Sacred Heart Church, Limerick

30 June 2006

“What proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.” Jesus told us that the love greater than which no one has is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. But he did more than that; “he died for us sinners”. He gave his life for us not because we were so admirable, but because we were in such need and because God is love: “He had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Mt 9:36).

It was the expression in a human life and a human heart of the love of God which passes all understanding. This Church is dedicated to that extraordinary love of God, made visible in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is a love that looks for the lost, brings back the stray, bandages the wounded and makes the weak strong. It is a love that looks after the sick and healthy alike.

Tonight we give thanks for all that this Church of the Sacred Heart has meant in Limerick for a hundred and forty years. We give thanks for and to the Jesuit community and for all those who have served in the Church during all those years. In very many ways this Church of the Sacred Heart has been a place where people have been touched and encouraged and healed by the love of the heart of Jesus – in the celebration of the Eucharist and in quiet moments of prayer before the tabernacle, in the sacrament of Penance, in listening to the word of God, in the musical tradition that gave birth to the Cecilian Musical Society, in spiritual counselling and pastoral care, in prayers for a good death, in devotion to Our Lady of the Wayside, one of the favourite images of St Ignatius himself.

The realisation of how much this church has meant for so many generations of the people of Limerick is a reason to give thanks. It is also a reason for sadness that this aspect of the mission of the Jesuits in Limerick is ending. That sadness gives rise to two reflections.

In the first place, the Jesuit community leaving this church is perhaps the clearest challenge yet to all of us as a Catholic community in this diocese. The uncomfortable fact for us in Ireland is that we are no longer a community that encourages and fosters and prays hard enough for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Forty years ago there were about one thousand seminarians in Ireland for the diocesan priesthood, mainly in Ireland but also in other English speaking countries. That number of one thousand has dropped to about sixty – a drop of 96%. And that is not taking into account the religious and missionary vocations which have fallen just as dramatically.

It is very painful to think of this beautiful building standing empty and we certainly hope and pray that it will not be used in any way that is unworthy of its history and tradition, of the sacred realities it has been home to, and of the place it has had in the hearts and lives of so many Limerick people.

But even more important than our regret at the departure of the Jesuit Fathers from here is to be awake to our responsibility as a Christian community to encourage and pray for vocations. We live in a world which makes less and less space for reflection and prayer, for discussing deeper questions about where our lives are going and what our real goal in life is. We are living in a world where it is much harder to think of or to talk about a religious vocation. Men entering the seminary at the age of 29 or 30 will very often say that the thought was in their mind when they were 17 or 18, but they didn’t feel that there was anywhere they could talk about it. In other words they did not feel that they were living in a community which welcomes and nurtures vocations. The sad reality of the absence of the Jesuits from the centre of Limerick will be a reminder to us that we need to be a community which encourages, not discourages, people to consider whether they may have a religious or priestly vocation.

There is another lesson, a lesson about our sadness. The Lord has been present to us here in this church, in his house, for nearly a century and a half. Its closure leaves a gap in the lives of many people, and of course, most of all in the lives of the Jesuit Fathers who see so much of their history and tradition in this church.

God was present to his chosen people, the Jews, in the Temple of Jerusalem for nearly four hundred years. Then the city was captured, they were driven into exile and the Temple of God was destroyed.

Their sadness was expressed in the Psalm:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? ( Ps 137:1, 4 )

But all of that sadness was part of God’s plan, part of God’s unlimited love. It led them to understand that even when they were driven out of the land God had promised them, even when God’s own house was destroyed, he was still with them. It is a lesson that each of keeps learning throughout our lives. We pray with all our hearts than someone will get better or that something dreadful will not happen. We see possibilities that we tell ourselves we could never bear. We see prospects so dreadful that we think that, if they happened, nobody could help us – not even God. We need to learn how wrong we are – the love of God is greater and more powerful and more healing than we ever fully realise.

We are asked to keep on learning that the love of God is still being poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is still the fount of love and mercy for us. God never promises that everything will turn out as we wish what he does promise is that his love is poured into our hearts and that his Son is with us always, to the end of time.

We spend our lives learning the painful but hope-filled lesson that everything in this world is passing. The places we love are changed, the ‘good old days’ will not come back, the friends we knew so well move away and gradually contact is lost, even the people we love most deeply die. It is a hard lesson but it is calling us to hear the words of real hope: “We have here no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” ( Heb 13:14 ).

Our hope is not in things that pass; it is in the city which is to come, in our Father’s house. It is not even in the churches, even the most beautiful churches, in which he is especially present to us. We know that “ we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” ( 2 Cor 5:1 ).

This is one of those occasions for deepening our trust in God our Father and in the love of Christ which can “accomplish abundantly far more than we could ask or imagine ( Eph 3:20 ).

One thing that we can rejoice in is that the Jesuit presence in Limerick will remain in the Centre for Spirituality which will, I hope, be a source of grace and peace and deepening of prayer and faith for very many people. There is nothing more needed today than to help people to open their hearts and minds to the God whose love is the very meaning of the universe, but who can easily remain unheard and unseen in most aspects of our complicated lives. In that new centre I hope that people may hear the gentle challenging call of the Good Shepherd and understand that call to live by following Christ in whatever place or calling or responsibilities they have. His yoke is easy and his burden light, but it is a yoke that we carry behind his cross.

When Pope John Paul visited Ireland, he told us that every new generation is like a new continent to be won for Christ; he said that the Church has to find new ways of passing on the message we have received. The departure of the Jesuits is an event that none of us would have foreseen at that time, only twenty-eight years ago. This evening’s Mass of Thanksgiving tells us how new the new continent is and how uncertain the road ahead will be. We look to that future with hope and with confidence in the love of God made visible in the Heart of Christ, and we have on our lips a prayer which was often recited in this church:

Lady of the Wayside,

for the love of the child within thine arms

take us by the hand

for the rest of the way.