St. Oliver Plunkett was found guilty of treason in 1681, before being hanged, drawn and quartered.
At Tyburn, his body was torched by the bloodthirsty Reformers in an act of depraved zealousness.
Painting of St. Oliver’s death in St. Peter’s Parish Church in Drogheda
His head was eventually recovered from the fire and Dom Maurus Corker had it smuggled to the Benedictine Monastery in Lamspringe, Germany. Within the next few years, it was passed on to Cardinal Philip Howard OP at Rome, a friend of St. Oliver, who had helped the Archbishop of Armagh to return to Ireland safely after his ordination as Archbishop. From him, it passed to Oliver’s successor, Archbishop of Armagh Hugh McMahon, who returned the head to its rightful place in Ireland. McMahon brought the head to the Dominican Nuns at Siena, the prioress at the time being Sister Catherin Plunkett, St. Oliver’s grand niece.
As this came during the penal laws, when it was illegal to be a Catholic, much less a member of a religious order, the order and the relic both had to survive together in secret. Having originally started out in a mud cabin, the sisters moved to other parts of Drogheda over the years, always maintaining the veneer of being a boarding house for women rather than a convent.
When Pope Benedict XV declared Plunkett a martyr for the faith on St. Patrick’s Day in 1918, it was inevitable that his head eventually would have to be moved (incidentally it has been claimed that Benedict XV also blessed plans for the Easter Rising when Count Plunkett brought documents written by his son Joseph Mary Plunkett, apparently a distant relative of St. Oliver). Count Plunkett was in the audience on the day that Oliver was beatified.
The sisters had kept the head in good condition for 200 years at this point, with a shrine surrounding the relic at their convent.
Cardinal Michael Logue then requested that the sisters transfer his head to the St. Peter’s Parish Church in Drogheda, which fulfilled an agreement made initially by the sisters when they promised to return it to a successor of McMahon. The head had not been entirely hidden away however before this, in 1881 thousands had flocked to the convent to venerate St. Oliver on the 200 anniversary of his death.
In 1920, which the War of Independence raging, St. Oliver was beatified and his head transferred to the parish church in Drogheda with Eucharistic processions in celebration.
Pope Paul VI visited the shrine on a number of occasions in order to venerate it, eventually lifting Oliver to sainthood during his pontificate, in 1975.
Pope John Paul II visited Drogheda in 1979 and venerated the shrine also.
Most of the information in this article is sourced from Tommy Burns’s book ‘St. Oliver Plunkett: Two Centenaries 1921-2021’