DONNCHADH O CORRAIN,
Sir, - Judith Maas and Mary Condren (Rite and Reason, March 5th) are much mistaken if they think modern scholars deliberately suppressed St Brigid's miracle of causing a pregnancy to vanish. Just look at Sean Connolly's translation of the First Life of Brigit (1989) or Fr John Colgan's text of the original Latin published as long ago as 1647.
And this is not the only account of abortion in Celtic history. There is another in the Life of Ciarán of Seir, bishop and saint. Bruineach, a virgin nun in a convent under Ciarán's authority, was seized by the local king who loved her for her beauty, and he slept with her in his fortress for a long time and wished to keep her as wife.
But St Ciarán went after him and got her back - miraculously, but pregnant. Now I quote in translation from the Latin: "When the man of God saw that the womb of the woman was swelling with a foetus, he blessed her vulva with the sign of the cross, and her belly shrank, and the foetus in her womb vanished."
Another version of the Life says that he did this because "he did not wish that viper's seed should not have life".
On a more mundane level, it is clear from the Penitentials that the medieval Irish knew about abortion and practised it commonly, as did many early and medieval societies. I can find no civil law punishment for abortion, though a married woman's unilateral abortion was a ground for divorce. Otherwise, the only punishment was penance. - Yours, etc.,
DONNCHADH Ó CORRÁIN,
Professor of Medieval
History, UCC,
Cork.
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Sir, - It was a moment of déjà vu, reading Judith Mass's article of March 5th. A similar piece by your columnist Medb Ruane appeared in your paper on September 6th, 1999 outlining the story of the "disappearing foetus".
Could your paper now commission an article, as a matter of fairness, on the anti-abortion teaching of any of the following writers? At least these writings are accepted as historical, unlike the unreliable hagiography surrounding the life of Brigid:
Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Octavius, St Hippolytus, Council of Elvira, St Basil the Great, St Ambrose of Milan, St Jerome, St John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Weemse, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. - Yours, etc.,
GARRY O'SULLIVAN,
The Irish Catholic,
Dublin 1.