns and to the men and women in the surrounding communities. They wore a bishop’s mitre. There’s even evidence that some of them served at the altar leading mass, distributing communion. We know all this because although the hierarchy tried to erase the history, some of the liturgical remnants have survived. They performed some functions that were later reserved only to male deacons and priests.
Their record was impressive. But most impressive of all was Brigit, abbess of the monastery at Kildare, was an abbess on steroids, proof that there was a crucially important place for women within the ecclesial structure in Ireland of the early Middle Ages.
Brigit of Kildare
If Patrick preached the Gospel with authority he received from Rome, Brigit took her authority directly from God. In one account of her life, Brigit, bored by Patrick’s sermon, is lulled off to sleep, only to reveal upon awakening that she’d received a heavenly vision, straight from the divine, which she shares with Patrick and his followers. For Early Irish Christians, Patrick may have been the apostle of Ireland, but Brigit, who communed directly with God, seems to have been his spiritual superior.
The Irish calendar is packed with female saints, like Ita, Sencha, and Moenna, who are still venerated today. They’ve all got their own holy wells, churches, and feast days. Ita even has a city named for her—Kileedy, in County Limerick, where her monastery was located. But it’s Brigit who epitomizes and illustrates the role of women in the early Irish Church in a way no one else does.
We have several vitae of Brigit, each with a slightly different story to tell. Two portray Brigit as the daughter of a druid king born to a slave woman who “gave birth standing over a threshold, just after milking the cows” and who washed the child in the new milk. The writers report that soon after the baby was born, she “shot columns of fire out of her head, which even the druids understood made her special.”
Later writings downplay these pagan connections, but for the early Irish, these stories hinted that “Brigit’s sanctity was greater, not despite but because of her gender and pagan reputation. They hinted that her very femaleness gave her territorial and numinous powers both Christian and Other, and that she governed the landsapes of Ireland long before Patrick and Christianity ever came to Ireland.”
Brigit came to epitomize Irish Christianity. At her monastery at Kildare, in the southern province of Leinster, she educated male saints including St. Brendan the Navigator, reputed to have been the first European to sail across the Atlantic to North America. She negotiated peace treaties between warring petty kings in her province and beyond; she administered what amounted to a diocese—a federation of monasteries and daughter houses.
She revealed the father of a baby whose paternity was under dispute; she performed a miraculous abortion on one of her errant nuns. She was known for her generosity and kindness, and her many miracles were reminiscent of those of Jesus: She turned a lake into beer for some thirsty lepers, multiplied loaves for a feast with visiting clerics, and drove a demon from a man possessed.
Ordained a bishop, she passed her episcopal authority on to her successor abbesses at Kildare. As the leader of her faith community, she performed liturgical functions as well, from hearing confessions and granting absolution to preaching the Gospel to even—some evidence suggests—celebrating the Eucharist, which was only officially restricted to males in the thirteenth century.
Brigit was certainly not the only prominent woman in the early church, but she illustrates perhaps better than anyone else both the power of early Christian women and the feminine nature of the early Irish Church, with its connection to its pagan past. Washed in milk, straddling the two worlds of the old feminine religion and masculine Christianity, she was powerful in symbol as well as in deed.
She helped to lead a church that understood, and practiced, the faith in a thoroughly feminine way, baptizing converts in milk rather than water.
Later writings about Brigit whitewashed her pagan connections and tried to minimize her role in the Church. But for the early Irish, these stories hinted that Brigit—and indeed all Christian women—held a place of honor and importance.
It’s not easy—maybe it’s impossible—to disentangle fantasy from fact when it comes to Brigit’s life. But we do know that this milk-washed and fire-spouting, half-Christian, half-pagan woman, born on the threshold between two worlds, continues to inspire women today.
The practice of baptizing in milk, banned by the Synod of Cashel in 1172, soon after the Norman invasion, put an end—officially—to old Irish practices connected to the feminine religion that had preceded Christianity. But those practices, and the history that surrounds them, linger in quiet ways today—young brides rub their fingers over the Sheela-na-Gig as they enter and leave church for Mass, beseeching the pagan goddess for a healthy pregnancy and a safe delivery.
These female practices, and the understandings that form them, may have something important to tell us about the contemporary church.
Brigit’s Daughters Today
Out in the countryside, in villages and woods barely touched by the modern world, the sacred trees and the holy wells and the Sheela-na-gigs are still there. Pilgrims still make the trek out to those barren places like Skellig Michael and Colman’s Cave.
They tie “clooties” to the trees and sprinkle themselves with water from the holy wells, immersing themselves in the feminine world of the pagan water-dwelling goddess even as they say their Our Fathers and Hail Marys. In Irish folk Catholicism, the history and power of early Christian women is alive and well.
With fresh reeds from the edge of holy wells, pilgrims make Brigit’s crosses, weaving the story of the pagan goddess of the sun into the story of the Christian saint who shot tongues of fire from her head. They may not realize it, but they’re continuing to incorporate their faith with the pagan past, the Christian present, and the uncertain future.
Those strands might have something to tell us about how women might regain their roles in the church today—think, for example, of women like Dorothy Day or Helen Prejean, community activists, who nurture with the word of God and with practical care.
For a twenty-first century church in crisis, we can turn to Brigit and her sisters for inspiration and courage. The voices of women, their ministry—and their priestly orders—were important in early medieval Ireland, and they are crucial to the Church today.
Brigit and her sisters can help us find a path to a profoundly incarnational faith, deeply focused on the goodness of nature and God’s immanent presence, in which welcoming women to Holy Orders can be perceived as natural and right.
This theology exposes the misogyny of Augustine and his descendants, which saw women as imperfectly formed men and set the stage for centuries of oppression. Brigit and her sisters can help us reclaim the roles that our baptism has called us to.