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EARLY
HISTORY OF THE CONGREGATION
A Religious Congregation comes into being in response to
some deeply felt contemporary need; and it was in answer to
the anguished cry of a deeply wounded Ireland that the Brigidine
Congregation was founded. The Penal Laws of the 18th
century had wrought what seemed irreparable havoc on the once
far-famed "Land of Saints and Scholars", leaving
its oppressed and largely pauperized people bereft of their
beautiful Gaelic culture, deprived of their much treasured
education tradition, and reduced to an underground practice
of their faith, in their effort to retain what was the very
'soul of their soul'.
Such was the Ireland into which Daniel Delany was born in
1747; and such was the desolate, national miasma in which
he spent his early years. Fortunately, his parents and his
two exemplary aunts were firm Catholics, who not only passed
on to the little lad the truths of the faith, the richness
of his land's traditions, and a deep thirst for knowledge,
but also taught him to be sensitively aware of the sufferings
that surrounded him in his native locality near Mountrath,
in the county of Laois.
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Daniel Delany
Bishop Kildare & Leighlan,
Ireland
Founder of the Sisters of St
Brigid and the Brothers of St Patrick
1747 - 1814
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On his decision to answer the Lord's call to the Priesthood,
Daniel, at the age of sisteen, was smuggled to Paris to pursue
his studies. There he became known for his intellectual brilliance
and his marked sensitivity of disposition. In 1770, significantly
the year that Captain Cook entered Botany Bay, Daniel Delany
was ordained a Priest. On his return to Ireland, disguised
as a layman, the country was still fettered and unfree despite
the relaxing (but not total lifting) of the Penal Laws. Ignorance
at every level was abysmal and widespread. Having overcome
his initial temptation to return to France, the young priest
resolutely set his face to the multitudinous tasks ahead.
Fr Delany's deep and abiding love for the Blessed Eucharist
enabled him to fearlessly lift aloft the Host for public veneration
in Corpus Christi processions - in brave contrast to the long,
dark penal years, when such religious processions were forbidden.
He likewise organized Sunday school for adults as well as
children. It was in experiencing great difficulty in training
and maintaining teachers, that, as Bishop, he determined after
long hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament to found
in Tullow the Brigidine Congregation in 1807; and the Patrician
Congregation in 1808. The following year he sent three of
the Tullow sisters to Mountrath.
 In
1842, the parish priest of Abbeyleix, who had workd with the
Brigidines in Tullow, asked for their help in his new parish.
In response, three of the community were sent there. Then,
in 1858 a layman in Goresbridge, who had a niece in the Tullow
community, offered to help finance a foundation in his parish.
The Paulstown and Ballyroan foundations followed hot on the
heel of Abbeyleix.
Then in 1883, from the " land of the Southern Cross"
came a cry for help in Christian Education, when Bishop Murray
of Maitland diocese, asked for, and obtained, six sisters
from Mountrath, who made the first Brigidine Foundation in
Australia, in Coonambl, New South Wales. From there branches
quickly spread to the Diceses of Sydney, Bathurst, Canberra
Goulburn, Perth and Brisbane as well as to the Diocese of
Wellington, New Zealand , in 1898.
Meanwhile, in 1886, a second foundation direct from Ireland
- this time from Tullow- was established in Echuca, Victoria,
followed by a group from the Abbeyleix community to Beechworth,
in November of that same year; as well as a contingentfrom
Goresbridge to Wangaratta in 1887; and, finally, a conbined
group from Abbeyleix and Goresbridge to Ararat.
In the 20th century, the Irish province added
to its outreach:
- in Dublin: Dartmouth Rd, Ballinteer, Meadowbrook,
Killinarden, Ballyboden and Finglas; as well as
- to the U.K. in Denbigh (Wales), Windsor, Gilmoss (Liverpool),
Leeds, Slough and Shoeburyness.
- In the U.S.A., foundations were made from the Irish Province
in San Antonio and Beloit; and
- the two Australian provinces sent sisters to Hohola and
Erima in Papua New Guinea.
Brigidine mission outreach also extended to Zambia and Kenya
and Mexico.
In our present day commitment, our Brigidine charism enshrines
the anxieties, injustices, expectations and challenges of
the modern world. In response to the Second Vatican Council,
we have experimented with many possibilities, and with wide
involvement, always aware of what our charism beckons us to,
in working generously for each other in the Congregation and
on behalf of the Church and society- interiorly aware of the
nobility of soul that has filtered through to us, down almost
two centuries, from all our former Brigidine sisters, encouraging
us onward, ever in search of new horizons; and at the same
time ever open within ourselves to an ongoing revitalization
of soul and mind, fire by whatever needs of "The Kingdom"
call out to us Brigidines in this our day.
Just as our patroness St Brigid is believed to have been
the first woman in Ireland to weave and spin cloth, what a
privilege it would be for us, her followers, to weave people's
lives together on a creative one-ness of co-operation in an
effort to stem the competitiveness that tears people apart
in a consumerist society of crass materialism.
Sr Mary O'Riordan CSB (Dublin)
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