Feast Day: June 20 (group feast — Irish Catholic Martyrs); March 23 (date of martyrdom; observed by Irish Dominicans)
Beatified: September 27, 1992 — Pope Saint John Paul II (with 16 other Irish Catholic Martyrs)
Canonized: N/A — Blessed
Order / Vocation: Order of Preachers (Dominicans, O.P.); Prior of the Dominican House at Naas, County Kildare
Patron of: Ireland · the Dominican Order in Ireland · those falsely accused · those who protect their enemies · those martyred by unjust authority
"I die a Catholic and a Dominican priest. I forgive from my heart all who have conspired to bring about my death. Deo gratias." — Blessed Peter Higgins, at the gallows, March 23, 1642
The Man Whose Life He Had Saved Was in the Crowd
Sir Charles Coote's soldiers brought him to the gallows at Hoggen Green — the open ground outside Dublin's walls that is now St. Stephen's Green — on the morning of March 23, 1642. It had been a rapid sequence: arrested in January, transported to Dublin, imprisoned, offered his life in exchange for apostasy, refused. There had been no trial in any meaningful sense. Coote had authority from the Chief Justices to execute Catholic priests summarily, and he exercised it.
Among the crowd that gathered — and crowds always gathered at these events, drawn by the mixture of curiosity and dread that public executions produce — stood William Pilsworth, the Protestant rector of Donadea in County Kildare. He watched the priest who was about to be hanged. He recognized him.
He cried out: "This man is innocent! This man is innocent! He saved my life."
His words fell on deaf ears. The soldiers were not interested in character references. They were implementing a policy.
Peter Higgins had saved Pilsworth's life in 1641, during the Irish Rebellion, when a group of Catholic rebels had seized the Protestant rector and were about to hang him. The Dominican Prior of Naas had intervened — physically, personally, at risk to himself — and upbraided the Catholics for their unchristian behavior and secured Pilsworth's release. He had done the same for other Protestants threatened by the sectarian violence of the rebellion: sheltered the homeless, Protestant and Catholic, attempted to restrain the violence, used his moral authority as a priest and his practical authority as the most senior Catholic religious figure in the area to keep people alive.
None of this mattered to Sir Charles Coote. He had a policy. Father Peter Higgins was a Catholic priest. The execution proceeded.
"This man is innocent," said the man whose life he had saved. The soldiers cut down the body and hacked it to pieces so that it could not be given an honorable burial. Nobody knows where the remains are.
He is for the person who protected his enemies and was killed by his friends. He is for the priest whose pastoral charity extended without distinction across the sectarian boundaries that the political situation was drawing in the blood of the Irish countryside. He is for Ireland — which he loved, and which did not save him.
Dublin, the Dominicans, and the Long Formation
He was born near Dublin around 1600, in the Ireland of the early Stuarts — a country whose Catholic population had been living under the Penal Laws since the Elizabethan religious settlement had made the practice of Catholicism legally dangerous and the priesthood legally capital. The Catholic Church in Ireland had been functioning, since the 1560s, as an underground institution: priests ordained abroad, exercising their ministry clandestinely, supported by Catholic families who took the risk of sheltering them and gathering around them for the liturgy, always aware that discovery meant heavy consequences.
He was received into the Dominican Order probably at the Priory of Saint Saviour's in Dublin — the ancient Dominican house on the north bank of the Liffey, long suppressed under the Penal Laws but maintaining a clandestine presence through the network of Catholic households in the city. He completed his novitiate and received his formation, then traveled to Spain — as many Irish priests did in this period, using the Catholic countries of Europe as the place to complete the academic and spiritual preparation that the hostile conditions of Ireland could not safely provide.
He was ordained a Dominican priest in Spain in 1627. By 1630 he had returned to Ireland and was installed as Prior of the Dominican house at Naas, County Kildare — some twenty miles from Dublin on the old road to the west, a town with ancient Dominican connections (a priory had been founded there in 1356 and suppressed by Henry VIII in 1540) that the reorganized Irish Dominican Province was in the process of reviving.
The revival of the Naas priory was part of the broader effort by the Irish Dominican Province under the leadership of Father Ross MacGeoghan to rebuild the Order's institutional presence in Ireland despite the Penal Laws. The effort required the particular combination of pastoral courage and institutional prudence that the period demanded: visible enough to function as a religious community, invisible enough to avoid the worst consequences of the law. The Lord Deputy Wentworth — a Protestant political operator with close connections to Naas — apparently tolerated the Dominicans' presence there, a pragmatic accommodation that the political situation occasionally produced.
Peter Higgins governed the Naas community through the 1630s, building its institutional life, serving the local Catholic population, maintaining the relationships with the surrounding community — Catholic and Protestant — that the Dominican mission required. He was, by the evidence of his subsequent conduct during the 1641 Rebellion, a man known and trusted across confessional lines: his ability to intervene with Catholic rebels on behalf of Protestant civilians was only possible for a priest who had built genuine pastoral relationships with both communities over years.
1641: The Rebellion, the Rector, and the Many He Saved
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 began in Ulster in October of that year and spread rapidly southward as the Catholic Irish gentry of the Pale — the area around Dublin long dominated by the English colonial settlement — joined the Ulster Irish in what they presented as a revolt against English misrule rather than a religious war. The reality was more complex: the violence that accompanied the rebellion was explicitly sectarian in many places, and the Protestant civilian population of the affected areas bore the brunt of it.
