The patron saints of Ireland are Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid and Saint Columba. The life of St Patrick appeared in the last section as he was a Roman citizen. Saint Brigid will be discussed later under the heading: Cult of Saints. It was Saint Columba, a Gaelic Christian who really set up the Celtic Church in Ireland and in Scotland.
From Iona, the abbey founded by Columba in the Scottish Western Isles, Celtic monks went to found an abbey on the island of Lindesfarne in Northumbria under the direction of Saint Aidan. St Aidan and St Cuthbert evangelized the Angle Kingdom of Northumbria which took in the north of England and southern Scotland.
Ireland was governed by Druids when Patrick returned there in 432 AD. The last evidence of paganism in Ireland dates to 830 AD so evangelization took some 400 years to complete. The setting up of monastic schools played a large part in Christianization. Saint Columba and Saint Brendan set up monastic schools in Iona in Scotland; Clonfert, County Galway in Ireland; and also in East Anglia and Gaul. Saint Aidan set up a monastic school on the island of Lindesfarne, Northumbria.
The Celtic Church also existed in Wales with the school of St David in the place now called St Davids. Nennius, a Welsh monk wrote Historia Brittonum, a history of Celtic Britons in 828 AD.
The Celtic Church was an early Orthodox Church. The Celtic Church in Britain existed at the time when Christianity as a whole was led by five church patriarchs in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome. This is before there was a Pope in Rome and the Roman Catholic Church came into existence.
The Celtic Church was organized around monasteries, and not around cathedrals. Priests were married, while monks were celibate, and hermits often chose very ascetic lives. The later Anglican Church was a return to the view of priesthood held by the Celtic Church.
The Celtic Church was a missionary church. The itinerant preachers, who were monks, set off in coracles to cross seas to the remote islands of Scotland and to the coasts of Cornwall and Wales, and then on to Brittany and Britonia (now called Galicia in Spain). Later they evangelized Northumbria from Lindesfarne Island.
Monks who were priests celebrated open air masses with an alter cloth to lay upon a rock. They retold the stories of the Gospels and the Old Testament to the people in Gaelic.
The Celtic Church flourished between the 6th to 8th centuries. It was essentially a Gaelic-speaking church, although its missionaries to Cornwall spoke Cornish, a Brittonic language and its missionaries to Northumbria learnt to speak Anglo-Saxon English.
Cornwall and other regions have many place names from dedication to Cornish saints who lived in the 6th century. In Cornwall there are many high cross monuments of granite. These are large sculpted crosses that date from the time of Celtic Christianity. They resemble a Christianized form of the standing stones of the Ancient Britons. They would have been set in place by the Christian descendants of Ancient Britons.
Later on the Roman Catholic Church became the church of Celtic lands. In 1123 Saint David was canonized by the Holy See of Rome and in 1131 the Cistercian monastery of Tintern Abbey was founded in Monmouthshire, Wales.
Saint Columba (521-597)
Columba means ‘dove’. He was an Irish abbot and missionary. The Irish call him Saint Colmcille. When he was young he was instructed by Saint Ninian, the Apostle of the Southern Picts. He was also instructed by other Brittonic-speaking priests and monks at Clonard monastery in Ireland.
Columba was a Gaelic man of noble birth, great stature and powerful voice which stood him in good stead as a public speaker and evangelist. He founded four monasteries in Ireland and a church. In 563 Columba went by boat – a wicker and leather Currach with twelve companions to Scotland. One of Columba’s kinsmen, the King of Dal Riata gave him the island of Iona. Columba founded the Abbey of Iona on the island and from here evangelized the northern Picts.
Saint Columba became known as the Apostle of the Picts. He was much loved by both the Picts and Gaels. When he died his relics were divided between Picts in Scotland and Gaels in Ireland. In Scotland Saint Columba’s relics were placed in the Monymusk Reliquary. When Scottish armies went into battle they took St Columba’s relics with them. St Columba’s bones were at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 when the Scots led by Robert the Bruce won victory over the English despite being vastly outnumbered.
The Life of Columba was written in Latin by Adomnan or Eunan of Iona, an abbot of the 7th century.
Saint Aidan
Aidan, of Irish descent, was a monk at Iona. In 635 he went to the north of England and founded Lindesfarne Priory on the island of Lindesfarne and served as its first bishop. It was here that he learnt to speak English as he decided to make it his mission to convert the Anglo Saxons of Northumbria to Christianity. His native language must have been Gaelic. He obtained an invitation from the King of Northumbria for this missionary work. Aidan became the Apostle of Northumbria.
