This is the edited text of the homily given by Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP at the Mass for the closing celebrations of the 800th Anniversary of the Arrival of Dominicans in Ireland, Basilica Shrine of Our Lady of Knock, 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time (B), 13 October 2024.
Padraic Colum’s 1920 collection of Norse myths, The Children of Odin, was an example of the Celtic Literary Revival led by William Butler Yates Yeats, and including luminaries such as Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn. Odin was the Norse god of wisdom, who acquired understanding through ordeals such as plucking out his own eye and offering it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of wisdom. Colum has him say, “I would change the knowledge I have into wisdom, so that the things that are to happen will be changed into the best that may be.”
The superiority of wisdom over knowledge is an ancient idea. Apollo, the god of wisdom who conducted the muses of the arts and sciences, was rivalled by Hermes, the god of technical knowledge. In a feminist repost the goddess Athene also claimed wisdom for herself and the Dominicans have a church and convent over her Roman title Minerva. Socrates and Plato raised φίλοσοφία to the highest of activities, for only the wise would understand the form of the good and have the courage to act on it or, as Aristotle claimed, understand not just what things are but why.
Influenced by Hellenistic wisdom, Hebrew spirituality expected the older to be the wiser, even if the young could be more knowledgeable. Wisdom saw more deeply and linked truth and goodness, knowledge and right action. It was ultimately more a divine gift than a product of experience. It was key to the good life and to friendship with God. By happy coincidence on this Dominican Jubilee, the first reading in our lectionary today (Wis 7:7-20) is a favourite of the Order and the text used in the universal church to celebrate Thomas Aquinas, that wisest Church doctor born in the very same year as the Irish Dominicans. It is part of Solomon’s encomium, telling us to prize wisdom above power and wealth, health and beauty, as key to knowledge beyond all science.
Because the Hebrew חָכְמָה (chokmâh), the Greek σοφια (sophia) and the Latin sapientia are all feminine nouns, Wisdom is often personified in sacred art and poetry as feminine. Yet for Christians the Wisdom described in the book of that name as the “virtue,” “light” and “glory” of God, “seated by God’s throne”, “through whom all things were made,” “unchanging yet renewing all,” imparting divine teachings and called “Son of God” and of Man (Wis 2:13-20; 7:21,24-27; 8:1,4; 9:9-10 etc.) cannot but evoke Christ. And so in the New Testament Jesus himself is the Wisdom of God “that comes down from heaven”—“pure, peaceable, gentle, rational, merciful and fruitful” (Jas 3:1). His disciples are themselves wise when they hear His words and put them into practice, walking as “children of the light,” “teaching and admonishing one another with all wisdom.”
In his Breastplate the first and sainted Pádraig appealed to the mighty strength and deep wisdom of the Blessed Trinity, proclaimed by holy ones like himself through the ages. With divine wisdom to guide him, the apostle of Ireland knew he was safe from spiritual enemies and his own vices. And that wisdom he called Christ: Christ with me, before me, behind me, within me; Christ above, below, all round me. And the wise doctor, born in the same year as the Irish Dominicans, likewise sang the praises of the spiritual gift of wisdom by which we may think divinely, “judging and setting all things in order according to the eternal law.”
We witness a specific example of that divine wisdom in action, bringing about as Colum put it “the best that may be,” in the Dominican mission to Ireland now eight centuries old. Founded only a decade before, the preacher-friars of Dominic de Guzmán had already grown to sixty convents of men and four of women in eight provinces. One of his last acts was to send a dozen friars to England to found houses in the British Isles. Amongst them was Reginald of Bologna, a scholar friar who would go on to be Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, alongside two other Dominicans, David McKelly, Archbishop of Cashel, and Alan O’Sullivan, Bishop of Cloyne—whom Wikipedia confuses with the Gaelic footballer of that name. Yet first some friars had to cross the Irish Sea from England.
Dominican friars set up first in 1224 in Dublin and Drogheda, then Kilkenny (1225) and Waterford (1226), Limerick (1227) and Cork (1229), followed by Mullingar (1237) and Athenry (1241), Cashel (1243) and Tralee (1243), Coleraine (1244) and Newtownards (1244), Sligo (1245?) and Strade (1252), Roscommon (1253) and Athy (1253?), Trim (1263) and Arklow (1264), Rosbercon (1267) and Youghal (1268), Lorrha (1269), Rathfran (1274) and Derry (1274). It’s an extraordinary roll-call of 23 Dominican communities established in just half a century, as the English Province, which still included Scotland and Ireland, grew to being the biggest in the Order and friars were to be found all over these isles. In due course, the Order would offer preachers, bishops, saints and martyrs to Ireland, penal times colleges to Lisbon, Louvain and Rome, and from Tallaght missionaries for the Caribbean, South Africa, North America and Australia. The sisters, too, would populate the Island with colleges and other works, and export them to Ireland’s spiritual colonies.
Preaching to the Irish that Word Hebrews describes (Heb 4:12-13) as “alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword”, subtle enough to divide soul from spirit and judge hidden thoughts, was not without its challenges. But that was to be expected: as Christ wryly remarks in our Gospel today (Mk 10:17-30), the rewards for Christian discipleship are priories—families and homes—aplenty, but “not without persecutions,” perhaps within those very priories!
And so, in its 800-year history, together with extraordinary growth and apostolic fruitfulness, this Dominican Province (as it eventually became in its own right) and the church in Ireland have had their share of crosses too: tussles with the English, the catastrophic Reformation including the suppression of the monasteries, penal laws, famine, civil wars and more. I remember Fr Harris recounting to me years ago that, on the occasion of her visit to San Clemente in Rome, the Queen Mother had asked how this historic site had come into the possession of Irish Dominicans. “Historical reasons, Mam,” was the answer given, and that history was not all glorious: the Irish friars were there because they’d been persecuted and exiled from their own country by the Queen Mother’s ancestors. Despite all this, as Ireland’s first female flight instructor, the photographer and amateur historian Daphne Pochin Mould recounts in her history of the Irish Dominicans, “throughout the twists and turns, the vocation of the Preachers, has been, and is, to know and make known the truth, to stand as champions of the Catholic faith, and true lights of the world” and this they have done for eight centuries now in this land and beyond.
And so, dear grandparents, from this Shrine of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland and of Peace, Protectress of our Order, I ask her intercession, and that of St Dominic and all the saintly preacher-friars, sisters and tertiaries of Ireland, that in all things the Dominicans of this great land “may be the best that they may be”. May you long to illuminate it with the wisdom of God, as it says on our chalice Lumen praebe fidelibus, holding out your light to the faithful.