I’m trying to figure out who my confirmation saint should be, and I think it might be St. Brigid. Could you give me some advice?
Well hello, anon! My confirmation saint was St. Brigid of Ireland and I’ll share a little bit about why I chose her.
I wanted St. Francis since he’s the patron saint of animals (I’m going to be a vet so St. James the Greater would have worked also but I didn’t know about him at the time) but at the time I was going through RCIA I didn’t know you could pick a saint of the opposite gender.
That being said, I started looking into female saints who were fairly famous and well-known with some sort of tie to animals. The saying goes that your patron saint picks you instead of the other way around for whatever reason. So St. Brigid must have picked me.
Before I dive in, I’ll just give a small history on why we choose confirmation saints: it’s a fairly new thing in Catholicism but it stems from the same idea as choosing a saint name when you enter religious life or the priesthood--you pick someone whose example you want to follow and someone already in Heaven to intercede for you through the process of confirmation/religious vows and beyond.
Her feast day is February 1st, and she is patroness of Ireland, dairymaids, cattle, midwives, Irish nuns, and newborn babies. She shares a name with a Celtic goddess so sometimes people in history have confused her for the goddess and vice versa, with some going so far as to say St. Brigid was made-up altogether. So if you can get past that last part, you’ll be fine lol.
One of the things I loved about her was that even when she was young she had a propensity for giving to and helping the poor, and sometimes was even able to heal them. Her father was quite wealthy and without hesitation she’d give away much of his possessions to the poor. Her father tried to sell her to the king but seeing her purity, he asked her father to free her instead (her mother was her father’s slave, and she also was therefore born into slavery). Brigid also made a vow that she would always remain chaste (chastity is something that I’ve struggled with myself so I thought that perhaps she could help me by her intercession to be more pure in heart and in the flesh) to the point where she prayed to become ugly so no man would want to marry her and God granted her this request, and it wasn’t until she made her final vows that her beauty returned.
There are many accounts that say she was friends with St. Patrick of Ireland and that he was actually the one who heard her vows (one account even says he accidentally did the form of ordination instead of religious life and he just kinda shrugged it off and was like “So be it, my son, she is destined for great things.”) Again, not sure how much of this is true or not but if so, she’s pretty rad.
There’s also a cross called the St. Brigid cross, which stems from her attempt to explain Christianity to someone who was sick as she had made it out of rushes that were nearby. People in Ireland make these crosses on her feast day.
So all-in-all she was a really God-fearing, chaste, motherly, holy woman who performed SO MANY miracles and established the first convent in Ireland and she loved animals, and she’s Irish and so am I (I’m ¼) and I just really liked that about her.
So if any of this speaks to you and you feel as though she’s calling you to herself, by all means, go for it.
But if not, there’s no harm in looking elsewhere, there are plenty more saints out there well-known or not that would be absolutely delighted to be friends with you. Basically keep looking into saints or search them by their patronage until you find one that just really fits well with your soul.
https://www.thoughtco.com/who-was-saint-brigid-124534
https://web.archive.org/web/20061222140931/http://www.crosscrucifix.com/articlehome.htm
https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=453
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Brigit-of-Ireland
A Google search would have a ton more info on her life and the miracles she performed. Hope this helps!
