COLOMBA (Columba), saint. — Of Jona, a great Irish saint of the sixth century, placed by the island’s ancient hagiography in a triad with St. Patrick and St. Brigid. In lineage he is certainly the most illustrious of the saints of Ireland, having been born in 521 into the royal family of the Ui Néill: while he was alive, three of his first cousins were kings. His original Gaelic name was Crimthann; upon entering the service of the Lord, he was given the name Colum (dove) or Columcille (dove of the church): in Latin he was always called Columba. He received his religious formation at Moville, then at Clonard, and in turn became a founder of monasteries. Derry (today London-derry) and Durrow are the most important of his Irish foundations, which are said to have numbered thirty-seven. In 563 he left Ireland, « pro Christo peregrinari volens ». As early as the fifth century the Irish (Scoti) had settled in Great Britain, south of the Picts, in the so-called Dalriada: this colony was Christian more in name than in fact. The southern Picts had been evangelized by St. Ninian, but had subsequently lost the faith. Among the Picts of the north, beyond the Grampians, druidism still held sway. It was these peoples that C. had in mind when he went to settle with twelve monks on a deserted little island situated 115 km. north of Ireland (separated from the Scottish mainland by the island of Mull, and from the latter by a channel about a mile wide) called I or Hy, later Jona, the name it has retained. The island soldier, « insulanus miles » as Adamnan calls him, lived in such solitude for thirty-four years. Disciples soon flocked to Jona in great numbers, and other monasteries and hermitages arose on the neighboring islands. These houses, together with those in Scotland (said to have numbered fifty-three in all) and those in Ireland, which the holy founder had never ceased to direct, formed a vast monastic organization, designated in the texts by the names « muintir Columcille, familia Columbae ». Unlike many Irish abbots of that period, the abbot of Jona was not a bishop: nevertheless, he exercised over the neighboring churches and monasteries a jurisdiction similar to that of a metropolitan. This anomaly still persisted in the time of Bede (cf. Hist. eccl., III, 5).
Much of the thirty-four years that the Saint’s « peregrination » lasted was devoted to the harsh and dangerous work of apostolate among the Picts and the Scoti of Dalriada, whose king Aelhan Mac Gabhran was consecrated at Jona by C. himself in 574. C.’s eloquent speech (he was a poet, friend and defender of the filid, as well as a highly skilled scribe), the prestige of his birth, and the example of his extremely rigorous life sowed converts along his path, beginning with that of the Pictish king, Brude. When C. died in 597, Scotland was largely converted, and he fully deserved the title bestowed upon him, apostle of Caledonia: his disciples continued and completed his work. They later earned great merit among the Anglo-Saxons through the foundation of Lindisfarne on the North Sea and through the effective work of apostolate carried out among them in the seventh century.
Many poems in Latin and Gaelic, for the most part undoubtedly apocryphal, were attributed to C. (eleventh–thirteenth centuries). For the hymn Altae prosator, which is probably his, the tradition is ancient (at least from the tenth century).
The historical outlines of C. are well defined. Information about his life has been handed down to us by three eminent authors, who flourished within a century of his death and were in a position to be well informed: Cuimine Ailbe, seventh abbot of Jona (657–69), Adamnan, ninth abbot of Jona (679–704), and the Venerable Bede (673–735). Adamnan’s Vita Columbae is perhaps the most important monument of the Irish Church to have come down to us.