22.04.2026
Archbishop Preaches on Trinity Monday as a ‘Scholar of the Decades’
“One of the fundamental roles of education is to engender engaged citizenship,” Archbishop Michael Jackson said in his sermon in the Chapel of Trinity College Dublin on Trinity Monday (April 20).
Trinity Monday is when Trinity College Dublin celebrates the announcement of new Honorary Fellows, Fellows and Scholars of the College. The ceremony is one of the oldest and most colourful at Trinity College and refers back to the foundation of Trinity College in 1592, as a corporation consisting of the Provost, the Fellows and the Scholars.
The Archbishop was preaching on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his own announcement as a Scholar. The service, he said, gathered people “to praise Almighty God for our continuance in the endeavour of education, for our respect for those who at various points in the kaleidoscope of learning have reached significant attainments as Scholars and Fellows and to commend them to the future investment of their talents in the world to which we belong – for good for all”.
The purpose of citizenship is to energise a generously functioning society, Archbishop Jackson said.
“The germs of this are tended in large part in what we call the educational system. People who have been offered and who have taken educational opportunity and have had it tested at a high level of scrutiny are duty bound to invest that treasure in the society to which they belong. It is called public benefit. It is called the common good,” he stated.
He added: “Investment in clever people requires investment by those same people in the bettering of the lives and circumstances of others. We might call it the altruism of public policy and of public service. This requires vision and courage. This requires confidence and perspective. This requires knowledge laid at the feet of others. This is its vulnerability and this is its wastefulness. In a very particular and specialized way Election to Scholarship and Fellowship tests and expresses such skills in successive individuals as The Foundation replenishes itself organically year after year on Trinity Monday and as new stones are set carefully and confidently into the fabric of the College that, many years later, still holds our affection and our admiration”.
The Archbishop highlighted both the positive and negative changes in Irish life. The readings [Genesis 28 and Ephesians 2], he said, pointed to an invitation to create a new and newly functioning single humanity, what might today be called diversity and inclusion.
“If hate speech and prejudice are the underbelly of knowledge; if weapons of mass destruction are the underbelly of innovation and science; if alienation and harassment are the underbelly of privilege and opportunity, today is a day on which we can set our face against these distortions and encourage those whose achievements we honour to make a difference,” he stated.
You can read Archbishop Jackson’s sermon in full here.
As a Trinity College Scholar of the Decades, the Archbishop was invited to the Provost’s toast after the Scholars’ Dinner on Monday evening.