As today is the feast of Saint David, patron of Wales, I have made a post at my own site on some of the Irish sources which honour him. Saint David is represented in the earliest surviving Irish Martyrologies as well as the Irish Annals and the hagiographies of some Irish saints including Saint Ailbe of Emly and Saint Molua. His own hagiographer, Rhygyfarch, mentions a number of Irish saints, Patrick and Brendan among them. Some manuscript versions of Rhygyfarch's eleventh-century Uita Sancti Dauid also preserve some of the texts of the Mass of Saint David, something made all the more important by the fact that there are no surviving copies of pre-Reformation Welsh liturgical books. So, for all those in Ireland who celebrate the feast of Saint David, especially for the good people of Naas, County Kildare, who enjoy his patronage, here is the collect for the feast as preserved in the Vita:
O God who didst foretell thy blessed confessor and bishop, David, by the message of an angel to Patrick, prophesying thirty years before his birth: we beseech thee that by his intercession, whose memory we are keeping, we may attain to eternal joys. Through...
Silas M. Harris, Saint David in the Liturgy (Cardiff, 1940), p.14.
If you are interested in further reading on the links between the Welsh patron and the Irish I have reprinted a paper on Irish devotion to Saint David from the Irish Rosary magazine of 1921 which can be read at my own site here. An earlier post on Saint David and Naas is available at this site here.
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