Description

The life of a saint by a saint. Malachy O'Morgair spent his life and considerable energies exhorting, wheedling, badgering, and praying his countrymen back to christian faith and practice. Bernard holds him up in this Life, eulogy, and hymn as a model to bishops.

'He was a man truly holy, a man of our times, a man of outstanding wisdom and virtue, a burning and a shining light even now [after his death] not quenched but only withdrawn.' In these words Bernard of Clairvaux, himself a great saint of the twelfth century, expressed his admiration for his friend and contemporary, Malachy O'Morgair, monk and bishop of the Irish Church.

Once the land of saints, Ireland had fallen on hard and unholy times by the late eleventh century. An Irishman born, Malachy took as his task in life the reform of the Church in his native land: the re-establishment of discipline, the regularization of worship, and the re-introduction of monastic life.

Malacy 'fell asleep happily in the Lord' shortly after midnight on the feast of All Souls, 1148, at the cistercian abbey of Clairvaux; on the day and at the place he had prayed he might, and foretold he would, die. Abbot Bernard celebrated the requiem. In his homily then and later in a biography, another homily, and a hymn, he spoke of the bishop as a modern saint. His judgement was confirmed by the western Church in 1190, when Malachy became the first formally canonized saint of Ireland, more nearly again a land of saints.