A neighborhood committee is planning a serious celebration of the saint for 2024, the 1,five hundredth anniversary of her reputed loss of life. And the Irish authorities introduced in January that beginning subsequent yr, there can be a brand new annual vacation, on or close to Feb. 1, to mark each Imbolc and Saint Brigid’s Day. It will likely be, the federal government mentioned, the primary Irish public vacation to honor a lady.
For some Catholic feminists, the brand new curiosity in Brigid displays the liberalizing Second Vatican Council within the Nineteen Sixties, which appeared to sign an finish to the subservient and cloistered function of ladies within the church.
“Many nuns, just like the Brigidines, turned rather more engaged with ecological and social points, and they’re additionally in contact with feminist teams all over the world,” mentioned Mary Condren, the director of Trinity School Dublin’s Heart for Gender and Ladies’s Research.
Margaret Hebblethwaite, a number one English author on Catholic issues, attended this yr’s vigil at Saint Brigid’s Effectively.
Whereas she had heard the title of Saint Brigid as a baby, Ms. Hebblethwaite had solely not too long ago discovered that, unusually, Brigid and her feminine successors ruled not solely nuns however male monks, as effectively. Furthermore, it’s believed that Brigid, regardless of being a lady, was ordained as a bishop.
“She is such a mannequin, so badly wanted by the church of at the moment due to the problems of gender equality,” Ms. Hebblethwaite mentioned.
In lots of different Christian church buildings, these points have already been addressed. The Church of Eire voted in 1990 to allow girls to turn out to be clergymen, and in 2013, it appointed its first feminine bishop. In December that yr, the Most Rev. Pat Storey turned bishop of Meath and Kildare — presumably the primary lady to carry such a title since Brigid herself.
Supply: NY Times
