This is a place where education happens, a place where life is nurtured and valued, and where the future is formed. This is a place of hope. As Pope Francis captured it so well, education is, “above all, an act of hope in those before us …” (24 February 2024). That hope for the children of this place was made real in the dedication of the sisters to the future of those children and young people. Education does not just happen of itself; education happens because people give of themselves for the sake of those entrusted to them. Among the things that have moved me in the few days I have been among you, are your stories of the sacrifice of the Mercy sisters in the establishment of this place.
Education costs: as you know, it costs money, but as importantly it costs energy and time; it demands constancy, evenness, and belief in people, especially when they don’t or can’t, or won’t be allowed to believe in themselves. The good educator has to find the balance between patience and kindness, on one side, and discipline and rigour on another. True education is born of a conviction of the value and worth of every person, that in the end we are all brothers and sisters, children of the one God.
It was that same conviction, those same values that brought Catherine McAuley to open, on this day 199 years ago, what she called “a House of Mercy” (on 24 September, 1827). The Dublin of 1827 was a different world, but Catherine McAuley was a forward-looking woman. She was a woman of courage who used the fortune she inherited to bring dignity to the poor.
That is no easy task. Catherine had to face ridicule, and resistance. There will always be resistance and opposition when one attempts to be in the service of justice and education in a world which can so often be structured around keeping people in their place. The Gospel we have just heard, Mary’s song of hope, is a prayer of deep confidence in what God does and continues to doi in our lives, and in our world. “The Almighty has shown his mercy … [God] has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things…” This is the shape of Mercy in the life of Christ, and in the life of the Christian community, the Church.
The community element is not to be underestimated, because inequality and disadvantage are almost always socially and culturally embedded. Coming here, one of my friends drew my attention to a recent article in The New York Times, where one of the staff journalists – an African American woman – told of her long and painful struggle to permit her only child to have the education that child deserved (see Nikole Hannah-Jones, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The New York Times Magazine, Sept 20, 2026. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html).
What struck me was how powerless this woman and her husband were on their own. It wasn’t a question of money, it was a question of “a system [wherein] those who hold the power refuse to change.” That woman and her husband discovered their powerlessness due to their not being part of a community for whom change mattered.
Mother Borgia Egan and her companions knew what they were up against, but they were not on their own. In Ireland we have a Gaelic saying which says, “Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine” – “It is in each other’s shade that we live.” We can do so little on our own, but together, in each other’s shelter, we discover another resilience and another strength. Is this not what synodality is all about – discovering God’s way for us together?
Mercyhurst, as a locus of divinely-inspired and divinely-sustained human service, offers an experience of integral humanity that guides all towards that synthesis between the human and spiritual dimensions, the foundation of the fullness of life, offered to us by God in Christ (John 10:10). We do not live two lives, natural and supernatural, secular and sacred, material and spiritual. We are offered one rich, multidimensional life, offered to us by the one God (Mark 12:32) “Authentic education does not flourish merely through the transmission of content, but is fulfilled when knowledge becomes life” (Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, video message, 21 April 2026).
May the God of Mercy and Justice, the one God in whom all are one, the Lord who includes all, bring what he began in this place to its fulfilment. May God “lift up the lowly” (Luke 1:53). May our Father “fill the hungry with good things.” (Luke 1:54)
To the students
At this centenary celebration it is very important to address a word to the students of today. While we remember the past, that memory “is not only directed to the past, but nourishes the present and guides the future” (Pope Leo XIV, 24 May 2025). Memory shows us the road, it does not replace the journey we have to make, but it does provide us with a direction of travel.
At the opening of Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo reminds us that, “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and, fraternity is made possible” (Magnifica humanitas §1).
To the students of both university and Preparatory school, I wish to keep before you the fullness of life that we see and share in Christ, and that is offered to every person by God. This life is there for all. It is God’s gift for all – not just Christians, not just people who are religious, but for all – God makes His sun rise on all, as the Prophet Isaiah says. The re-owning of that truth of our faith is one of the great fruits of Second Vatican Council. I ask you to make your own this fullness of life. That is what a truly Catholic education offers you and empowers you to do.
I am not saying that is easy in this very new world that opens up before us all unrelentingly, day by day. It demands a courage and a bravery.
On this centennial day in Mercyhurst, we do well to remember the bravery of Catherine McAuley and the sisters who followed her in taking the risk of challenging the very fabric of society in their time? Faced with the challenges of living in today’s complex world, it would be so easy to withdraw and fabricate a world of our own. However, Pope Francis, always at his most prophetic with the young, would tell you: “Take risks!” He would ask, “How can we reawaken the greatness and the courage of comprehensive choices, of the impulses of the heart in order to face educational and emotional challenges? …Take a risk! Take a risk. Whoever does not risk, does not walk. ‘But what if I make a mistake?’ Blessed be the Lord! You will make more mistakes if you remain still” (see Preparatory Document for Synod on Youth [Doc. I, 3]).
I am here among you today as the Archbishop of Dublin, the place where Catherine McAuley put flesh on God’s work of mercy. I am very conscious that I am not an American, but I am someone who has visited your country many times since I first came here as a student in 1977. I have family here, and I know first-hand the generosity of this land. The great American writer F Scott Fitzgerald says that “America is a willingness of the heart.” Make that willingness to live, that hunger and thirst for the fullness of life that the Old Testament, again and again, calls nefesh ( Psalm 62(63): 1–2), the cornerstone of your lives.
May you all, young and not so young, see what Mary sees. May her hope and confidence in the Lord God would be yours. May you see first-hard how the Lord has mercy on all His creatures… how everyone is important to Him, not just the strong, or the wealthy, or the powerful, but especially the weak and poor, those left behind, and those locked out. For the last hundred years, that mercy of God has taken flesh in this place. May this place continue to open the eyes and hearts of all to the wonders that God continues to shower upon all of creation.
May God bless you in your work, and may Mary the mother of Mercy, keep you close to her Son (John 2:5, John 19:26–27).