Aidan travelled ceaselessly spreading the gospel among Anglo Saxon nobility. He also looked after orphans from poor families and collected money to pay for the setting free of slaves (taken by the Angles and Saxons). Aidan practiced strict asceticism and was made a saint after he died in 651.
Saint Cuthbert (634-687)
Cuthbert of Lindesfarne became the Patron Saint of Northumbria. As a child Cuthbert was brought up near Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders. There are indications that he was of noble birth. He became a monk and went on evangelization missions from Berwick in Northumbria to Galloway in southern Scotland. He was called ‘Wonder Worker of Britain’ for all the miracles he performed.
Cuthbert joined Melrose monastery and was made prior. After this he was made prior of Lindesfarne, but he wanted to be a hermit. To this end, Cuthbert departed to St Cuthbert’s Island near Lindesfarne, but he received many visitors there. One of his visitors was Elfleda, royal virgin and holy abbess who succeeded St Hilda as abbess of Whitby in 680.
In 684 Cuthbert was brought back from his small island and was made Bishop of Lindesfarne, but he insisted on returning to his ascetic life and went to an even more remote island, Inner Farne Island. His asceticism led him to praying waist deep amidst the waves of the cold North Sea. It was on this island that he died.
The monks of Lindesfarne came under attack from Vikings in 793 and were forced to depart. They took Cuthbert’s sarcophagus with them. The stone tomb was loaded onto an ox cart. After much journeying, the cart got stuck in deep mud at Durham and would go no further. So St Cuthbert came to rest at Durham Cathedral where his shrine became the destination of a popular pilgrimage. Located in the Kingdom of York, the cult of St Cuthbert appealed to Danes who converted to Christianity and was later adopted by Normans too. St Cuthbert was the most popular saint in Britain from 687 to 1170 when Thomas Becket was martyred.
The alter cloth of St Cuthbert that he had used to lay on his mobile alter to say mass when on mission, was taken into battle by the English against the Scots on many occasions prior to the Reformation. There were no relics of bones of St Cuthbert as when they opened his tomb eleven years after his death, his body was found to be incorrupt so it was sealed up again.
In 1104 a new cathedral was constructed in Durham with a shrine for St Cuthbert. His tomb was opened again and this time his bones were taken out and put in the new shrine. Cuthbert’s bones survived the Reformation which is unusual. Today they are interred in the floor of the cathedral of Durham. When the tomb was opened in 1104 the ‘Saint Cuthbert Gospel of John’ was found well conserved. It is the oldest surviving Western book with original binding in leather. It is now kept in the British Library. The tomb also contained a square Saxon cross of gold with inlaid garnets. This cross became the heraldic emblem of St Cuthbert.
Venerable Bede
Bede (672-735) is a well-known historian of Britain and a theologian of the Celtic Church. He was a monk from Northumbria, though there are indications that he had a wife. (Celtic priests had wives so maybe he was a priest rather than a monk). He travelled throughout the British Isles and wrote and received many letters informing him on the historical events of these kingdoms.
History had been dated by the dates of reign of successive kings, of which there were many as there were many kingdoms. To get a chronological sequence these all had to be tallied together which was extremely difficult. A Byzantine monk called Dionysius Exiguus invented dating from the birth of Jesus Christ. Bede, in writing his histories, spread the usage of this new system of recording dates: in Latin Anno Domini = AD or ‘year of our Lord’. We can thank the Venerable Bede for this simplification in dating events in Britain.
One of the places visited by Bede was Lindisfarne or Holy Island on the northeast coast of present-day Northumberland. It was a big monastic centre of Celtic Christianity founded by Saint Aiden and Saint Cuthbert. Bede made known these two missionary saints by describing the miracles connected to them.
Lindesfarne Gospels
The Lindesfarne Gospels are the oldest translation of the life of Christ from Greek into English. The illuminated manuscript dates to 715-720 AD and was produced at the monastery on the island probably by Eadfrith, a monk who became bishop of Lindesfarne. The artwork has Saxon, Mediterranean and Celtic influences.
I have seen the beautifully hand illustrated Lindesfarne Gospels at an exhibition at the British Library in London.
Merry and True 
very interesting thani
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