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St. Dymphna — The Saint Killed by Her Father Who Still Heals Geel · Everyday Saints: A Catholic Podcast

• 0:00
  A father can grieve so hard that grief turns into something else entirely, something dark
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  enough to make him do the unthinkable to his own child. That is exactly what happened to
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  a teenage girl in seventh century Ireland. Her father lost his wife and instead of grieving
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  her, he tried to replace her with his own daughter. When she said no and ran, he sent soldiers
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  across an entire country to drag her home. She never made it home. What happened next would
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  700 years later still be changing how the world treats people with mental illness.
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  Hi, my name is John O'Connor and this is Everyday Saints. This is episode 18. If you're new here,
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  welcome to the porch. Pull up a chair, grab a cup of coffee or a lemonade and stick around.
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  We look at a new saint every Thursday. And if you've stuck with me for 18 weeks now, thank
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  you, genuinely. And hey, if these Thursday mornings are giving you something, take five seconds
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  right now and hit follow or subscribe wherever you are listening. Costs you nothing means
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  a lot to a show like this. You have perhaps never heard the name before today, but this
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  is the story of Saint Dimthna. Here's the thing you need to understand up front. Almost everything
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  we know about Dimthna's comes from a single medieval account written down roughly 600 years
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  after she supposedly lived, based on oral tradition that had already been passed around for centuries.
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  There's no independent Irish record confirming her father was a king or that any of this happened
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  the way the legend says. So as we go, I want to be upfront with you. This is church tradition,
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  not verified history the way Joseph's story is anchored in scripture or say Mother Teresa
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  is anchored in her own letters. Keep that in your back pocket as we go. According to that
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  tradition, Dymphna was born in Ireland to a pagan tribal chief and his Christian wife.
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  Her mother raised her in the faith in secret and Dymphna took a vow of consecrated virginity,
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  a formal lifelong commitment to God while she was still just a girl. Then her mother suddenly
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  died and her father, well, he did not handle it well. He fell into grief so consuming that
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  his own advisors, grew worried about him running an entire territory with that mental state.
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  They pushed him to remarry, told him he needed a new wife to pull him out of the spiral. So
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  he agreed, but only on one condition. His new wife had to look exactly like the one he lost.
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  His men searched the kingdom and came back empty-handed. Nobody looked enough like her. Then, strangely,
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  He looked at his own daughter. Dymphna was the spitting image of her mother. And in his grief
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  warped mind, that stopped being a comfort and became a plan. He decided the only woman who
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  could help replace his wife was his own child. Think about how twisted that logic actually
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  is. This wasn't a stranger with bad intention showing up at the door, busting in. This was
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  the one man in the world. who was supposed to protect her above everyone else, turning that
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  same protection inside out because he could not sit with his own grief long enough to let
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  it pass through him honestly. Instead of grieving his wife, he tried to resurrect her and the
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  raw material for that resurrection was going to be his own daughter, whether she agreed
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  to it or not. When Dimta understood what her father intended, she went straight to her confessor.
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  A priest named Gera Burnas and told him everything. Together, they made a plan to run, not just
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  out of the house, not just out of the territory, but off the entire island. They gathered a
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  small group and slipped away by boat, crossing to the continent and eventually settling near
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  a small village called Gille in what's now Belgium, close to a shrine dedicated to Saint Martin.
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  For a while it worked. They built a quiet life there. A fugitive princess and a priest hiding
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  in plain sight in a village that had no idea who she really was. But her father wasn't the
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  type to let it go. He sent men out searching and eventually the trail led them across the
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  sea. The detail that gave her away according to the tradition was money. The coins Dymphna's
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  group had been using to pay for food and lodging were Irish currency, unlike anything the local
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  merchants had seen before, and that made them easy to trace. When her father finally caught
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  up to them in Giel, he didn't come to negotiate. He gave the order, and his men killed Father
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  Geraburnus on the spot. Then he turned to his own daughter and told her, one last time, to
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  come home and be his wife. She refused. So her father drew his sword and beheaded her himself.
