As recently as yesterday, if you’d asked me where that strange-sounding hospital in Ballinasloe – Portiuncula – got its name, I’d have guessed it came from the townland in Galway on which it was built. That in turn might have derived from the Irish “port”, meaning bank or shore. The rest could have been a corrupted anglicisation for “of the” something.
I now realise, very belatedly, that the name is in fact a corruption of the Italian Porziuncola, which means “small portion”. You could therefore ask for a porziuncola of pizza, I suppose. But the Porziuncola with a capital P is a church in Assisi, scene of a pivotal moment in the life of Saint Francis.
Hence the Portiuncula Indulgence, as it’s known in English-speaking countries: a centuries-old phenomenon that once a year, at the start of August, promises remission of sins (or at least of suffering caused by sin) to believing Catholics.
The original “Pardon of Assisi” is said to have been granted to the saint himself in 1216 during a vision in a tiny chapel he had just restored. At first, pilgrims emulating him were expected to visit this “Porziuncola” in person.
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Then the indulgence was delegated to other places and eventually to all Franciscan churches worldwide, although in Ireland, by tradition, there is a special status attached to Multyfarnham Friary in Co Westmeath.
Alas, this was the indirect cause of a tragic event in the early hours of August 2nd, 1944
Supplicants can ask for themselves or for souls in purgatory. Either way, they must pray at a Franciscan church between noon on August 1st and midnight on August 2nd. Other terms and conditions apply.
The seventh centenary of the saint’s vision coincided in Ireland with the fateful year 1916. Then, Pope Benedict XV announced a special extension whereby the indulgence would be available at the Porziuncola for 12 months, from August 1st, 1916 to August 2nd, 1917. Many Irish pilgrims made the trip.
But the cult was popular here well into the middle decades of last century, when CIE used to lay on special buses to the main sites and when midnight masses were celebrated to mark the occasion.
Alas, this was the indirect cause of a tragic event in the early hours of August 2nd, 1944. Two young Westmeath men, Thomas Carroll (19) and Daniel Tighe (20), had walked six miles to Multyfarnham for midnight mass. Then they set out for home again until, overcome with tiredness, they sat down on a railway line and fell asleep.
They were still asleep, an inquest later heard, when either the 6.15am or 7.20am train passed. Carroll was the luckier one. He died instantly. Poor Tighe lived long enough to tell his father he couldn’t remember what had happened.
***
As always, reading such cases, you wonder if there was drink involved. Elsewhere in newspaper archives, from 100 years ago, I find that an announcement about the 1925 Portiuncula Indulgence (by direction of the Pope it could be used only for souls in Purgatory) was juxtaposed with a dire warning from the Bishop of Derry.
Although that was a designated “Holy Year”, the bishop was worried about unholy practices associated with “dances in country districts”. In some cases, he said, these were “disgraceful carousals, in which the very worst passions of human nature are inflamed by the use of that poisonous drug known as poteen”.
Dances aside, even ostensibly religious rituals at this time of year in Ireland could have pagan undertones. Hence, for example, “Lady Day” (August 15th), about which Patrick Kavanagh wrote. So named for the Feast of the Assumption, it used to involve pilgrimages to holy wells, especially those associated with female saints.
At its height, the event was more popular in northern parts of Ireland, including the Monaghan of Kavanagh’s childhood, where it was “greater even than St Patrick’s Day”. In his memoir, The Green Fool, he described the annual outing to a Lady Well near Dundalk.
This was typical of the aristocratic Frenchman, who elsewhere was pained to see pretty girls at such ceremonies kissing “ugly stones” rather than him
Even then, the observance had been abandoned by more sophisticated locals. And the clergy boycotted too, doubting there was anything holy about it: “They said it was a pagan well from which the old Fianians (sic) drank in the savage heroic days. The peasant folk didn’t mind the priests. They believed that Saint Brigid washed her feet in it.”
Either way, the occasion was not always dominated by piety: “There was a rowdy element too, pegging clods at the prayers and shouting. A few knots of men were arguing politics. I overheard two fellows making a deal over a horse.”
In another August, 150 years earlier, the French tourist Chevalier De Latocnaye visited a Franciscan friary and nearby holy well in Kerry and found himself distracted by the sight of female pilgrims performing rituals with their clothes “tucked up . . . on their bare knees”.
This was typical of the aristocratic Frenchman, who elsewhere was pained to see pretty girls at such ceremonies kissing “ugly stones” rather than him. But even the superficially pious local men may have had similar thoughts. When De Latocnaye asked one why he took part in such superstitions, “all he could say was ‘to do what others do and to see the women’”.
