Somehow, he stands alone.
Many saints do.
But Saint Patrick, like the rest, had a family, and one member, a sister, was likewise a saint. How many of us knew that?
She was named Darerca and her feast day isn’t for a few more days (March 22).
Veiled in the mists of time, her life presents a compelling tableau of piety interlaced with legend, as medieval chroniclers wove a rich tapestry around her saintly deeds.
Pro-family?
Saint Darerca was a super-matriarch.
For according to some accounts she gave birth, in the course of two marriages, to seventeen sons and four daughters, most of whom were likewise declared saints (the standards were a bit less formal back then). Others say her children tallied to 19, many of them becoming religious and again saints themselves.
She and her children helped St. Patrick evangelize Ireland [below, a pilgrimage to Saint Pat’s holy mountain in County Mayo in the 1950s]. As a writer notes: They could have made their own congregation!
In recounting the tale of Saint Darerca, it is essential to navigate the historical from the hagiographical, discerning the woman from the myth. But according to a hagiographer named Colgan, all her sons ascended to the bishopric.
She’s also known as “Moninna.” According to an account, while Darerca was her name at first, a certain dumb poet fasted with her, and the first thing he said after being miraculously cured of his dumbness was “Minnin.”
We’re not quite sure why those syllables were uttered. Whatever: hence she was called Mo-ninde or Moninna.
As for her formal name, Benedictines apparently say it was derived from the Irish Diar-Sheare which means “constant and firm love.” That’s always an important quality, to be sure, for sainthood.
Regardless of the challenges that conflation of legend and fact pose, her storied legacy remains a beacon of maternal sanctity and spiritual leadership in Ireland’s ecclesiastical heritage.
A piece of local folklore says that Saint Darerca blessed a poor man’s beer barrel so that it provided an endless supply of beer ever after!
Whether they dyed it green on Saint Patrick’s Day is a detail lost to history.
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