St. Mohonna (or Macarius, Mauricius), sent by Columba, with twelve companions, to the Picts.
St. Columbanus, with twelve brethren, whose names are on record, to France and Germany, a.d.
612.
St. Kilian, with twelve, to Franconia and Würzburg, a.d. 680.
St. Eloquius, with twelve, to Belgium, a.d. 680.
St. Rudbert or Rupert, with twelve, to Bavaria, a.d. 700.
St. Willibrord (who studied twelve years in Ireland), with twelve, to Friesland, a.d. 692.
St. Forannan, with twelve, to the Belgian frontier, a.d. 970.
It is remarkable that this missionary activity of the Irish Church is confined to the period
of her independence of the Church of Rome. We hear no more of it after the Norman conquest.
The Irish Church during this missionary period of the sixth and seventh centuries had a
peculiar character, which we learn chiefly from two documents of the eighth century, namely, the
Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland,^62 and the Litany of Angus the Culdee.^63
The Catalogue distinguishes three periods and three orders of saints: secular, monastic, and
eremitical.
The saints of the time of St. Patrick were all bishops full of the Holy Ghost, three hundred
and fifty in number, founders of churches; they had one head, Christ, and one leader, Patrick,
observed one mass and one tonsure from ear to ear, and kept Easter on the fourteenth moon after
the vernal equinox; they excluded neither laymen nor women; because, founded on the Rock of
Christ, they feared not the blast of temptation. They sprung from the Romans, Franks, Britons and
Scots. This order of saints continued for four reigns, from about a.d. 440 till 543.
The second order, likewise of four reigns, till a.d. 599, was of Catholic Presbyters, three
hundred in number, with few bishops; they had one head, Christ, one Easter, one tonsure, as before;
but different and different rules, and they refused the services of women, separating them from the
monasteries.
The third order of saints consisted of one hundred holy presbyters and a few bishops, living
in desert places on herbs and water and the alms of the faithful; they had different tonsures and
Easters, some celebrating the resurrection on the 14th, some on the 16th moon; they continued
through four reigns till 665.
The first period may be called episcopal, though in a rather non-episcopal or undiocesan
sense. Angus, in his Litany, invokes "seven times fifty [350] holy cleric bishops," whom "the saint
[Patrick] ordained," and "three hundred pure presbyters, upon whom he conferred orders." In
Nennius the number of presbyters is increased to three thousand, and in the tripartite Life of Patrick
to five thousand. These bishops, even if we greatly reduce the number as we must, had no higher
rank than the ancient chorepiscopi or country-bishops in the Eastern Church, of whom there were
once in Asia Minor alone upwards of four hundred. Angus the Culdee gives us even one hundred
and fifty-three groups of seven bishops, each group serving in the same church. Patrick, regarding
himself as the chief bishop of the whole Irish people, planted a church wherever he made a few
converts and could obtain a grant from the chief of a clan, and placed a bishop ordained by himself
over it. "It was a congregational and tribal episcopacy, united by a federal rather than a territorial
tie under regular jurisdiction. During Patrick’s life, he no doubt exercised a superintendence over
(^62) Catalogus Sanctorum Hiberniae published by Ussher from two MSS, and in Haddan & Stubbs, 292-294.
(^63) Contained in the Leabhar Breac, and in the Book of Leinster.