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  Tradition holds she was around 15 years old. Here's where the story stops being just about
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  one girl and turns into something bigger. After Dimtza's death, a church was built on the spot
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  in Giel and her relics were kept there. Pilgrims started arriving, not Taurus, but... Desperate
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  families bringing loved ones who were suffering with what we now recognize as serious mental
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  illness, epilepsy, or what the era simply called madness. They came looking for a cure at the
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  shrine of a girl who had been killed by the very kind of disturbed mind they were praying
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  to be healed of. And the town of Giel didn't turn them away. When the church and its small
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  hospital ran out of room, Instead of sending people back home untreated, local families
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  started taking pilgrims into their own houses, feeding them, housing them, living alongside
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  them, sometimes for weeks, sometimes permanently as part of the household. That single practical
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  decision made by regular families with no medical training and no grand theory about mental health
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  turned into a tradition that outlasted every king. every war and every shift in how the
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  rest of the world treated people with mental illness. For most of the history, the standard
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  response to serious mental illness elsewhere in Europe was to lock people away, chain them,
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  or hide them from society entirely. Gille did the opposite. They brought people into their
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  kitchens in their spare bedrooms and treated them like neighbors. Historians studying the
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  roots of modern mental health care have pointed back to Giehl again and again as one of the
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  earliest known examples of community-based care, treating people with dignity inside a normal
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  home centuries before anyone had the vocabulary of mental health at all. Think about what that
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  actually required generation after generation. This wasn't one heroic family doing something
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  remarkable once. This was an entire town collectively deciding over and over without any single person
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  ordering them to that a stranger showing up in the middle of a mental health crisis was
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  someone you took in, not someone you turned away from your door. No hospital did that back
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  then. Most of Europe didn't do that for a very long time after. Giehl just kept doing it,
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  quietly, without ever making it their whole identity. A grieving, violent man slammed a
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  door shut on his own daughter's life, and a whole town spent the next several centuries
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  doing the exact opposite, opening their doors over and over to strangers nobody else wanted.
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  Here's something worth sitting with. Giel didn't wait for permission. Local devotion to Dymphna
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  had already been building for centuries before anyone in the wider church formally wrote her
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  story down. The earliest real historical record of her veneration comes from the middle of
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  the 13th century, around 600 years after she supposedly died. A canon named Peter, writing
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  under the Bishop of Cambrai, put her story down on paper, and he says plainly he was drawing
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  on oral tradition that was already old by the time it reached him. Dymphna was never formally
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  canonized by a pope the way saints are today. Her sainthood is what's called pre-congregation,
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  recognized through centuries of immoral local devotion, not a single official declaration
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  from Rome. And the part of the story you just heard, the families opening their homes, took
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  even longer to arrive than that. It wasn't until roughly the 15th century, closer to 800 years
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  after her death, that Gilles churches and hospital finally overflowed enough for locals to start
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  taking pilgrims in themselves. That's not a detail that shrinks the story though. It means
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  this town kept faithfully caring for people in her name for centuries through building
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  expansions, through a church that burned down and had to be rebuilt long before the practice
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  that made them famous even started. What's remarkable isn't that the church eventually recognized
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  her. It's that an entire town had already built centuries of practice around her memory without
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  needing that recognition first. The sainthood was a confirmation of something that was already
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  true on the ground, not the thing that made it true. Let's pause here and do the truth
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  or legend game like we did last week because a story like this practically demands it. Three
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  claims about Dymphna. Some hold up, some don't. Quick heads up, Dymphna isn't a saint most
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  people have ever heard of. So don't stress about getting these right. Just take your best guess.
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  And here's a tip that might help anyway. Legends tend to tidy things up. A clean, satisfying
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  detail that makes the story feel complete. Real history is often messier and weirder than that.
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  Keep that in mind as you listen. Alright, claim number one. The very first miracles associated
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  with Dimpa, people with mental illnesses being healed at the site of her grave, started almost
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  immediately after she was killed. according to the earliest layer of the tradition itself.
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  Claim number two, the famous practice of Giehl families taking mentally ill pilgrims into
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  their own homes was in an official program set up and run by the Catholic Church as a formal
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  ministry. Claim number three, that same family boarding tradition in Giehl, regular families
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  housing people with serious mental illness in their own homes, didn't just fade into history.
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  Some version of it was still going, in an organized way, well into the modern era. All right, got
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  your guesses? Here we go. Claim number one is true, at least according to the tradition itself.
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  The earliest accounts describe healings happening at her grave almost right away. People suffering
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  from what the medieval writers called madness reportedly found relief there. That detail
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  is baked into the story from its earliest known telling, not something tacked on centuries
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  later to make a better legend. Claim number two is legend. This one surprises people. The
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  Gieo tradition wasn't a church program at all. It grew up organically, almost by accident.
