Malachy

← Encyclopedia

A wooden staff and an old book of gospels, carried from hand to hand through one family for generations, were the proof a man held the primacy of the Irish church. Whoever possessed the Bachall Ísu — the Staff of Jesus — and the Book of Armagh held the seat of Patrick, whatever a synod or a pope might say. To pry that seat loose from a hereditary dynasty and bind it instead to canonical election and Roman order was the work of Malachy of Armagh, and it consumed most of his life. His modern celebrity rests on something he never touched: a sheaf of Latin mottoes, printed four centuries after his death, forecasting the end of the papacy.

Saint Malachy shown as a bishop in a 1722-24 fresco by Wolfgang Andreas Heindl in the abbey church of Metten, Bavaria — photograph by Wolfgang Sauber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Malachy — Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, born about 1094 at Armagh, dead at Clairvaux on 2 November 1148 — was the leading churchman of twelfth-century Ireland: archbishop of Armagh, papal legate, and the figure who bound the Irish church more closely to the usages of Rome. The historical man is well attested, and from an unusually authoritative source. Bernard of Clairvaux, who knew him, wrote his life within months of his death and preserved most of what is known of him.

The documented life

He came of age in a church that had drifted, in Roman eyes, into irregularity. In the Irish system, abbacies and even bishoprics often passed within a kin-group; at Armagh the coarbship of Patrick had run through a single family for some eight generations, held by married laymen who controlled the relics and the revenues without taking orders. Malachy was formed in the reforming current that meant to end this. He studied under Imar Ua hÁedacáin, an ascetic of Armagh, and was ordained priest about 1119; he was sent south to learn the Roman liturgy under Malchus, the bishop of Lismore, a former monk of Winchester who carried English and continental usage. In 1123 Malachy became abbot of Bangor, the great northern monastery he set about restoring; in 1124, while still a young man, he was consecrated bishop of Connor.

In 1129 the dying primate Cellach — himself the last reforming holder of the hereditary line — named Malachy his successor at Armagh, deliberately breaking the custom of the kin. The custom did not break easily. A layman of the old family, Muirchertach, seized the insignia and the see; on his death another kinsman, Niall, took up the staff and the book and the popular loyalty that came with them. For years Malachy was archbishop in title and canon law while another man held the relics that the people regarded as the office itself. Bernard’s account makes the struggle vivid and slightly appalled: an apostolic see treated as patrimony, passed down like a field. Only about 1134 did Malachy gain effective control, and once the reform was secure he did a thing reformers rarely do — he resigned the primacy to a chosen successor and withdrew to the smaller see of Down, where he had begun.

Statue of Saint Malachy at the south portal of St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in Armagh, the see whose reform consumed much of his life — photograph by Andreas F. Borchert, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The program he carried through the Irish church was regularization rather than revolution: replacing the old monastic-federation map with territorial dioceses on the model framed at the Synod of Ráth Breasail in 1111, restoring the regular sacraments — private confession, confirmation, sacramental marriage — and aligning the liturgy and discipline with Roman norms. He carried the cause to the papacy in person. On his first journey to Rome, in 1139, he asked Pope Innocent II for the pallia, the woolen bands that would mark Armagh and Cashel as full metropolitan provinces and so complete the new structure. Innocent made him papal legate for Ireland but withheld the pallia, directing him to convene a national council and request them formally — a delay that would, in the end, kill him.

It was on that first journey that the second great strand of his life began. Going to Rome he stopped at Clairvaux, the austere Cistercian house in Burgundy ruled by Bernard, and was seized by what he found there. He left several of his companions behind to be trained as monks, and on his return arranged for the order to come to Ireland: the founding of Mellifont in 1142, the first Cistercian abbey on the island, followed directly from that visit and seeded a network of daughter-houses.

The ruins of Mellifont Abbey, County Louth — the first Cistercian house in Ireland, founded in 1142 after Malachy’s visit to Clairvaux — photograph by Weloveireland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The transplant joined the wider Cistercian expansion then remaking the religious geography of Latin Christendom — the same current of austere monastic reform, the Western monasticism of the high Middle Ages, that Bernard himself embodied and drove across Europe in the decades of the early crusades.

The national council met, and in 1148 Malachy set out again for Rome to obtain the long-deferred pallia. He never arrived. Falling ill at Clairvaux, he died there on 2 November 1148, in Bernard’s arms by Bernard’s own account, and was buried at the abbey. Bernard composed the Vita sancti Malachiae — the Life of Malachy — early the following year, together with sermons for his feast; in it he portrayed his friend as a man of meekness, austerity, and reforming zeal, a contemplative who happened to be a great administrator. The portrait is partisan, written by a devoted intimate and shaped by Cistercian ideals of sanctity, but its closeness to events and its author’s standing make it the indispensable record. The pallia Malachy died seeking reached Ireland a few years after him, carried by the legate Cardinal Paparo to the Synod of Kells in 1152, which completed the diocesan settlement he had fought for. In 1190 Pope Clement III enrolled him among the saints — the first Irish-born person formally canonized by a pope, a procedure itself newly centralized in Rome (see canonization).

That is the documented life: a reformer, a friend of Bernard, a man whose actual labor reshaped a national church and whose memory, in Ireland and among the Cistercians, has never depended on prophecy.

