Saint Laurence O'Toole and Saint Brigid

November 14 is the feast of the twelfth-century saint Laurence (Lorcán) O'Toole. I have only recently begun to research his life and career but have been immediately struck by his links to the holy places of the early Irish church, most famously Saint Kevin's monastery of Glendalough. At my main site today I have published an address delivered in 1880 on the 700th anniversary of the death of Saint Laurence by the then Bishop of Ossory, the future Cardinal P.F. Moran. Interestingly, he begins with an account of the devotion of the family of Saint Laurence to the Irish patroness Saint Brigid:

St. Laurence O'Toole was born about the year, 1125. His father was chieftain of the Hy-Murray territory, which embraced all those fertile and picturesque districts now comprised in the southern half of the County Kildare. St. Bridget was the patron of the family, and her protecting mantle, and her blessing, were in a particular manner extended to the whole of that rich territory. The infant was sent to St. Bridget's shrine at Kildare to receive the waters of Baptism. Many signs and wonders foreshadowed his future greatness. The holy man who baptized him gave him the name of Lorcan, that is to say, one valiant and renowned, foretelling at the same time, that he would one day be magnified on earth and glorified in heaven. 

The rest can be read here. Blessings of the Feast!

Latin Mass in the Pro Cathedral, Dublin

With the permission of His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin and the Very Reverend Canon O'Reilly, Adm., St. Laurence's Catholic Heritage Association organised a pilgrimage to the Pro Cathedral, Dublin, today, to honour the feast of St. Laurence O'Toole, Patron of the Archdiocese, and to venerate his relics enshrined there.

The sacristy staff honoured us by laying out for use at the Mass the vestments made for the High Mass in the Phoenix Park at the 1932 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and the chalice given as a gift by the People of Ireland to St. John XXIII, gifted by him back to the Pro-Cathedral, and used by St. John Paul II at the Mass that he celebrated in the Phoenix Park when he visited Ireland in 1979.

From Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road by Christine Casey, p. 126 ff:

ST. MARY'S PRO-CATHEDRAL

Marlborough Street

Of 1814-25.  A large and remarkably ambitious metropolitan chapel whose style and scale provided an exemplar for Catholic church building in the city for over half a century.  In all but name, this is the Roman Catholic cathedral of Dublin.  It is the parish church of the archbishop and since its dedication in 1825 it has played a central role in national religious ceremony.  The remains of Daniel O'Connell, Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera lay here in state; John Henry Newman was inaugurated here as the Rector of the Catholic University; and in 1903 John McCormack began his career here with the renowned Palestrina Choir, founded in the previous year.  At 4,734 square ft (1,320 square metres), it was the largest church built in Dublin since the Middle Ages.  The model was French, in particular the basilican church of St Philippe du Roule in Paris (1764-84), a Neoclassical design with a nave, apse and ambulatory... The Pro-Cathedral design is more fastidiously primitif in its employment of Greek Doric throughout, modulated to Tuscan in the tripartite windows of the s elevation.  'Sublimely Greek by any standards' concluded J.M. Crook, 'pedantic' and 'dogmatic' counters Michael McCarthy, both seeing through the many accretions to the original heroic concept.  While substantial C19 and C20 alterations have considerably reduced the potency of the original design, the Pro-Cathedral still ranks among the most powerful Greek Revival church interiors in these islands...