BIOGRAPHY OF ST. MALACHY

Thomas Merton, priest, monk and poet celebrated the November anniversary of the death of St. Malachy of Ireland with a poem that begins:

In November, in the days to remember the dead
When air smells cold as earth,
Saint Malachy who is very old, gets up,
Parts the thin curtain of trees
and dawns upon our land.

TTTThroughout the poem St. Malachy utters no word.  He is, as Merton notes, a speechless visitor and a man whose history is best told by silence.  At poem’s end, Malachy—like the Old Testament priest Melchisedech—“leaves without a trace.”
TTTThe life of St. Malachy centers on the city of Armagh, Northern Ireland.  A socially and politically troubled city in the twentieth century, Armagh was much the same in the twelfth century, the age of Malachy.  The invasions of pagan Vikings and their conquest of the Catholic Irish had traumatized both Church and society in Ireland.  Civil disorder had become a way
of life.
TTTMalachy’s mission was to proclaim the values of the gospel—peace, justice, the primacy of God – to a world disrupted by militarism and violence.  The vocation of Malachy required him to be a missionary to his native land and a peacemaker to his countrymen.  He was called to be a man of spiritual stability to a world that was largely out of control.
TTTMalachy, man of silence in Merton’s poem, left behind himself neither letters nor books.  However, Malachy was fortunate in having a friend and biographer in St. Bernard who was also a priest, monk and poet.  Bernard records the spirit of courage with which Malachy met the constant threats upon his life.  As a matter of fact, Bernard records that “Malachy endured cheerfully, things that were difficult and nearly impossible.”  As a final testimony to the warmth of their friendship, Bernard was eventually buried in the vestments that Malachy had worn for the celebration of Mass.
TTTA final challenge given to Malachy of Armagh was to respect both the localism of the Irish sensibility and the universalism of the Catholic Church.  Malachy had to help his people to be both culturally Irish and religiously Catholic.  As attested by his epitaph, Malachy—Hibernus Patria: Irishman by birth—was both
TTTSt. Malachy died on the Celtic feast of Sahmaintide, a night in November when the Celtic dead wandered the earth.  The spirit of Malachy—man of gospel peace and Catholic sensibilities— continues to wander the world and in a spirit of silent witness to summon twentieth century men and women to a vision of life centered on a vision of God.

Francis A. Carbine