This is the edited text for the Homily for the Pontifical Mass of Christian burial for Monsignor Frank Coorey, at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Randwick, 17 June 2026.
The oldest noble vine in the world still bearing grapes is not in some remote clos in Burgundy but in the tiny village of Maribor in Slovenia. According to the Guinness Book of World Records it has been producing fruit for 450 years. And it has seen some things. It is growing on the front of a house that forms part of the city walls, and was at times in great danger from marauding Ottomans or Allied bombardment. It narrowly escaped several fires. It resisted the plague of the phylloxera insect that devastated the vineyards of Britain in the 1850s, moved to France to destroy the Rhone valley’s vineyards in the 1860s, and had killed most of the vines of Europe by the end of the 19th century. Almost mythological for its longevity, local villagers sing an anthem to celebrate the Maribor vine and its harvests. Each autumn its keepers prune it back, each year it regrows, and each harvest it yields between as much as 50kg of wine grapes. So valued is the wine, it is fermented and bottled in tiny 250ml bottles and only given to VIP guests of the city.
In our Gospel today (Jn 15:1-8) Jesus uses the vine, with its branches, vinedresser and fruit, as a metaphor for Christian discipleship. His first miracle was, of course, making wine at a wedding reception in Cana without vineyard, vines or even grapes. His last miracle before He went to the cross was to make wine into His Precious Blood, declaring that He would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until He drank it anew with His disciples in God’s kingdom. He used viticultural imagery on many occasions.
He was building on a long tradition. Genesis reports Noah planting a vineyard after the flood, Kings the squabbling over Naboth’s vineyard, Psalms wives and indeed all Israel as a fruitful vine or vineyard. Wines and its sources feature throughout the Bible as nourishment and inebriation, for feasting and the cult, as symbols of blessing and curse, of Israel at its best and worst. So when Jesus compares Himself in our Gospel with a vine and His Father with a vinedresser, when He talks of Himself or His disciples being pruned or fruitful, when He says His strength sustains the branches, He is using imagery His hearers would immediately have appreciated. But what are we to take away from this imagery?
Well, first, in calling Himself ‘The True Vine’, planted by the Father, Jesus is suggesting that He is faithful, He is true, to the Father’s intentions, unlike Israel that was planted by God but gone wild (Ps 80:9-16; Jer 2:21). Christ is the stock that will never fail, the vine that will always bear fruit, the One who keeps faith, no matter what.
Secondly, this imagery highlights our dependence on God as human beings and upon Christ as disciples. “As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself”, we can only be fruitful by God’s initiative, God’s grace, God’s sap in us. It is a matter of divine initiative: it is God who plants, God who prunes, God who waters and gives growth.
As St Augustine observes, the Lord could have said “without me you can do very little”, but instead He says simply “without me you can do nothing”. Little or big, whatever we do, we must rely on Him to do it in us.
Thirdly, the text explains that God makes us fruitful by grafting us onto Jesus. Only God-made-man can unite human beings with the divine. It is in God that we live and move and have our physical being (cf. Acts 17:28), it is in Christ and the Spirit that we live and move and have our spiritual being. If we separate ourselves from Him, we are fruitless and fade, good for nothing but to be thrown out and burnt. If we want to live, really live, and not just survive or decay, we must “make our home” in Him and let Him make His home in us.
Fourthly, Jesus teaches, that the end to which God plants His Vine the Son, grafts us onto that vine, prunes us in our seasons, and sustains us with the grace that flows through His trunk, is that we might bear fruit – if not 20,000kg of grapes over four centuries, then at least a full life, a life to the full (Jn 10:10). For “the glory of God,” as St Irenaeus wrote, “is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God.”
But what does that look like? A fifth point Jesus makes with His vine-and-branches image is that discipleship includes suffering – what He calls ‘pruning’. In order to flourish we must be clipped by the divine vinedresser. Or as He puts it elsewhere, we must take up our cross, serve rather than be served, die in order to live. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a great harvest (Jn 12:24). Yet paradoxically, as Pope Benedict XVI said at his inaugural Mass as pope,
If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation.
In returning ourselves to Him, we yield thirty, sixty, a hundredfold; in letting go, we are given back fields and families and life aplenty. However painful pruning might be at times, it’s the Father’s way of drawing more out of us, conforming our will to His, shaping us into the likeness of His Son.
If not quite as old as the Maribor grapevine, Monsignor Frank Coorey still approached a century as a Christian and his fruitfulness is sung as our village anthem today. For six decades, he relied upon God as captain of the vineyard and Christ as the True Vine, confident God would never fail to bear fruit. He allowed himself to be grafted onto Christ the True Vine, so the sap of divine grace might flow through him to others. He remained faithfully attached to His Lord, convinced that only then would he really live.
This made him a priest of rare warmth and integrity, compassionate, generous and good-humoured to the end. And he was fruitful as a result, serving in so many places, preaching the Word, dispensing the sacraments, offering the Eucharistic sacrifice, building up the community, raising saints to heaven. It was not always easy: doubtless there was pruning along the way. But he was promised a hundredfold reward for his fidelity. Now, in “the new heaven and the new earth” (Rev 21:1-7), the One seated on the throne says “Behold, I am making all things new”. And to Monsignor Frank Coorey, His faithful servant, He says, “Come drink from the well of eternal life, the rightful inheritance of the one who proves victorious. I will be his God and he a son to me!”
