24.02.2026
John Sullivan – ‘An ecumenical saint’
“There may be no such category as ecumenical saint. However, I think that John Sullivan qualifies for such a description were it ever possible,” Archbishop Michael Jackson said in his sermon at the Fr John Sullivan SJ Mass at St Francis Xavier’s Church, Gardiner Street on Saturday (February 21).
Archbishop Jackson said John Sullivan will continue to be remembered for “his acute sense of the divine presence in others and for his part in caring for people in whom he knew that God dwelt. Incarnation was his watchword. Grace and truth were his way”.
Known as the cycling Jesuit, John Sullivan was born on May 8 1861 on Eccles Street in Dublin. He converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and four years after his conversion he joined the Jesuits.For most of his life as a priest, he ministered in Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare. Over his years of ministry, people were struck by his life of deep prayer and personal sacrifice. He spent a lot of his time cycling to visit the poor, the sick and dying in the surrounding villages. He taught from 1907 until his death at St Vincent’s Nursing Home, Dublin, on February 19 1933.
In 1960 Fr John Sullivan was declared a Servant of God and in 2014 he was declared Venerable by Pope Francis. He was declared Blessed John Sullivan, Pope Francis having approved a decree the previous year, at a beatification ceremony on May 13 2017 in St Francis Xavier’s Church, Gardiner Street, Dublin.
The example of John Sullivan, the Archbishop said, has spoken from generation to generation of what it is to seek and to find, to follow and to belong and perhaps most essentially to us in contemporary Ireland to change without losing the essential threads of what was good in the old ways while finding all–encouraging fulfilment in the new.
“We need to see more of such vigour and such energy in the church of today. I refer, of course, to John Sullivan’s setting to one side what today we call Anglicanism and, in its stead, embracing Roman Catholicism in a spirt of obedience and of fulfilment rather than in a spirit of rejection and triumphalism. We always need to be able to applaud gracious tolerance and tolerant grace walking hand in hand,” he commented.
Archbishop Jackson said that the season of Lent beckons us forward to the positive use of an energy that always needs focus and purpose, community and compassion, others as well as ourselves. “And to this way of life John Sullivan himself was no stranger. His rejection of the ways of the world did not leave him as a killjoy. Rather it focused his fervour for goodness and for rightness on the needs, discerned or yet to be disclosed, of the pupil, the local person, the sick person and the dying person. His instinct was to show mercy and love and, in this way, to work the transformation of suffering into the miracle of healing,” he said.
You can read the Archbishop’s sermon in full here.