Blessed John Sullivan’s 90th anniversary

Kevin O’Rourke SJ took the cross of Blessed John Sullivan SJ to Galway on Sunday 19th February for three days, marking the 90th anniversary of the much-loved Jesuit’s birth. Many citizens of Galway came to St Ignatius chapel over the three days to attend Mass and receive a blessing with the cross that was dear to Fr John, having been passed on to him by his mother.

Kevin also preached at the annual Blessed John Sullivan SJ Mass in St Francis Xavier Church on Saturday 18 February, where people came from around the country to celebrate the life of Fr John and receive a blessing with the cross. To mark the 90th anniversary, both the Church of Ireland Archbishop Michael Jackson and the Catholic Archbishop Dermot Farrell attended the special Mass in the Gardiner St church.

In his homily, (read the full text below) Fr Kevin gave a short biography of Fr John before going on to ponder the influences on him that may have caused him to first convert to Catholicism and then become a Jesuit priest.

He spoke about Fr John’s love of the poor which he believes was inspired by his mother’s similar devout care for them. And he said that Father John’s concern for and devotion to those who suffered greatly was surely in part connected to the unspeakable tragedy in his own family when his brother Robert drown in a boating accident. His body was never found and his mother was left bereft and brokenhearted. Fr Kevin quoted one local woman who said, “He seems to be able to take on all of our troubles and sufferings”. And another person who said, “Everybody prays to Father Sullivan. There may not be a miracle, but he eases the pain”.

Referencing the healing and miracles associated with Blessed John and the cross people now get blessed with (formerly his mothers), Fr Kevin said: It (the cross) is not a magic wand, something to be waved over people. As early as in the Acts of the Apostles 19:11-12, we read of God working extraordinary miracles through St Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick; their illnesses were cured, and the evil spirits left them. We have something similar here. Why is this cross endowed with spiritual power? I would venture to say that the heavy cross Lady Elizabeth had to bear made her crucifix a source of grace and blessing. It was bathed in “her faithful and daily tears”, as John would describe them. She could never have anticipated the fruit her sufferings would bear. Without the tragedy of Robert’s death, would we be here today?

Speaking on the Keith Finnegan Show » on Galway Bay FM on Friday 17th Fr Kevin also recounted the life of Fr John and spoke about his cross which he was bringing to Galway for a special triduum of prayer for Jesuit vocations.

Fr Kevin also read an extract from a letter sent to the Jesuits in 1985 from a woman who was cured of very painful arthritis after receiving a visitation from Fr John in a dream.

Homily at Annual Mass to honour Blessed John Sullivan, 18 February 2023

It takes about six minutes to walk from St George’s Church of Ireland church at George’s Place, to this Church of St Francis Xavier on Gardiner Street in Dublin. Blessed John Sullivan was baptised at St George’s Church on the fifteenth of July eighteen sixty-one. Ninety-nine years later, his mortal remains were transferred from the cemetery at Clongowes Wood College in Kildare to St Francis Xavier’s Church.

His father became Lord Chancellor of Ireland and was a member of the Church of Ireland.
His mother Elizabeth was a devout Catholic, who had a great love for the poor.
In later life, he would speak of his mother’s goodness to the poor and of the influence it had on him in his youth.

He went to Portora Royal School Enniskillen at age 12. It was then under Dr William Steele, the outstanding Protestant headmaster of his time, in the flower of his reputation, described as “upright, generous and deeply religious”. His character and teaching formed character and piety in the pupils.

Dr Steele prepared the Greek texts for Sunday service in the parish church, where the boys went week after week.

John did very well in his studies and won many prizes for Scripture and Classics. Throughout his life, he had a great love for Portora, which had a reputation for its high cultural standards and religious atmosphere.

20 years after John’s death, the headmaster Rev D Graham, spoke of the just pride the school felt in having trained one whom his co-religionists hoped one day to see canonised.

When he was seventeen, his twenty-four-year-old brother Robert lost his life in a drowning accident off Killiney beach. His mother’s faith at that time touched him very deeply. I will come back to this later.

He studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin. When he was twenty-four, his father died suddenly, and shortly after this he went to London to study Law and was called to the Bar. Comfortably off, he was described as the best-dressed young man in Dublin, and a very eligible bachelor. He enjoyed travelling, cycling, and walking in Europe, and a busy social life,

At the age of thirty-five, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Jesuit Church in Farm Street in London, by Fr Michael Gavin S.J., son of a prominent Limerick family. Four years later he became a Jesuit novice, and at the age of forty-six, he was ordained a priest at Milltown Park in Dublin.

