Bishop Niall Coll and Father Willie Purcel with members of the Kilkenny Gospel Choir at RTE studios, Donnybrook, Dublin
Homily
Words of Jesus spoken at the Last Supper are told in today’s gospel from Saint John.
‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word’ and elsewhere in that same gospel Jesus calls on his followers to love one another. Now that word ‘love’ is much overused these days. Some, tongue in cheek, blame the Beatles and their hit song, ‘All you need is love’ …!
Let me try and shed light on what it might mean in the context of today’s Gospel.
Have you ever heard of Hilaire Belloc? He was an early 20th Century Catholic poet and intellectual, born to an English father and a French mother (he died in 1953).
Anyway, a true story. This same fellow Belloc fell in love with an American girl he met in a London restaurant. After a few days trying unsuccessfully to woo her, she informed him that she was leaving for America the very next day and told him that she was going to fulfil her long-term wish to enter an enclosed convent on her return to California. Her rich mother wouldn’t let her join the convent before she had taken her on a tour of Europe so that she could see something of the world before taking her vows and entering the cloister. Belloc was shattered and quiet beside himself with grief at the lovely girl’s departure. He was only a very young man but managed to scrape together enough to buy a passage on the next boat to New York.
Without any money and just relying on his wits he managed to get himself across America. Often, he offered to paint a portrait and recite poetry at remote farmhouses and ranches in exchange for a night’s food and lodgings.
When Belloc eventually arrived in California, he managed to track down the poor girl and to her complete astonishment turned up on her doorstep asking her to marry him. She refused again but he wouldn’t give up and in due course he managed to woo her away from the convent to be his wife. Elodie Hogan became Elodie Belloc, and they would have five children together!
Belloc was persistent and it paid off. Persistent in wooing Elodie and steadfast and faithful in loving her to the end.
My friends, when we look around us, we actually discover quite a lot of this sort of thing – real love and persistence. We see it in the lives of parents who make huge sacrifices for their children. We see it in the lives of those who dedicate themselves to caring for a spouse, partner, parent or sick child.
We see it in grandparents who devote so much time to the care of grandchildren. We see it in the lives of those who give up a kidney so that someone else does not have to live life on a dialysis machine, and so on.
We see it, as I witnessed this last week during our annual Ossory Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes, in the way dozens of people – ordinary citizens, nurses, medics, teachers, brandardiers, handmaids, teachers and students – volunteer to help the assisted pilgrims in that place hallowed for generations by prayers of gratitude and prayers for healing.
Truth be told, we humans are no strangers to persistence and sacrifice. In fact, we are surrounded by people, frequently without a vestige of religious faith, who live lives of tremendous and heroic self-sacrifice.
I think we have to conclude that we are made that way; that we human beings, for all our faults and failings, can in the end come up with the goods …
The God who made us knows this very well and our faith teaches us that he places before us goals which are achievable, targets that – with His grace – are achievable. God knows us better than we know ourselves and the cross he places on our shoulders is tailor-made to our own very particular specifications. The Christian life in all its many dimensions is truly a mystery. Our faith teaches us that there is both meaning and purpose to life.
We must never give in to the loud voices in society and maybe in our own heads too which try to persuade us that life is without hope, meaning or direction. Never give in. Instead – during this Jubilee Year of Hope 2025 so close to the heart of the late Pope Francis – be joyful, faithful and persistent in the Lord.
Doing precisely that allows us to discover that, peace that the Lord has bequeathed to us is a peace that the world cannot give us. Amen
ENDS
- Bishop Niall Coll is Bishop of Ossory. This homily was delivered at the televised Mass marking the Silver Jubilee of the Kilkenny Gospel Choir, on RTÉ One on Sunday, 25 May 2025.