Monenna of Killeavy
Our Venerable Mother Monenna, Abbess of Killeavy
Venerable · b. c. 435 — d. c. 517
Commemorated 6 July — Repose at Killeavy in Armagh
Monenna — called also Darerca, and locally Blinne — was one of the earliest and greatest of the holy women of Ireland, a contemporary of Patrick and Brigid, who founded and ruled the monastery of Killeavy (Cill Shléibhe, "the church of the mountain") at the foot of Slieve Gullion in what is now County Armagh. Her first community, in the account preserved of it, was eight virgins and a widow with an infant child; their rule was eremitical, taking Elijah and John the Forerunner as its models. Killeavy endured as a house of nuns for some seven hundred years. She reposed about 517, and her grave, her ruined church and her holy well are still visited on her day, the sixth of July.
Origins
Monenna was born about 435 in the district of Mag Coba, in the territory of the Ulaid — the place is identified with Donaghmore in County Down — of a family said to have been of some standing. The name-forms are a thicket: her baptismal name is given as Darerca; Moninne is explained by the Irish tradition as an affectionate diminutive (glossed "my Ninne" or "my little one"), and the local Armagh usage calls her Blinne or Bline, whence the name of her well.
The received tradition, which is that of her eleventh-century Life, makes her a disciple of Patrick, who is said to have baptised her and given her the veil, and to have placed her for a time in the care of Brigid at Kildare. Both associations are chronologically strained and neither is contemporary evidence; what they attest reliably is that the Irish Church of the early middle ages placed Monenna in the very first rank of its founders, alongside its two greatest names.
Killeavy
She settled at last at the foot of Slieve Gullion, the mountain that dominates the south Armagh landscape, and founded there the church that gave the place its name — Cill Shléibhe, Killeavy. Her community as first constituted is described with a precision unusual in Irish hagiography: eight virgins and one widow, the widow bringing with her an infant son, said to be the boy who became Saint Luger, later a bishop. They lived, in the words of the Life, in the manner of Elijah the prophet and John the Baptist — that is, eremitically and in extreme austerity, rather than by the cenobitic pattern that later prevailed — supporting themselves by their own labour, keeping vigil and fasting, and holding all in common.
Killeavy became one of the principal houses of women in Ireland and outlasted almost all its contemporaries: nuns were there until the twelfth century, and the site remained in religious use long after. The remains of two churches, joined end to end, still stand on the slope, and a massive granite slab in the churchyard is pointed out as her grave.
Later foundations and the wider legend
Her Life credits Monenna with founding further communities — at Faughart in County Louth (the reputed birthplace of Brigid), and beyond Ireland in Scotland and England. Later tradition made much of this, and a whole cycle of legends attached itself to her, in which she travels widely, founds churches in Galloway and in the Midlands, and is associated with places as far apart as Whithorn and Burton-upon-Trent.
Veneration
Her grave at Killeavy has been venerated continuously, and St Bline's Well (Tobar Bhláthnaide), marked by a large white cross on the mountainside above the church, is the goal of the local pattern — the Irish anniversary pilgrimage — kept on her feast. The pattern lapsed under the penal conditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was revived in 1928; it continues on the sixth of July.
Feast and commemoration
July 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 19). Monenna belongs to the undivided Church of the West and is kept in Orthodox usage among the saints of the British Isles and Ireland — in the ROCOR and Antiochian Western Rite calendars of pre-schism western saints, and in the local observance of Orthodox communities in Ireland — rather than in the Byzantine synaxaria. In Ireland the day is kept locally at Killeavy with the pilgrimage to the well and the grave. She shares the calendar day with St Sisoes the Great.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable woman)
In thee, O mother, was the divine image preserved unimpaired; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Monenna, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
There is no medieval image of Monenna: Irish sculpture of her period made no portraits, and what later art existed was destroyed in the wars and confiscations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the modern icons written for her she appears as an abbess in a plain dark habit and veil, holding a cross and a scroll, or the abbatial staff; the attributes given her are Slieve Gullion rising behind her, a small stone church with the double nave of the Killeavy ruins, and the white cross of her well. Her Life supplies no distinguishing miracle that iconography has fastened on. No pre-1900 image has been identified for this collection, and the modern icons of the Irish saints are in copyright.
Disputed questions
- Darerca, Moninne, Modwenna: how many women? The chief problem of her dossier. Her Life by Conchubranus, written probably in the eleventh century, already amalgamates material belonging to more than one person, and the later English cult of Modwenna of Burton-upon-Trent — and the Galloway cult of Medana or Edana — drew Monenna's name and stories into itself. Most scholars now hold that the Irish Monenna of Killeavy is a real and distinct fifth–sixth-century figure, and that the foreign foundations belong to the legend rather than to her.
- Patrick and Brigid. The claims that Patrick veiled her and that Brigid raised her are hagiographical topoi of the kind Irish Lives use to attach a founder to the apostolic generation; they cannot be pressed as fact, and the dates do not fit comfortably.
- The date of repose is given as 517 or 518 in the annals; both are late compilations, and the figure is conventional.
- Not to be confused with the Darerca whom Irish genealogy calls the sister of St Patrick and mother of many bishops — a different person entirely, whose name has repeatedly been merged with this one because Darerca was Monenna's baptismal name.