The Prophecy of the Popes

Detached from that life, and far better known, is the Prophecy of the Popes — a sequence of short Latin mottoes, one for each pope from the twelfth century to a last pontiff at the end of the age, the whole attributed to Malachy as a vision granted him during his stay in Rome. It first appeared in print in 1595, in the Lignum Vitae of the Benedictine annalist Arnold de Wyon, and was contested almost at once. The collection runs to some 112 mottoes, beginning with Celestine II — the pope elected in 1143, while Malachy was still alive — and ending with a figure the text names Petrus Romanus, Peter the Roman.

Page 311 of Arnold Wion’s Lignum Vitae (Venice, 1595), the first appearance in print of the Prophecy of the Popes attributed to Malachy — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The case against it is concrete and converges from several directions, and the scholarly verdict has been settled since the late seventeenth century: the text is a sixteenth-century pseudonymous composition, not a work of Malachy’s. No manuscript, no citation, no trace of any such prophecy exists before de Wyon printed it in 1595 — a silence of four and a half centuries. Bernard’s Life of Malachy, exhaustive on its subject’s gifts and written by the man who knew him best, mentions no vision of the popes at all; for a biographer who recorded Malachy’s smaller wonders to omit a prophecy of this scale is decisive.

The internal evidence is sharper still. The mottoes describing popes down to the 1580s fit their subjects with suggestive, sometimes uncanny ease, drawing on a pope’s coat of arms, birthplace, name, or cardinalate; those composed for popes after the date of printing grow abruptly vague and generic. This is the exact profile of a vaticinium ex eventu — prophecy written after the fact and backdated, accurate where it summarizes history and helpless where it must guess. The Jesuit scholar Claude-François Menestrier, in his Réfutation des prophéties faussement attribuées à saint Malachie of 1689, laid out the argument that remains standard, and located the forgery precisely: the prophecy was most probably composed during the papal interregnum of 1590, between the death of Urban VII in September and the election of Gregory XIV in December, as a partisan instrument. On Menestrier’s reading the motto assigned to that very conclave, Ex antiquitate Urbis — from the old city — was crafted to point at Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli of Orvieto, whose town’s Latin name, Urbs Vetus, means precisely the old city, talking up his candidacy as foreordained. Simoncelli lost the conclave, and the prophecy, having served its turn, passed into print a few years later under a saint’s borrowed name. The interpretive gloss de Wyon attached to the early mottoes he credited to the historian Alfonso Chacón, lending the whole the air of scholarship.

The mottoes have nonetheless kept a long and recurrent afterlife in popular eschatology, the kind of popular prophecy and divination that gathers around an anonymous list of names. Every conclave since occasions fresh matching of the next motto to the man elected, an exercise in retrofitting that the open looseness of the later phrases readily accommodates — the same hospitality to interpretation that has kept the quatrains of Nostradamus in print for as long. The interest concentrates on the final entry. After Petrus Romanus the text breaks into a sentence of plain apocalypse: in the last persecution of the Holy Roman Church, sedebit Petrus Romanus — Peter the Roman will hold the seat — who will shepherd his flock through many tribulations; and when these are past, the city of seven hills will be destroyed and the dreadful judge will judge his people. That ending is what gives the prophecy its grip on each generation that takes it up: by tying the line of popes to a fixed and final pontiff, under whom Rome falls and judgment comes, it can always be read as pointing at the second coming in the reader’s own time. The reading is honored among adherents and dismissed among historians; both have been doing so, about successive popes, for four hundred years.

Sources and scholarship

The primary witness to the man is Bernard’s Vita sancti Malachiae, written about 1149; the standard English is H. J. Lawlor’s annotated translation, St Bernard of Clairvaux’s Life of St Malachy of Armagh (1920), which remains the usual route into the text. Bernard’s two sermons for Malachy’s feast and a letter on his death supplement it. The Irish annals — the Annals of the Four Masters and the Annals of Ulster — supply the dates and the politics of the Armagh succession from the native side, against which Bernard’s hagiographic shaping can be measured. The Dictionary of Irish Biography gives the current critical account of the reformer; the older Catholic Encyclopedia article of 1910 and the Encyclopædia Britannica entry summarize the documented life and flag the spurious prophecy.

For the prophecy itself the foundational critique is Menestrier’s Réfutation of 1689, which framed the forgery argument and the 1590-conclave dating still cited today. The whole modern literature on the text, scholarly and popular alike, runs back to de Wyon’s Lignum Vitae of 1595 as its sole and unsupported origin — the absence of anything earlier being, in the end, the strongest single fact about it.

What endures of Malachy himself stands clear of all this. The diocesan map of Ireland still broadly follows the lines drawn at Ráth Breasail and Kells that he fought to impose; Mellifont and its daughter-houses long outlasted him, the Cistercian life he brought taking root where he planted it; and at Down he lies remembered as a bishop who gave up a primacy once he had reformed it. The staff and the gospel-book that once made a man master of the Irish church passed, in the end, to the men who held the office by election — which was the whole of what he set out to accomplish.

→ Related: St Patrick · Divination · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Prophecy · Eschatology · Second Coming · Nostradamus · Canonization · Middle Ages · Monasticism · Western Monasticism · Christianity · Crusades