The Bachall Isu—The Crozier of St. Patrick, by Phillip Campbell

Free Speech Depends On SCOTUS Rejecting The Government’s Censorship Excuses In Murthy v. Missouri, by Scott Street
March 15, 2024
Texas Helps More Than 105,000 of Biden’s ‘Newcomers’ Migrate to Sanctuary Cities, by Craig Bannister
March 15, 2024

St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, depicted in stained glass. (Crop of photo taken by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work ...

By Phillip Campbell, Catholic Exchange, March 15, 2024

Phillip Campbell is a history teacher for Homeschool Connections and the author of many books on Catholic history, most notably the Story of Civilization series from TAN Books. You can learn more about his books and classes on his website, www.phillipcampbell.net. Phillip resides in southern Michigan. 

Avatar photoOf all the relics bequeathed to us by Ireland’s catalogue of saints, the greatest was undoubtedly the episcopal crozier used by St. Patrick known as the Bachall Isu. The Irish word Bachall comes from the Latin baculus, a crozier or staff; Isu is a shortened form of the Latin name for our Lord, IesusBachall Isu thus means “Staff of Jesus,” a name reflecting a popular tradition that the staff was given to St. Patrick by Jesus Christ Himself. According to the fourth book of the medieval Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, when Patrick was in Italy preparing for his Irish mission, he traveled to an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea where he encountered a strange prodigy—a young man and and his wife with an elderly woman. The young man told Patrick that the old woman was one of his descendants. Patrick, mystified at how a young man could have an elderly descendant, asked how such a thing could be. He was told: ….

Continue reading >>>>>>>>>>