In the early monastic period the contact of the new Christian culture with the native one had sparked off our ‘golden age’ in sanctity, art and missionary zeal. Some of the evidence for the period remains. But the plunderings of the monasteries by the Norsemen who followed the rivers into the heart of the country started a decline that the twelfth century reform tried to reverse.

The twelfth century saw greater changes in Ireland than any century in our history. Politically it saw the coming of Henry II of England and his Norman barons in the 1170s and the submission of the Irish petty kings to him as their overlord. For centuries a number of royal families had contended for the high kingship, but no family was able to establish itself in a way that would give the country permanent peace and stability. Unfortunately these blessings did not follow on the Norman intervention, as had been hoped. The influx of Norman knights continued and by the year 1200 they owned most of the richest land in the country. They had built fortified places in Donaghmoyne, Clones and Belturbet; and advancing from Sligo they had come as far as Caol Uisce on the Erne at Belleek.

In church affairs the changes introduced by the national synods of Kells and Rath Breasail were also far-reaching and radical. They were substantially completed by the time the Normans arrived; and they continue to provide the structures of the Catholic Church as we still know it. The Irish bishops, following the lead of the kings, also accepted Henry II as Lord of Ireland in the expectation of peace. Henry ruled, not only England, but also the greater part of what is today’s France.

The principal churchmen associated with this ecclesiastical reform were the archbishops, St Malachy of Armagh and St Laurence O’Toole of Dublin. They were supported by many of the regional kings, not least by Donnchadh Ó Cearbhaill, the powerful king of Airghialla, from whom the MacMahon family claims descent. St Malachy and St Laurence set out to bring the Irish Church into line with continental practice, which itself was the outcome of a reform associated with the monk Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII. The question arises, how was the Irish Church different? It was different for one thing, in the role of bishops. Quite soon after St Patrick’s time there was an extraordinary flowering of monastic life in Ireland; and abbots of monasteries came to overshadow bishops and to exercise jurisdiction and authority: Colmcille, Molaise, Sinell, Comhghall and many others. Bishops had their office – to consecrate and ordain, to be examples of sanctity, but not to rule. If there were exceptions, like Tiarnach of Clones, who was both bishop and abbot, he ruled in virtue of his abbacy rather than his bishopric. Sometimes monasteries formed federations, such as the ‘familia Columbae’, ruled by the abbot of Iona. To make things worse, bishoprics and abbacies and other church offices had become hereditary inside the family ‘in possession’. There were crude abuses in the matter of marriage, which was governed more by native law than by the law of the Church.

Dealing with the central issue of bishops’ authority, the reforming synods divided the country into four ecclesiastical rovinces – Armagh, Dublin, Cashel and Tuam – each with an archbishop. The archbishop, as well as his own diocese, ad a measure of authority over a number of suffragan dioceses, each having its own bishop. Each diocese was given name, nearly always from a historical site. The name indicated the ‘see’ or seat where the bishop would reside with his cathedral and chapter. The limits of each diocese were indicated, not in detail, but only by a number of oundary points. Clogher had been decreed to stretch from the Blackwater (Abhainn mhór) to Galloon, and from Slieve Beagh (Sliabh Beatha) to Sliabh Larga near Omagh. The boundaries were to be worked out in detail to take account of the political divisions of the time. The core of Clogher diocese was a confederation of tuatha (small states) ruled by families related through common descent from a king who ruled in Clogher around 600 A. D. The name of the confederation was Uí Cremhthainn; and it was part of a bigger confederation known as Airghialla. The Erne, for example, had in earlier times divided Airghialla from Breifne, a group of different descent. The part of Clogher diocese on the left bank of the Erne may well be the extent of Airghialla’s extension across the Erne in the twelfth century.

The fixing of Sliabh Beatha as the southern boundary point raises big questions that have not been satisfactorily answered and with which we cannot deal. Did the synod intend to exclude the present County Monaghan from Clogher? It seems unlikely, in view of Donnchadh Ó Cearbhaill’s active interest in the reform. In those years he was pushing his kingdom of Airghialla southwards to the Boyne. Clogher diocese expanded accordingly and for a period the Bishop of Clogher had his cathedral at Louth before withdrawing, not without contention, to Clogher, which had been originally intended for him. Northwards, too, Clogher expanded to include Ardstraw in the Derg valley in the present Co. Tyrone. After a period of contention which included an appeal to the Pope, Clogher withdrew to its present limits.

The diocese, having been set up, its organisation into parishes was the next development. By 1300 they were well established. The earliest list of them is from that time and reads rather like today’s list. Later on Galloon-Dartry was broken up into smaller parishes, as was Clogher parish. It seems that originally the present Donacavey, Dromore and Kilskeery with Truagh – and possibly Donagh – were all assigned to the support of the cathedral and the bishop, chapter and diocesan officials. The people in all that area would be their spiritual care.

