Diocesan Pilgrimage to the Island of Ireland

Venerating the Holiness of Celtic Orthodox History

Exploring an Island of Singular Holiness

The island of Ireland is one of sites of the most concentrated Orthodox Christian sacred history in the world. On this island, which received the Gospel of Christ in the time of the Apostles and became one of the first centres of Orthodox monastic spirituality in the world, ascetics and saints sprang up who would go on to be numbered amongst the greatest luminaries of the Church. Almost every town and village in Ireland bears a connection to its millennium-long Orthodox history, a majority of which continue to have direct physical connection to that spirtiual history: sacred and miraculous wells, the ruins of monasteries, still-functioning churches from the earliest centuries, the caves and lake-hermitages in which the great ascetics lived, and the sanctified ground on which they walked.

One of the spiritual joys of a pilgrimage to Ireland is that it provides the pilgrim with the opportunity to grow closer to a host of saints, some of whom are widely known (such as St Patrick, whose well and places of asceticism we visit), but also a great many Orthodox saints whose legacies are less widely known amongst those who are not adequately aware of the Orthodox history of these islands. During our pilgrimage, we spend time learning about many of these saints by visiting the sites of their lives, reading their histories, and above all praying to and with them in the lands they sanctified — amongst these are included St Kevin, St Dunstan, St Declan, St Cenan, St Columba, St Olcan, together with the monks of Skellig Michael and many, many others.