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  So many pilgrims with mental illness showed up seeking a cure that the local church and
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  hospital simply couldn't house them all. Ordinary families in the town started taking the overflow
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  into their own homes. Nobody designed that system from a bishop's office. It grew out of a small
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  town running out of beds and deciding to open their front doors instead. Claim number three
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  is true. That family boarding tradition didn't stay in the Middle Ages. It kept going, generation
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  after generation, and by the time historians and early psychiatrists were writing seriously
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  about it, Gille had already been doing this for hundreds of years. They pointed to Gille
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  as one of the oldest examples anywhere in the world of a community caring for the mentally
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  ill inside ordinary homes instead of locking them away. So the legend gave the town a saint
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  and that saint gave the town a reason to keep opening their doors for the next several hundred
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  years. All right, back to the porch. I keep coming back to the two very different doors
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  in this story. Dymphna's father closed every door he had. He closed himself off from the
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  grief instead of grieving it honestly, and that closed off grief curdled into something that
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  made him try to control and eventually destroy the one person he had left. A father's love
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  twisted shut, turned into violence. And then on the other hand, You have an entire town
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  that did the exact opposite thing, generation after generation. They didn't have a doctrine
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  handed down from Rome telling them to do this. They just had people showing up at their door
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  in real pain and they made a choice over and over for hundreds of years to let them in instead
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  of turning them away. I don't think that's an accident. The same event that came from a closed
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  door. grief closed off until it turned violent, ended up producing centuries of open ones.
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  And here's what gets me the most about it. Nobody in Giel ever met Dimfah. Not one of those families
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  across 700 years ever shook her hand or owed her a personal favor. They just heard her story
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  and they kept choosing generation after generation to live like it was true. A 15 year old girl
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  they never met somehow talked an entire town into opening their front door to strangers
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  for the rest of history. That's not the kind of influence you plan for. That's the kind
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  of influence you only get by refusing to give in, once, at the worst possible moment, and
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  then letting God do something with it you will never get to see. But I wanna push on that
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  a little further, because I think it's easy to hear a story like this and follow it away
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  as something that only applies to grand, dramatic moments. Most of us are never going to face
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  a moment as extreme as Denthna's. Most of us are never going to be the reason a town changes
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  how it treats people for 700 years. So it's tempting to hear this and think, well, That's
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  a nice story, but it doesn't really apply to my life. I just don't think that's right.
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  I think the door analogy works as at much smaller scale than martyrdom, and that's actually the
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  harder, more useful version of it. Grief doesn't always show up as violence. Most of the time
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  it shows up as a door quietly swinging shut over months or years. and you don't even notice
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  it closing. Somebody hurts you and instead of dealing with it, you just get a little bit
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  more guarded, a little slower to let people in, a little quicker to assume the worst about
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  someone before you even know their situation. None of that feels dramatic in the moment.
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  It just feels like self-protection. But closed is closed, whether it's slams, or whether it
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  drifts shut an inch at a time. And on the other side of it, opening a door doesn't have to
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  look like taking a stranger into your home for the rest of your life either, the way those
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  families in Giehl did. Sometimes it looks like actually listening to somebody who's struggling
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  instead of changing the subject because it makes you uncomfortable. Sometimes it's just showing
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  up for the person everybody else has quietly stopped inviting places. You don't need 700
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  years of tradition behind you to be somebody's open door this week. So here's what I'm sitting
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  with, and I want you to actually sit with it too. Not just let it pass by while you're driving
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  or doing the dishes, but is there a door in your own life that grief or fear or old hurt
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  has quietly shut? Not the big obvious ones, the smaller ones. the person you stop texting
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  back, the subject you steer every conversation away from, the kind of pain you have decided
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  is easier to manage by just not letting anyone near it. And if you can name that door, what
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  would it actually cost you to open it? Even just a crack, even just for one person this
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  week who needs somewhere to land. Maybe that's the whole point of Dintra's story surviving
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  at all. Not just that something terrible happened to her, but that it didn't get the final word.
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  What was meant to end her story quietly instead cracks something open that's still in some
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  form open today. I don't think it's a stretch to say the same could be true of whatever door
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  you are sitting with right now. It is now time for the closing prayer. Lord, thank you for
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  Dimtna and for the courage she found at 15 years old to say no to something no one should have
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  ever asked of her. For anyone listening who is carrying grief that's turned into something
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  dark and closed, soften that closed place, Lord, before it costs someone else. And for anyone
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  who's ever felt like the world has no room for them, No door willing to open? Let them find
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  a gheel. Let them find people willing to let them in. Amen. Saint Demptha is recognized
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  as the patron saint of those suffering from mental illness, emotional disorders, and nervous
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  conditions, as well as the patron of victims of incest and family violence. Her feast day
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  is traditionally celebrated on May 15th, though the modern Roman calendar recognizes May 30th,
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  the actual date of her death. Well, that's episode 18. If this one hit you a little harder than
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  most, you are not alone. It hit me the same way while I was writing it. If you know somebody
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  carrying something heavy right now, this might be the episode to send to them. Next week,
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  we are headed back to a known name, one you have heard of your entire life, but probably
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  don't know nearly as well as you think you do. I'm John O'Connor. Thanks for sitting on the
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  porch with me, and I will see you next week.