St. Columbanus

Who they were

Columbanus left Bangor at around fifty, an age when his contemporaries retired to die, and spent twenty five years crossing Europe on foot with twelve companions. Luxeuil and its sister houses in Gaul came first, then exile, for refusing to bless a king's illegitimate sons and for keeping Irish customs against the local bishops. His letters to popes survive, and they are bold to the edge of cheek and completely loyal underneath: we Irish, he wrote, are bound to the chair of Peter.

Expelled and shipwrecked back, he simply started again, up the Rhine and over the Alps at around seventy, founding Bobbio in Italy in 614, where he died a year later. His federation of monasteries seeded the continent's next several centuries, and Robert Schuman invoked him as a patron of European unity. The modern road has claimed him too: motorcyclists have popularly adopted the saint who never stopped travelling, which is devotion by adoption rather than any formal designation, and is none the worse for it.

Why people turn to St. Columbanus

Riders, which is a real and organized modern devotion with blessing of the bikes seasons behind it, alongside St. Christopher and St. Frances of Rome. Expatriates and missionaries who have to correct power in somebody else's country. And Europe's unity, prayed for by name.

How to ask their intercession

Before the season's first ride, one line and go. And his Alps at seventy are the standing argument that the long road is startable at any age you happen to be.