What is Blessed John remembered for?

He became known as a “Man of God”. During philosophical studies for the priesthood at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, the superior of the community wrote “The Irish Jesuits have sent us a great blessing. To have a man of God living amongst us is proof of God’s special favour to us”. A pupil of Clongowes Wood College wrote to his mother “I considered him to be a saint, and this was the general opinion among the boys”.

He was known to spend long hours in prayer, despite his many other duties as teacher and spiritual father at Clongowes Wood College. He had a great devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and Our Lady. He was ascetic in food, clothing, and sleep. His clothes were threadbare and worn, his shoes were broken and worn. His diet consisted mainly of porridge, rice, bread, and weak tea.

He had heroic devotion to the sick and the suffering all his life. Physically strong, he walked and cycled many miles to comfort the sick and the poor in Kildare and in hospitals in Dublin. He went to great lengths to secure the burial of a homeless man of the roads.

His reputation as a holy man spread all around the country due to healings and graces in mind and body, attributed to his prayers. People came from as far away as Donegal by horse-drawn cart to receive his blessing. In answer to his prayers, jobs were obtained, houses were got, people returned to the life of faith, and much more. A young nephew of Michael Collins was in a Dublin hospital with a deformed leg. Fr John was sent for and prayed over him for a long time. Shortly afterwards, a nurse gave the boy a bath. During the bath, his leg straightened out, and he lived a full life after that.

Hundreds of letters have been received from many countries reporting blessings and graces due to his intercession. A local woman said of him “He seems to be able to take on all of our troubles and sufferings”. On a number of occasions, he foretold things before they happened.

His pastoral experience gave him a great appreciation of his priestly vocation. A former pupil of his, considering joining the Society of Jesus, asked him for advice. He wrote as follows: “If only you knew how much misery, sin, sorrow and suffering there is in the world, and how much a priest can do to comfort, console and raise the fallen, you would not hesitate”. The young man did become a Jesuit.

Immediately after his death people began to visit his grave and take away pieces of clay and leave rosary beads and medals. One person said, “Everybody prays to Father Sullivan. There may not be a miracle, but he eases the pain”.

He was reported to have appeared to people after his death. Retired Detective Garda Gerry O’Carroll had occasion to visit a Mr Pocock in Tullamore during a murder investigation in 1976. In an article in the Irish Independent shortly after Blessed John’s Beatification, he wrote the following:

“Mr Pocock told me an incredible story. Years before, he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and doctors had held out no hope. He prepared himself for the inevitable and, as he lay on his deathbed, he heard a voice call his name. He looked up and saw a man standing at the foot of his bed, who said: “I’m Fr John Sullivan, don’t worry.” He awoke the next morning, rang the bell for breakfast, and got out of bed. Nurses, doctors, and consultants crowded around in amazement. X-rays revealed no cancer, and, within three days, he was back at home with his family”.

How did this come about, that he was a “Man of God”?

A tapestry of encounters and events can give us some pointers to his journey of faith.

Was it the teaching and example of Dr Steele at Portora Royal School Enniskillen?

Was it the challenge of a Catholic domestic staff member of Trinity College, who chided him for not attending church? He told her he was tired of going to church as it meant nothing to him, but that he would go to Mass with her if she would bring him. Although he went to Mass with her once, we don’t know how the experience affected him.

Was it a chance overhearing of a young girl’s catechism lesson through an open window of a hotel in Glencar in Kerry? He listened to the end of the lesson and asked for a loan of the catechism and permission to listen in on the following day. The following year, his own catechism in hand, he took part in the lessons, asked many questions about the Mass and Confession, and attended Mass locally on occasion.

How was he drawn to the Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos, where he spent some months? Although in his early thirties, he seemed to have had no definite religious views, yet he seriously considered becoming a monk and later kept up correspondence with some of the brothers. In a recent documentary film about Mount Athos, a monk said, “It is a part of (our) nature and mission to help people to collect themselves and find inner peace”.

Was it the influence of the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of Charity? Following his reception into the Catholic Church at the age of thirty-five, his life of privilege and comfort came to an end. His fine clothes were not to see the light of day again. He lived a simple ascetic and prayerful life, visiting the poor and the sick, particularly those under the care of the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Mercy. One of the nuns trained a four-year-old girl to run up to John during his regular visits to a school for poor children and recite a prayer: “God bless Mr Sullivan and make him a holy Jesuit”. He enjoyed that, encouraging her to “say it again Annie, say it again”. Who knows?

