This is the feast day of St Brigid (aka St Bride), who born about the year 450 (and is pictured above being airlifted to Bethlehem by angels). She is the patron of dairy workers, was said to have turned water into beer, and is Ireland’s second favourite saint. She founded a community of women in Kildare, Ireland, and was a friend of St Patrick.
Mary beloved! Mother of the White Lamb,
Shield, oh shield us, pure Virgin of nobleness,
And Bride the beauteous, shepherdess of the flocks,
Safeguard thou our cattle, surround us together,
Safeguard thou our cattle, surround us together.
Prayer to Mary and St Brigid, Carmina Gadelica
Pope Stephen III died today in 772. A native of Sicily, his fellow Sicilians tried to have him declared a saint during the Middle Ages, but the Vatican was reluctant, on account of the number of murders, blindings, and tongues being ripped out which happened to his rivals when they were all scrambling to win the chair of St Peter.
Lawrence Humphrey, an English theologian living in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, died today in 1590. He was a key player in the sensation of the time, the Vestments Controversy, in which almost all the leaders of the English church quarrelled with each other over whether the vestments they wore in church were too Catholic or not. Humphrey, who was a Puritan, refused to wear the prescribed clergy fashions and almost lost his plum job (President of Magdalen College, Oxford) over it. But later in life he softened, and even allowed his clergy to wear the much-hated surplice.
Image of St Bride by John Duncan: Wikipedia