St Patrick’s Day 2025
St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral

Homily of Archbishop Dermot Farrell

Patrick offers another “perspective on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.”

‘I was no prophet, nor prophet’s son …but the Lord took me from following the flock, and said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.” (Amos 7:14–15) “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple rustic, and the least of all believers.” Just like the prophet Amos in the First Reading, Patrick was under no illusions about himself. Beyond all the hype and “paddywhackery,” there is something extraordinary about Patrick. If we look closely at his witness, we may be able to see the contours of hope in this time increasingly characterised by an air of anxiety about the future—not only from the perspective of our faith tradition, but also that of a changing and less clear national identity.

To look closely at Patrick, is to be confronted with one who put flesh on what we might call a faith-filled hope, through which, “the dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open, [and] the one who has hope lives differently…” (Pope Benedict, Spe Salvi, 2)

The Jubilee of Hope we celebrate this year, has asked us to consider our hope anew, this fundamental quality of Christian life. In the busyness of our lives, but also in the frenetic nature of life today, we can lose sight of that which makes a difference. Hope is foundational for every person, whether they consider themselves people of faith or not. When we lose hope—consciously or sub-consciously, our lives lose their coherence, and unravel. We see the consequences all around us, not just in the resignation that can characterise many of the streets which surround this Pro-Cathedral, but also in the deadness implicit in what, those materially much better off, do to numb the pain of the perceived pointlessness of how they earn their daily bread.

To look at Patrick is to look at someone who has another horizon. Patrick is a slave who returns to the land of his enslavement. It is very easy for us to speak of being a slave for Christ (see Romans 1:1) but the reality of slavery—then or now—is never pleasant. To escape that world of violence and degradation, where one’s dignity has little purchase, if any, is more than good fortune. But to return to it, to entrust oneself to those who had almost destroyed it is extraordinary.

Jacques Ellul, the French Reformed philosopher and theologian [d. 1994] keenly observed that “hope is the human response to the silence of God,” but it might also be observed that ‘hope is the human response to the surface futility of life.’ Patrick had been brought into life’s pit, and the depth of its darkness did not extinguish his conviction or his confidence that this was not life’s last word. A keystone of the Christian gospel is that Christ became a slave. He who was first of all became last of all and slave of all (Mark 9:35). “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” St Paul tells the Philippians, “but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave …” (Phil 2:6–7) In not buying into the power structures of his world, Christ undermines their dynamics and reveals their self-interest and darkness. In the words of Marilynne Robinson, Christ “undercuts cultural assumptions about what is valuable, and what hierarchies are.” In the returning slave, we see the radically Christ-like Patrick, who comes back, not to the High King, or to the chieftains, but to the those who are where he had been. Patrick returns to those who are invisible, those he had seen, those whose voices he heard.

Patrick brings the good news from below, and he witnesses to a Christ who comes from below. Yes, Christ is Lord, but the manner of his Lordship is not only worthy of our attention, but is vital if we are to receive the One who is the Lord of life. Patrick the Slave witnesses to a Christ who will not be controlled by the powers or interests of his age or any age. It is not that he sits in his house in Wales and comes to this conclusion! No! Patrick is brought to this place of truth and generosity, to his mission, by the tragedy, loss, and hardship that is his own slavery.

The depth of the gospel has been wrought in him by the depth of the cross he was forced to carry. We do well to keep this dynamic of the living faith before us. The living Christ cannot be received by the comfortable. The transformative hope that Christ brings, cannot even be longed for, not to mind tasted, by those who have their fill.

Stained glass window in St Brigid’s Church, Cabinteely

Sometimes, indeed frequently, we hear expressions of regret over the loss of the Church that was. But, if we are to take seriously the witness of Patrick, might we not wonder what our Heavenly Father is taking from us, and what God is giving us, where God is calling the baptised? To take the image from this morning’s Gospel, what depths he is asking us to plumb. There is no enduring life in the shallows. Christ knows this—he who is God from God and Light from Light, he knows this. But do we?

Patrick has received the depth of life that is in Christ. The gospel has shaped him, Christ has given form to his life. But there is more: Patrick’s passion for the good news, and his desire to reach the Irish have shaped Patrick’s imagination. He has developed what we might call a “pastoral and spiritual” imagination. While the shamrock risks being cliché, we would be foolish not to recognise its symbolic power and the genius that perceived in it a bridge towards the character of the living God. Such imagination is not forged in the shallows; one has to put out into the deep for such a catch. In our own time, think of the pastoral imagination Pope John XXIII who to the amazement, even horror of the College of Cardinals called a Council. Or of Saint John Paul II, with his many initiatives, totally in tune with his long years of reflection on the character of human life, and his passion for the vibrancy of the faith of the young. The imagination of Patrick, and that of John XXIII, and of Pope John Paul II are rooted in the hope that only the horizon of Christ can bring.

If there is a poverty in our Church today, it is above all, a poverty of imagination. Renewal in the faith is not going to come because we adopt some new management strategy that will address our current shortcomings in ministry and mission. Renewal in faith requires a new way of imagining what it means for us to follow Christ together. Offering Christ to new generations demands a re-imagining of how our communities work together, a re-imagining how we are nourished and resourced, how we “receive and offer the Bread of Life from the (one) table both of God’s word and of Christ’s body,” as the Council teaches (see Dei Verbum §21).

It is all too easy to fall into the illusion of celebrating Patrick by praising his mission and its success. Our faith, however, is like a garden: not only must it be planted, it must also be cultivated and maintained. What Patrick and his companions did, was only the beginning: the cultivation of the faith, living it so that the next generations may have the opportunity to come to know Christ falls to us. Is i measc na naomh atá Pádraig. Is anseo atá muidne! You may say that the Church is poor, that it has no people, that we are old and weak. But the living Church—the Church on the way to life—has never been afraid of poverty. The Church that is close to Christ knows all about weakness (see 2 Cor 12:9–10). Let us take heart from Pope Francis’s long journey with the poor. For him, “Christian hope embraces the certainty that our prayer reaches God’s presence; not just any prayer but rather the prayer of the poor!” (Message for the Eight World Day of the Poor, 2024) Let us take heart from his witness in weakness during these last weeks.

This is not the horizon of the strong, but it is the horizon of Patrick, and it is the horizon of Christ. It is a horizon which is not possible without a profound confidence in what God is doing among his people. It is a horizon which is not possible without the hope that comes from the conviction that God is close. That conviction is source of the hope that carries Patrick; it is grounded in his prayer (see Confession §§16, 24, 25), and in his compassion (see Confession §23). The same route holds for us. Without that authentic hope in what God is doing through Christ in the world, there will be no renewal of the Church.

“Put out into the deep,” said Jesus to Peter (Luke 5:4). As we celebrate Saint Patrick, let us give thanks not only for his faith that brought him back to this land, but for that faith that gave him a living hope, that brought him out of the shallows, and into the fullness of life.

Pádraig Naofa, Aspal Éireann, guí orainn.

+Dermot Farrell
Archbishop of Dublin