In Naas and the surrounding area of County Kildare, Peter Higgins used his position and his moral authority to do what he could against the tide. The sources are specific: he sheltered the homeless, intervened to stop violence, and made the most specific intervention that the tradition has preserved — the rescue of William Pilsworth.
Pilsworth was the Protestant rector of Donadea, a parish adjacent to Naas. He had been seized by Catholic rebels who intended to hang him. Peter Higgins arrived at the scene — how he came to be there, whether he had been warned or had sought out the trouble or encountered it by chance, the sources do not say — and confronted the men holding Pilsworth. He upbraided them, in what must have been forceful terms, for behavior he characterized as unchristian. He secured Pilsworth's release. Pilsworth went free. The Prior of Naas had put his own standing and safety at risk to save a Protestant rector from a Catholic mob.
In January 1642, the Earl of Ormond marched from Dublin with a Protestant force to reassert control over the Naas area, which the Lord's Justices had described as "a noted receptacle of the rebels." Father Higgins, understanding that his position was exposed and that the martial law authority being exercised made resisting arrest dangerous, surrendered himself peacefully to Ormond. He knew he had done nothing wrong. He trusted that his record — the Protestants he had sheltered, the violence he had tried to stop, the rector whose life he had saved — would speak for itself.
Ormond took him under his protection and transported him to Dublin. Sir Charles Coote attempted to seize him en route; Ormond resisted. Higgins reached Dublin prison with Ormond's protection intact. Ormond submitted petitions from at least twenty Protestants who had personal knowledge of the priest's conduct, urging that his life be spared. The petitions were supported by men like Pilsworth who owed him their lives.
Coote executed him anyway, before dawn on March 23, while Ormond was still sleeping and could not intervene. He learned what had happened when he woke: Peter Higgins had been hanged without trial, on the authority of a summary jurisdiction that Coote had decided to exercise before anyone could stop him.
The Gallows and the Last Words
He was brought to Hoggen Green. He was offered his life. The condition was the standard one: deny your faith, acknowledge the King's religious supremacy, abandon what you came to Ireland as a priest to serve.
He declined. And he did something unusual for a martyr in the instant of death: he explained himself. He told the crowd — which included the Protestants whose petitions for his life had just failed — why he was about to die. He announced that the condition on which his life could have been spared was the denial of his religion. He rejected that condition publicly. He forgave everyone who had brought about his death. He declared his identities: Catholic, Dominican priest. He said Deo gratias — thanks be to God.
The body was hacked apart by soldiers to prevent a decent burial. No remains have been located. His story reached the wider Catholic world through the martyrologies of the Dominican Order, written by Irish Dominicans who had fled to the Catholic countries of Europe where they could write and publish what they could not write and publish at home.
He was beatified on September 27, 1992, in Rome, by Pope John Paul II, as one of a representative group of seventeen Irish martyrs chosen from among the nearly three hundred who died for the faith during the Penal era. The group's feast day is June 20, the anniversary of the 1584 martyrdom of Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley. The Irish Dominican Province observes his memory on March 23, the date of his death.
The stone statue that stands outside the Dominican church in Naas marks the place where his community was rebuilt. Inside the church, the memory of the Prior who saved the Protestant rector is kept alive in stone and in the liturgy.
| Born | c. 1600, near Dublin, Ireland |
| Died | March 23, 1642, Hoggen Green (now St. Stephen's Green), Dublin — hanged without trial by Sir Charles Coote; body mutilated to prevent burial; remains location unknown |
| Feast Day | June 20 (group feast — Irish Catholic Martyrs); March 23 (date of death; Irish Dominican observance) |
| Order / Vocation | Order of Preachers (Dominicans, O.P.); Prior of Naas |
| Beatified | September 27, 1992 — Pope Saint John Paul II (with 16 other Irish Catholic Martyrs) |
| Patron of | Ireland · Dominican Order in Ireland · those falsely accused · those who protect their enemies |
| Known as | Peadar Γ Huiginn (Irish); The Prior of Naas; The Martyr of Hoggen Green |
| Ordained | 1627, Spain; returned to Ireland c. 1630 |
| Key act | Rescued Protestant rector William Pilsworth from Catholic rebels, 1641 |
| Petitions | 20+ Protestants petitioned Ormond for his life; Ormond supported the petitions; Coote executed him before the petitions could be acted on |
| Execution authority | Sir Charles Coote, Governor of Dublin — summary execution authority from Chief Justices; explicitly extrajudicial |
| Their words | "I die a Catholic and a Dominican priest. I forgive from my heart all who have conspired to bring about my death. Deo gratias." |
Prayer to Blessed Peter Higgins
Lord God, who gave to Your servant Peter the courage to defend his enemies as he defended his flock, and who permitted him to die at the hands of those who should have heard his testimony and did not, grant through his intercession that Ireland may honor the memory of those who fell in the complicated violence of its history and find in their witness the courage to build what their deaths could not prevent. May Blessed Peter pray for the Church in Ireland, for all who serve it under difficulty, and for those who protect others at risk to themselves. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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