Was it the outstanding holiness of his Novice Master, Fr Michael Browne? John always spoke with affection and reverence for him and later reported that this encounter saw him through many difficulties in life.

The example of his sister Annie, like her mother, a woman of deep faith and love for the poor, bore fruit in John’s faith and his love for the countless poor and sick people he ministered to. He surely recognised and drew close to Christ in the sick, the poor, and the hungry.

All of the foregoing contributed to his becoming a Man of God, but the lion’s share must go to his mother Lady Elizabeth. He wrote: “To my own mother’s prayers, tears, and agony of soul I owe the salvation of my own soul. I know how much a woman’s prayers can-do, mother or sister. I can say with all my heart I believe it is impossible for the child of those tears ever to be lost”.

Writing to the mother of a boy from Clongowes Wood College who had died, he said.
“I can form some idea of your anguish from what I saw of my own dear mother when her best-loved son and the one whom she almost idolised, was taken from her at the age of twenty-four without a moment’s warning. She never saw his face again and never even had the satisfaction of weeping at his grave, for his remains were never found. I cannot tell you what agony she endured during the days after his loss, hoping against hope that his remains might be recovered”.

“I believe that only for her passionate love for Our Lord and for her boundless faith, she would have lost her reason. To her prayers at that time, and to her resignation to God’s will I believe I owe everything, and God alone knows how much that means”.

His crucifix

When John took his first vows as a Jesuit, he was allowed to keep his mother’s crucifix as his vow cross. It was precious to him. He held it in his hands and gazed on the figure of Christ when he preached retreats. He once said, “The only book you can read on your deathbed is the cross”. That is exactly what he did in his own last moments, as the inscription on the back of the cross testifies. It is kept at this church of St Francis Xavier, and is sought to bless people in hospitals and who are in any kind of need. It brings peace and often healing of mind and body to those who are blessed.

It is not a magic wand, something to be waved over people. As early as in the Acts of the Apostles 19:11-12, we read of God working extraordinary miracles through St Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick; their illnesses were cured, and the evil spirits left them. We have something similar here. Why is this cross endowed with spiritual power? I would venture to say that the heavy cross Lady Elizabeth had to bear made her crucifix a source of grace and blessing. It was bathed in “her faithful and daily tears”, as John would describe them. She could never have anticipated the fruit her sufferings would bear. Without the tragedy of Robert’s death, would we be here today?

I am not sure if Blessed John was referring to Robert’s death or to a different tragedy, but he wrote the following: “God is a father and always must do the most merciful thing. We shall know this later on, but it is hard to see it now. God never sends a terrible cross like this without soon sending a great blessing”.

Good Friday people

Lady Elizabeth and Blessed John were Good Friday People. Dr Sheila Cassidy, in her book of that name, wrote, “I believe that Good Friday people are very specially loved by God, for he has called them to walk towards him along a particularly narrow path, the road to Calvary, the same road as his Son. I believe most deeply that they do not walk this path by chance and that they do not walk it in vain. I have no clever answer to the eternal “Why?” of suffering but I am convinced that whatever its cause and whatever its outcome it is never without meaning. …
Perhaps different people’s suffering has different meanings. Some are clearly purified and strengthened by it and go on to do great things for God and his people. Others are quite simply broken, dehumanized, and destroyed”.

When we love someone who is a Good Friday person, their cross becomes our cross, their pain becomes our pain, their tears become ours too. We become Good Friday people. And when Jesus was in great suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, an angel came to comfort him. That is our calling too, not just to take up our own cross, but to share in the cross of those we meet. Nothing goes to waste.

Chapter fifty-three of the Prophet Isaiah tells us about the Suffering Servant. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by his wounds, we were healed”.

A local Kildare woman said of Blessed John, “He seems to be able to take on all of our troubles and sufferings”. Borrowing his own words, he took to heart the misery, sin, sorrow, and suffering of the world, and gave his life comforting, consoling, and raising the fallen.

St Ignatius Loyola tells us that there is no wood better to kindle the fire of holy love than the wood of the Cross. “If God causes you to suffer much it is a sign that he has great designs for you, and that he certainly intends to make you a saint. And if you wish to become a great saint, entreat him yourself to give you much opportunity for suffering. For there is no wood better to kindle the fire of holy love than the wood of the Cross, which Christ used for his own great sacrifice of boundless love”.

May Blessed John Sullivan be our companion on our journey.

Fr Kevin O’Rourke SJ

18 February 2023