What the village is named for
The relic
The story begins with a fragment of wood — said to be part of the cross on which Christ was crucified — presented by Pope Paschal II to the O'Brien kings of Thomond around the early twelfth century, as reward for their work reforming the church in Ireland. The abbey was built to house it. For three centuries the pilgrims came, crossing the Suir in their thousands, wealthy enough to fund the elaborate stonework you can still see in the nave. The Reformation ended that. The relic disappeared from the records. When the Vatican authenticated a new relic for the restored abbey in 1977 — from St Peter's Basilica in Rome — it was the second time in its history that Holycross had formally received one. The first was eight hundred years before.
11 October 2011
The theft
Three men arrived at the abbey in the early evening. Two went inside with an angle-grinder, a hammer, and a screwdriver. They forced the steel cabinet open and took both reliquaries — the authenticated Vatican relic and the cross containing it. They were outside and in a wine-red Volkswagen Touareg inside a few minutes. The vehicle was found burned out. The gardaí said almost nothing publicly for three months. Then in January 2012 they announced the relics had been recovered, undamaged, and the abbey held a celebration Mass on 19 February. No one has ever explained who had them or where they had been. The relic went back into its case. The cabinet has a better lock now.
How a ruin became a parish church
The restoration
After the Reformation, Holy Cross Abbey spent three centuries as a roofless shell. Local people took stones for field walls and houses. What survived did so by indifference rather than care. In the 1960s a local priest, Willie Hayes, decided the thing to do was restore it entirely rather than consolidate the ruin. The Office of Public Works agreed. Archbishop Thomas Morris raised the money. Restoration work ran from 1970 through 1975 — five years of archaeological investigation and structural repair that put back the roofs, the windows, the cloister. The abbey reopened for Mass on 25 September 1975. It was the most ambitious medieval church restoration the country had seen. It is still a working parish church. It does not feel like a museum.
Inside the north transept
The butler tomb
The Butler tomb in the north transept dates from the fifteenth century and is carved with an effigy of a knight in full armour — the detail of the chain mail still crisp after six hundred years. The Butlers were the dominant Anglo-Norman family of Tipperary, Earls of Ormond, and they used the abbey as a prestige burial site. The monument survived the Reformation intact, which tells you something about either the thickness of the walls or the wariness of the people who came to loot them. Either way it is here, in a working church, still in the place it was made for.