Scripture Readings

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Reflection on Today’s Feast

By Br. Chris Derby, SJ

When asked to offer a reflection on Blessed John Sullivan, who died almost a century ago, I found myself perplexed. What was the connection? I am an American Jesuit Brother, a lifelong Catholic, an English teacher, spiritual director, and now a provincial staff member, while John Sullivan was an Irish Jesuit priest, a convert and attorney before entrance, a teacher of classics and rector of a Jesuit house of studies in the Society. Other than both of us teaching high school, what had John Sullivan’s life to do with mine? I had not even heard of the guy! “You did your tertianship in Ireland,” I was told. “There must be some connection.”

 Like a good Jesuit, I did my homework, and sure enough, there are connections. I completed the 9-month European English-speaking Tertianship (the last stage of Jesuit formation, preparatory to making final vows) in 2009-2010 in Dublin, the city of John Sullivan’s birth and university education. I worshipped most Sundays at St. Francis Xavier Church on Gardiner Street, where John Sullivan’s remains are kept and at which he was beatified in May 2017—the first beatification ever to take place in Ireland. I even made a couple of visits to Clongowes Wood College, the Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare, where John Sullivan taught and ministered from 1907-1919 and from 1924-1933. I had been in all those places of significance to John Sullivan’s life, but I was unaware of his story.

 John Sullivan, the youngest of five children, was born in 1861 to a wealthy family headed by his Protestant father, a barrister (attorney) and his Roman Catholic mother. Raised in the Church of Ireland like his brothers, John studied Classics at Trinity College and became an attorney. After his father’s death, John became a Roman Catholic and soon after, entered the Society of Jesus. John Sullivan had a “career” as a Jesuit priest and educator, just as he had had a brief career in the law. He taught at Clongowes for about twenty years, interrupted for five years as rector of the Juniorate (Jesuit house for collegiate studies in the humanities) and Retreat House at Rathfarnham Castle outside Dublin. Fr. Sullivan served at Clongowes until just before his death in 1933.

Learning about Blessed John Sullivan from various articles, testimonials, and short films, what strikes me is not his career as a Jesuit educator, but his humility and charity. 

 Having been born into a family of means and luxury, John gave up his inheritance for religious life. Like many Jesuits, he seems to have been greatly influenced by his mother, Elizabeth Bailey Sullivan, a deeply religious woman, who endured the loss of one of her sons, John’s older brother Robert, in a boating accident when he was just 24. It was “to her prayer and resignation to God’s will,” John later wrote, “I believe I owe everything.” John was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1896 at the Jesuit church in Farm Street, London. His mother passed two years later, and John decided to enter the Society of Jesus. At a time when entering religious life meant giving up all one’s possessions, John was allowed to retain his mother’s brass crucifix, which he used throughout his Jesuit ministry.

As a Jesuit, John lived St. Ignatius’s prescription agere contra, “to act against” his natural inclinations, observing intense simplicity of life by means of fasting and other penances. During his novitiate at St. Stanislaus College at Tullabeg, he showed the kind of Jesuit he would become by extending small kindnesses to his fellow novices, fondly remembered long afterward. Throughout his years at Clongowes, he was constantly available, bicycling or walking to those in need of prayer, healing, or any small luxuries he could provide—tea, fruit, tobacco.  Blessed John’s cause for canonization is alive with his humble, priestly presence to the villages around Clongowes. As Bishop Nulty of Kildare & Leighlin said at the opening of the Blessed John Sullivan Exhibition in 2019, “John Sullivan didn’t do pomp and ceremony; he is, after all, a People’s Saint.”

 Jesuits sometimes have very different ways of “imitating Christ,” that is, of knowing, loving, and following Jesus. Some Jesuits become very well-known and receive honors and recognition for the achievements in their “career.” Others, like Blessed John Sullivan, provide a striking reminder that a Christian life without great incident can be saintly, that while “years and years [go] by of world without event,” in Hopkins’s description of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, a person may be walking in the footsteps of Him whose heart was filled with compassion, who healed and fed and taught everyone who came to Him. In this, John Sullivan followed our Lord very closely indeed.

Blessed John Sullivan, pray for us!

Brother Chris Derby, SJ, serves as the Provincial Assistant for Spirituality Ministries for the USA East Jesuit Province.