Comgall, Saint

COMGALL, Saint. - Irish monk of the 6th century, of the Dal Araide, born in 517, he founded around 557 the famous monastery of Bangor on Belfast Lough, where he died in 602. Bangor, with its very severe rule of life, flourished greatly in the 7th and 8th centuries; it then declined, to rise again with the reform of St. Malachy in the 12th century.

From Jonas of Bobbio, who wrote around 640, it is known that C. was the teacher of St. Columbanus; and forty years later, from Adamnan, who was an intimate friend of St. Columba of Iona. A Vita Comgali, probably due to some monk of Bangor, is perhaps earlier than the 10th century. Today of Bangor, the most celebrated Irish abbey, there remain only a bell extracted from the ruins in 1793 and, in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, the manuscript known as the Antiphonary of Bangor, dated between the years 680-91. It is believed that the manuscript was brought to the Irish monastery of Bobbio by Dungal; it remained there until 1606, the year of the founding of the Ambrosian Library.

The manuscript contains in 72 pages a collection of hymns, antiphons, psalms, collects, the Creed, the Pater, names of Irish saints and the list of the first fifteen abbots of Bangor down to Cronan, who was living (680-91). The first editor of the manuscript was Muratori (Anecdota Ambrosiana, IV, Padua 1713, 119-59). The Bradshaw Society reproduced it in phototype in two volumes, edited by E. Warren, The antiphony of Bangor, an early Irishman script, in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, London 1893, 1895.

Anselmo M. Tommasini