F E AT U R E
HUNGARY’S IRISH MADONNA THIS ST PATRICK’S DAY MARKS 325 YEARS SINCE MASS-GOERS AT THE CATHEDRAL OF GYÖR IN HUNGARY WITNESSED A PAINTING OF THE MADONNA AND CHILD ‘WEEPING’. KNOWN AS THE ‘IRISH MADONNA’ THE PAINTING HAS A MYSTERIOUS BACKSTORY BY SÉAMUS DEVITT CSsR
O
n St Patrick’s Day 1697, in the side chapel of St Anne in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Hungarian city of Györ, a painting of Mary and her Child began to shed tears of blood. The 6am Mass had just begun. There was consternation. Word spread, and crowds of people – Catholic, Protestant, Jews – came running to the cathedral. The weeping continued until around 9am. Priests from the cathedral wiped the painting with pieces of cloth, but the weeping continued. Later, they took the painting off the wall, removed its frame, removed the stretchers holding the canvas and examined it thoroughly. They could find nothing to explain why their ‘Irish Madonna’ was weeping. Walter Lynch, a Galway man and the exiled bishop of Clonfert, had lived in Györ 40 years earlier. When he died in 1663, this painting of the Madonna and Child was among his most precious possessions. The Irish bishop had travelled into exile from Inishbofin when that island, the last stronghold of the Irish, surrendered to the Cromwellian forces on February 17, 1653. The Irish commander of the island, George Cusack, was allowed to leave by ship together with a thousand of his soldiers. The Bishop of Clonfert was also allowed to leave. It is not known if he had the rolled-up canvas of this painting with him, amongst his few belongings. Months later, in May 1653, he was in Belgium, reduced to penury and writing to Rome for financial assistance. Roughly two years later whilst in Vienna, he met the
Photo: Béla Szabó
‘Irish Madonna’ painting in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Györ, Hungary
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