When a religious congregation selects its chief patron, the decision carries rather more weight than a football team’s choice of mascot. It is the choice of a unifying figure around whom all members, past, present and prospective, can rally. The patron’s path is one they aspire to follow, and whose life, ideals and actions successive generations of missionaries seek to emulate and ultimately embody.
In choosing St. Columban, the Missionary Sisters who bear his name were guided less by the fact that St. Patrick was already taken than by the power of Columban’s own unique journey and steadfast example. For if Patrick had helped implant the faith firmly within Ireland’s shores, Columban was among the first of its great ambassadors to carry that same flame far beyond them. Columban helped refashion an island that had itself received the missionary impulse into a wellspring from which it could flow continuously outwards – one of the pioneers who forged its abiding reputation as a land of saints and scholars.
That the women’s congregation established in his name took shape in the early 1920s, just as Ireland won its hard-fought right to self-determination, gave the choice of Columban a deeper resonance still. A nation once again, it could, after centuries of trials and tribulations, claim a place of its own on the world stage – sending its brightest and best abroad out of choice rather than out of sheer necessity, just as Columban and his companions had done at the dawn of Ireland’s missionary age. He was, in the words of the scholar, senator and supporter of the women’s missionary enterprise, Helena Concannon, “the immortal prototype of the Irish exile”.
For the early Columban Sisters, there was too, a wish to hark back to the tradition of religious women that had sprung up on the Continent in his wake – to St. Burgundofara, a contemporary of Columban and first abbess of the 7th century abbey of Faremoutiers, which lasted more than a thousand years until its suppression during the French Revolution. In that proud monastic tradition, the Missionary Sisters found a lineage to claim – a comparatively youthful congregation casting itself as heir to an early form of consecrated life, drawing a line of kinship between the daughters of St Columban, both ancient and modern.
In all his endeavours, Columban imparted lessons that resonate as strongly today as they did fourteen centuries ago. He could cross cultural and political boundaries, creating communities among peoples far removed from his own, and engage readily with fresh surroundings without relinquishing the traditions carried from home. He planted trees in whose shade he knew he would never sit, secure in the knowledge that others would tend them when he was gone, regardless of background, gift or origin.
In that shade the Columban Sisters sit today, as they have for over a century in Ireland and in the mission fields abroad. His name and image preside over nearly every part of the Congregation’s spiritual and material life while his figure hangs on the walls of its convents, his name upon its works and houses, his example held before each generation, young and old. Columban himself never returned to Ireland, yet nowhere is he more at home than among the women who have carried his spirit and name further than the saint could ever have envisioned.
