Drogheda procession for St Oliver

While Orangemen are celebrating their Protestantism at Drumcree tomorrow, the Knights of Columbanus will be in Drogheda honouring St Oliver Plunkett, who was executed because of his Catholicism.

Like the Drumcree parade, the Drogheda procession is an annual event, and both take place on the first Sunday in July. The Orange parade does so because it the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of the Somme and the Drogheda procession because it is the nearest Sunday to St Oliver's feast day, July 1st.

The Drogheda procession is generally attended by the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland in whose diocese, as with Drumcree, it is. Dr Sean Brady has been a regular attender despite events at Drumcree in recent years. He is expected again tomorrow. Also taking part will be some Papal Knights and Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.

There are other similarities between the two events. There used to be many more such processions in Drogheda every year. Recently however, as in Portadown, there is just one.

There the similarities end. St Oliver's procession is led by a bier carrying his bones. His left clavicle, left scapula, ninth and tenth rib, left hemi-pelvic bone and sacrum are held at St Peter's Church, Drogheda.

The most prized relic, St Oliver's head, is not carried in procession, however. It remains at St Peter's and is venerated when the procession ends.

St Oliver was hanged at Tyburn, London, in 1681, nine years before the Battle of the Boyne. Friends spirited his body away and removed the head and forearms before burying the rest in a graveyard in London. The remains were later exhumed and found their way to a Benedictine monastery at Hildesheim, Germany. Some were later sent to the Benedictines at Downside, England. It was from this lot that bones were sent to St Peter's at the request of Cardinal Conway when St Oliver was canonised in 1975.

The head, however, had been held at the Sisters of Siena convent in Drogheda since shortly after the saint's death. When St Oliver was beatified in 1921, a petition to Rome secured the head for St Peter's. The nuns were "very crestfallen, very bitter", said Mgr Francis Donnelly, of St Peter's. It was around then that the procession began.

Tomorrow it will follow the traditional route from Our Lady of Lourdes Church through the town to St Peter's Church, beginning at 3 p.m. It is in memory of a man told by the judge at his trial that "the bottom of your treason was the setting up of your false religion than which there is not anything more displeasing to God or more pernicious to mankind".