By Charlotte Murphy

Once upon a time, many years ago, I had a teacher named Sr. Virgilius who was a credit to her profession and to her religious Order – the Sisters of Mercy. Recently, while on holidays in Austria, I came across the name Virgilius once more and was surprised and very pleased to find that it belonged an Irish saint.

In the Annals of the Four Masters and the Annals of Ulster, Virgilius is referred to as the abbot of the great early Christian monastery of Aghaboe, Co. Laois.

Because of his vast knowledge of geography he was also known as the ‘Geometer’; a man who believed that the earth was a sphere and, a thousand years before Captain Cook and other European explorers ever set foot on Australia, he believed in the existence of the Antipodes.

It was a common practice for many Irish monks to leave Ireland and seek what they called ‘white martyrdom’. They would leave the land that they loved in order to bring the word of God to pagans in the Europe of the time. This is what Virgilius decided to do.

At first he settled in a place known as Franconia, which is roughly in the centre of today’s Germany.

Virgilius became an influential adviser to the royal court and encouraged Pippin, the ambitious aspirant for the throne, to have himself blessed with holy oils at his coronation.
Virgilius was clearly making a name for himself because he was invited by Duke Odilo of Bavaria to come to his lands and help to establish learning and Christianity.

The Irish monk founded a monastery at Chiemsee, in a beautiful setting on a small island surrounded by a peaceful lake. It proved so popular, that he was chosen as Abbot of St. Peter’s in Salzburg. Here he continued to work diligently for the conversion of the Alpine Slavs and the Hungarians.

But in Salzburg he encountered what was perhaps, his most controversial experience, when he ran foul of St. Boniface. Most historians believe that Boniface was born in the south-west of England and went to Germany to help convert the people back to Christianity. Their first controversy arose because of the words used for the rite of Baptism.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own