Ordination to the diaconate of Patrick Corkery SJ
Gonzaga College Chapel
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Homily of Archbishop Dermot Farrell
It is a joy for me to be with you today to ordain Patrick Corkery to the Diaconate. This is a day of hope. Any day when we make a profound commitment is a day born of hope, a day rooted in hope: be that a solemn profession, or a marriage, or an ordination: it is a day of witness to hope, a day when we put flesh on hope.
If you seek to lead…
Patrick, today marks a key moment in your journey to priesthood. While priesthood has many dimensions, the Gospel we have just heard asks us to consider its leadership dimension, we might say its prophetic dimension. In one way, Jesus asks, if you seek to lead, this is what you must attend to. It is not that diaconate and priesthood do not have ministerial dimensions, but there are other dimensions which, when priesthood is seen exclusively in a ministerial key, risk remaining hidden.
The Shaking Reality of Sight
Listening to Jesus in today’s Gospel one might easily be taken aback. He is strident almost to the point of appearing harsh: “…you cannot see the plank in your own eye? Hypocrite! Take the plank out of your own eye first … ” The compassion of Jesus, that cornerstone of his good news, sounds far away. These do not sound like the words of the one who told the story of a Samaritan, so compassionate, that he could not pass by on the other side (see Luke 10:33). Many of you will have heard of the Second World War German Jesuit martyr, Alfred Delp SJ, and his “shaking reality of Advent”—the meditation he wrote as he awaited execution. Perhaps we could call this morning’s Gospel, “The Shaking Reality of Sight.” Jesus wishes to open the eyes of his hearers, to have them recognise their effective blindness, and see the world as it is.
The Character of Our Blindness
Our own blindness has very deep roots. Coming to know ourselves is hard work: overcoming pride and self-sufficiency and self-justification demands a particular humility and openness. Before I can stand in front of others, before I can truly serve, I must have the ability to look at myself with honesty. Before we can lead others we need to know what is in our own hearts.
All Journey to Sight
In asking “can one blind person guide another?” (Luke 6:39), Jesus bears silent witness to his own journey to sight, and asks his hearers to take seriously that it takes time to come to sight. We are all familiar with the story of sight and seeing that is the Emmaus story: how they came to see him in the breaking of break, and how he vanished from their sight (Luke 24: 31), and we taste the irony of the “but him they did not see…” … and there is Jesus beside them, engaging with them. (24:24)
The Gospel of Luke is filled with blindness: there is the shocking blindness of the Rich Man who cannot see Lazarus at his Gate, there is the pain-inducing blindness of the Elder Son, who cannot see his brother, “this son of yours,” he says to his father. Nor can he see the joy of his father who rejoices and celebrates that his son “has come back safe and sound.” (15:27) But if we are to be fair, there is also a splinter in the eye of the father who does not see the need to acknowledge the daily grind of “working in the field.” (15:25)
And there is the coming to sight of Mary and Joseph—“the child’s father and mother,” as St Luke calls them, who “stood wondering at the things that were being said about Jesus,” (2:33) as we heard a few Sundays ago on the Feast of the Presentation.
There are certainly moments of illumination and insight, but those moments usually pass us by, unless we are on a journey that wants to come to sight. “Take the plank out of your own eye first …” This is the work of a lifetime. It is also the work, indeed the responsibility of leadership.
Who Brings us to Sight?
In the end, sight comes from our encounter with reality. For the person of faith, the encounter with reality is at its deepest in our encounter with the Lord. It is seeing with the eyes of the heart. It is the Holy Spirit—the driving force of our life—who enables us to see. It is the encounter with the Spirit that enabled St Paul and countless others to discern their mission, and to speak out with courage. Opening up to listen for the Spirit is not about receiving rare signals; it means looking at how, in practical terms, the gospel challenges each person’s life—a fortiori the life of those who put themselves forward for ministry. Is this not the whole thrust of the Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius’s great gift to all people of faith.
Learning to See Like Christ
What is true for us individually, is also true for us as Church. Like Christ, our Lord and Master, the living Church must learn to see. As he says in today’s Gospel: “The disciple is not above their teacher. The fully trained disciple will always be like their teacher.” A Church which learns to see is a Christ-like Church. This can only happen in the Holy Spirit. Learning to recognise the plank in the communal eye is learning to see together, and what we see together brings another quality and depth to what we see on our own. The Second Vatican Council is a profound example of the Church learning to see learning to see what God is doing in the world, learning to re-discover who we are as disciples of Christ, as sisters and brothers of Jesus and of each other.
Recent Revelations
As we have come to see, and sometimes been forced to see, priests and religious, are no exception to the effects of their own weakness and fragility. This treasure we carry —the good news and its power — we carry in earthenware jars… (see 2 Cor 4:7). It was St Paul who begged the Lord three times to release him from the “thorn in his flesh” (2 Cor 12:7-8). But in vain! Was this an illness? Some moral suffering or weakness? A painful memory of his past as a persecutor of the Church? We don’t know. The ministers of the gospel—across the Globe— still have that “thorn in the flesh.” Recently, the Society made a courageous decision publicly to name some deceased members of the Society against whom credible accusations of abuse had been made. It is right that these crimes be brought to light—that the plank in our own eye be seen, that the pain, injustice, and trauma caused be accepted, and that the long journey of healing be undertaken and supported. To bring this to light, is not only a work of justice and truth, it is also a witness to authentic Christian hope. Authentic Christian hope is not a flight from the world as it is into some dream-like future. No! Authentic Christian hope is an engagement with the world in its brokenness and blindness. It is a commitment born of the power that is given to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the power to risk living in another way.
Patrick, it is out of this hope that you vow, your commitment this day, not to separate you, but to give yourself radically to what God is doing in Christ. Our shared hope is the gift of the God who creates us out of nothing, who conquers death and takes away its sting (see 1 Cor 15:55), who shines that light that no darkness can overcome (see John 1:5). You formally put flesh on that hope today. May the Lord bless you. May he who is calling you to priesthood keep you close to himself, may he keep you, and your Jesuit confrères, close to the poor. May your family, and all who have been involved in your journey, see the fruits of the ways in which they have contributed to making you the person that you are, ready to go forward. In these days before the season of Lent begins may we never cease to pray that his Kingdom may come, that justice and mercy be done. Father make us firm in hope, strong in faith, and constant in love.
May the Lord who has begun this good work among us and in you bring it to completion.
Mary Mother of the Church, pray for us.
St Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.
St Aloysius Gonzaga, pray for us.
+Dermot Farrell
Archbishop of Dublin
