FEAST OF THE MONTH ST FINTAN OF CLONENAGH
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My first introduction to St Fintan was in the Old (1847) Primary School in Kiskeam, Co. Cork. What stayed in my mind from that first introduction was the description in my schoolbook of the feast that Fintan’s father had put on as a farewell party before the son departed for a new career in the monastic life. If indeed a farewell party had taken place for Fintan, it surely was his last because in later years his monastic Rule was noted, if not notorious, for the scope of its severity and strictness, even by Irish monastic standards of the day. His early training in monastic life and his own subsequent career never took him too far from home. For a saint who is so well remembered in the Irish tradition there is little known with any certainty except that he is forever associated with his monastery at Clonenagh in Co. Laois. There, rising out of the bog on the western side of the old Limerick-Dublin road, about a mile beyond Mountrath, is a knoll without building or monument but conspicuous nevertheless for the density of its burials. On my way to Dublin on a sunny morning in early summer I paused at Clonenagh , sat among the dead and joined them in praising God with Lauds, the Church’s official Morning Prayer. This was the site chosen by Fintan as ‘the place of his resurrection’. And here he was laid to rest in 603. It can also be deduced from the mediaeval Lives that it was in this vicinity that he had been born. Family connections were thought to have been good; the genealogists say that he was of the Fotharta clan; and had he been that way inclined he might even have been able to claim a relationship with the great St Brigid herself. Putting some shape on his life we can state loosely that Fintan was born in the 520s and was baptised by a local priest. Having received some basic grounding in education from his baptiser, he is thought to have entered the monastery of Terryglass beside Lough Derg on the eastern bank of the Shannon in North Tipperary. Here he lived as a hermit until such time as he established an independent monastic community close to his home in Clonenagh. Fintan’s strict Rule required abstinence from all meat and dairy products including milk and butter. The diet was limited to bread, vegetables, herbs and water. Nevertheless, recruits flocked to him from all over the country. It is told that St Canice (Cainnech) of Aghabo and some other spiritual heavyweights came to him pleading for more leniency towards the monks. Fintan yielded to their request, but did not afford the same privileges to himself. Among his most famous alumni were Comgall, founder of the great monastery of Bangor, and Aengus-the-Ceile-Dé (i.e., St Aengus of Tallaght) the outstanding 8th century authority on the history of early Irish saints.. Clonenagh, like most monasteries in the midlands suffered destruction at the hands of Turgesius the Dane in the 9th century and after the 12th century it fades from history. Through the late mediaeval period pilgrims trudged across bog and causeway to pray at this hallowed spot. A wealth of folk traditions accumulated with each passing year; one such tradition maintains that the first church was built overnight; another tops it with the tradition that the causeway known as ‘St Fintan’s Road’ was came into existence an instantaneously. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I the nearby Ballyfin estate passed to the Crosbies/Crossans. New owners from Devonshire replaced the Crosbie Castle with Ballyfin House and with a further change of ownership the property passed to the Coots. An ancient vellum manuscript, the Book of Clonenagh, survived in the Ballyfin estate until the mid 17th century when it is thought to have perished in a fire together with a crosier and other relic. Despite these losses however, the memory of the holy man lives on in the popularity of the name. Fintan is frequently chosen as a name for boys while Mountrath’s gothic parish church with its graceful spire rises into the heavens like the prayers of the saint after whom it is named. John J. Ó Riordáin, CSsR REALITY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016
Reality Volume 81. No. 1 January 2016 A Redemptorist Publication ISSN 0034-0960 Published by The Irish Redemptorists, Unit A6, Santry Business Park, Swords Road, Dublin 09 X651 Tel: 00353 (0)1 4922488 Web: www.redcoms.org Email: sales@redcoms.org (With permission of C.Ss.R.)
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