The parishes, like the diocese itself, were named from old churches associated with early saints. Their boundaries probably matched the tuatha or population groups of the time. In Fermanagh the siting of many of the early parish churches is intriguing and puzzling. They were on the lough shore, if not actually on islands; so close to each other they were certainly not central in later times: Inniskeen, Cleenish, Derryvullen, Derrybrusk, Inismacsaint, Devenish and Galloon are island churches, and Aghalurcher was almost one. Was it because the people were concentrated on the Lough or because the Erne was so important for communications?

Part of the reform was to introduce from the Continent a new monastic rule, the Canons Regular of St Augustine, to renew the old monasteries. They were intended to combine community life with pastoral work and provide a cathedral chapter. The earliest foundation was at Louth, which was in Clogher diocese at the time. Later they set up in Clogher, Clones, Devenish, Lisgoole and Lough Derg. However, the older communities, the céilí Dé or culdees, did not disappear without trace. They continued on Devenish for centuries, serving the parish church and living alongside the Augustinian canons, who were further up the hill; and they left their name in nearby Killadeas. In Clones it was the parish priest and not the Augustinian prior who continued to be styled comharba Thiarnaigh, successor of Tiarnach. The community on Lough Derg as well as that on Devenish was for some reason attached to the Augustinian house in Armagh (where there was also a community of culdees). The Augustinians of Clones Abbey had a grange or farm at Lisdrum, Maguiresbridge; those at Lisgoole left the name, Granshagh, behind them and the Cistercian Abbey of Assaroe, Ballyshannon, had something like that at Kiltierney (associated with St Tiarnach) at Ederney.

An extraordinarily high degree of church organisation is reflected in a ‘concordat’ which Bishop Matthew Mac Cathasaigh – following the example of the archbishop of Armagh – entered into with Brian MacMahon, king of Airghialla, and Donn Maguire, king of Lough Erne, with their respective subchiefs. The two kings swore to respect and protect the freedom, rights and immunities of the Church, its land and people, from taxation and harassment of any kind. Where Church property and personnel were concerned the Bishop’s court had jurisdiction and the civil authority might not encroach on it. The larger churches, such as Devenish, Clones, Lough Derg, Muckno, had a ‘termon’, an area of immunity or sanctuary. Although it was occasionally violated, the termon was an important institution. The concordat was made in the year after the famous bull, Clericis Laicos, of Pope Boniface VIII, of which it is an expansion. It reflects a centralisation of Church authority in the Papacy which continued to develop for some centuries, involving the Pope, not just in appointing bishops, but even parish clergy The vitality of the Church at the time is reflected in other ways: the ‘Clogher Cross’, and the shrine of the Domhnach Airgid, made in Clones – both priceless treasures.

The year 1300 seemed in many ways to have been the high point of the Church’s achievement. The previous century had seen the growth of the universities and the mendicant orders, the development of Gothic architecture, St Thomas Aquinas and Dante and Giotto. Missionaries had been sent from Europe to Russia, India and China. A serious attempt had been made to heal the Eastern Schism. Never had the Pope been so powerful. But this highly organised Church and its wealth was a temptation to kings and princes and commercial families in the cities of Italy and they moved into positions of authority in it, even the papacy. By 1500 the Church needed to be reformed as badly as it had in the time of Hildebrand. The Council of Trent came too late to prevent the divisions of Western Christendom that are still sadly with us. Moreover, a new type of intellectual emerged through renewed contact with the Greek and Latin classical authors, sceptical and questioning and unsettling people’s minds.

Our own diocese of Clogher had constant communication with the Continent and reflected what was happening there. By 1400 many of the abuses that St Malachy had reformed were rampant again. Kin?groups had reasserted themselves and he bishopric and other important positions in the diocese were in the power of a few families and hereditary, as it was understood at the time. In 1428, for example, James MacMahon of the local ruling family, at the age of seventeen was appointed to the vast parish of Galloon (which included most of the barony of Dartry as well as an area in Fermanagh) with an undertaking that he would be ordained when he reached the age of twenty?two. Though he took the revenue, he never took orders, it seems?

It was a time of scholarship too as we remember learned families like the Ó Luinín and Ó Cianáin literary men, Bishop Piaras Maguire (1433?47), an Oxford canonist, the Máistir Mór Ó hEoghain, lecturer in Oxford, and other fir léinn as well. But the most eminent man of his time in the diocese was Cathal Óg MacManus, head of a powerful sept, second only to Maguire; powerful enough to block the appointment of Edmond de Courcy as bishop, and the scholar who left us the Annals of Ulster, which record the births of his children and finally his own death in Seanadh (Belle Isle) in 1498:

This panegyric is not a cold assessment. But it tells us how at least one contemporary regarded him and what was considered praiseworthy for a person in such high position.