Theobald Stapleton

Theobald Stapleton, Ireland. He was born into a family of mixed Old English and Gaelic Irish descent, as the son of John Stapleton and his wife Fionnuala (née Nic Conmara).

Little is known of his career, except that he was a priest living in Flanders. Fr. Stapleton was responsible for the establishment of the Irish College in Seville in 1612. In 1616, he was ordained to the priesthood in Madrid, where he offered his first Mass on 25 March 1616. He taught at the Irish College in Madrid in 1629.

In 1639, he published a catechism in Early Modern Irish to promote the use of the vernacular in Christian literature. It was the first Roman Catholic book in which the Irish language was printed in antiqua type. The book, published in Brussels, was called or, in Irish.

Fr. Stapleton stated that during his missionary work in Ireland he became convinced of the need for a catechism in Irish for the proper religious instruction of the uneducated commons. He expressed a love for the vernacular Irish language and harshly criticised the Classical Gaelic literary language and Dán Díreach strict metre favored by both the Bardic elite and the Gaelic nobility of Ireland, which Fr. Stapleton accused of having ‘put it under great darkness and difficulty of words, writing it in contractions and mysterious words which are obscure and difficult to understand’ and accordingly bringing the Irish language into ‘contempt and disregard and learning other foreign languages’. in the Sack of Cashel, during the Irish Confederate Wars Fr. Stapleton sought sanctuary inside St. Patrick's Cathedral upon the Rock of Cashel, County Tipperary, where he was captured by Parliamentarian soldiers under the command of Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin, and, with six other priests, he was put to death on the spot. He is said to have blessed his attackers with holy water moments before his death.

Due to his martyrdom, Pope John Paul II declared him Venerable in 1991 and in 1992 Beatified him, making him Blessed Theobald Stapleton.