Blessed John Sullivan SJ, the Healer of Clongowes

Who was Blessed John Sullivan?

Blessed John Sullivan was an Irish Jesuit who walked away from wealth, a legal career and the smart society of Victorian Dublin to become, in the words of witnesses at his cause, "a poor man among the poor." Born a Protestant, the son of a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, he became a Catholic at 35, entered the Society of Jesus, and spent most of his priestly life at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, where he taught boys and cycled the country lanes to pray with the sick. So many cures were reported after his visits that people came from every county to ask for his blessing.

He has not yet been canonized, so we call him Blessed. He was beatified in Dublin on May 13, 2017, the first beatification ever celebrated in Ireland, and his feast is May 8.

The Lord Chancellor's son

John Sullivan was born on May 8, 1861, at 41 Eccles Street in Dublin, the youngest of five children. His father, Edward Sullivan, was a rising Protestant barrister who would become Lord Chancellor of Ireland. His mother, Elizabeth Bailey, came from a Catholic landowning family in Cork. By the custom of the time the daughters of such a marriage were raised in their mother's faith and the sons in their father's, so John was baptized in the Church of Ireland parish of St. George.

He went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, which he later remembered entering "bathed in tears" and leaving with "more plentiful tears," and then to Trinity College Dublin, where he won the gold medal in classics in 1885. That same year his father died suddenly, a heavy blow. John studied law in London, was called to the bar in 1888, and had money, good looks and taste. A Jesuit friend of the family called him "the best dressed man around Dublin."

A slow conversion

Beneath the polish, something was moving. He read St. Augustine's Confessions and was deeply struck by them. He traveled widely and spent several months with the Orthodox monks of Mount Athos. On holidays at the Glencar Hotel in Kerry in the mid-1890s, he sat in on a little girl's catechism lessons, borrowed the book, and came back with questions about Mass and confession. He was already visiting the dying at the hospice in Harold's Cross, bringing small gifts.

On December 21, 1896, at 35, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Jesuit church of Farm Street in London. Like Augustine, he believed he owed his conversion to his mother's prayers, the prayers of a St. Monica. His family was astonished. One Protestant judge, a friend, answered a scandalized acquaintance: "John Sullivan would go to heaven even if he became a Presbyterian."

Jesuit and teacher

In September 1900 he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Tullabeg. When he took his first vows on September 8, 1902, he was allowed to keep his mother's brass crucifix, about nine inches high, as his vow crucifix. He carried it all his life and blessed countless people with it. He was ordained a priest on July 28, 1907, and sent to Clongowes Wood College.

He was no great classroom teacher, but the boys loved him. His penances were severe: little sleep and the plainest food, and the servants said his bed looked unslept-in and that they found stones in his boots. Cardinal Angelo Amato, at the beatification, quoted a witness's list of what his room held: "a hard wood chair, a broken pitcher, a kneeler, some books, a holy water font, his crucifix from which he was inseparable, a little table and the bed with few covers." He was hard on himself and never on others. From 1919 to 1924 he was rector of Rathfarnham Castle, the house of studies for young Jesuits, and then came back to Clongowes for the rest of his life.

The healer of Clongowes

Father Sullivan went wherever he was called, on foot or on an old bicycle, once walking fourteen miles there and fourteen back to bless a sick person. He met people at the door of the People's Church at Clongowes, prayed with them before the altar, heard their confessions and sent them off with holy water. Many cures were reported.

The best known came in October 1928. Michael Collins, the three-year-old nephew of the Irish leader of the same name, lay in the Mater Hospital in Dublin with one leg bent and paralyzed. Father Sullivan cycled in from Clongowes, prayed over the child for a long time, touched his leg and cycled home. Soon after, the sister in charge put the boy in a warm bath and he kicked out normally. The trouble never came back. In December 1932, two months before his own death, a young mother who could keep no food down and had been anointed recovered after he sprinkled her with holy water and prayed; on Christmas Day she ate her dinner. These are reported healings, testified to by the families and recorded by his biographers.

He had a gentle word for people tormented by scruples, too: "When God forgives me my sins, he buries them beneath a large stone. It is desecration to root them up again."

Death, beatification and the approved miracle

In February 1933 he was taken to St. Vincent's Nursing Home in Dublin with intestinal gangrene. He kept praying aloud until the sisters were weary, and when one told him he had done enough praying, he agreed and added, "But you go on." He died on the night of February 19, 1933, a stone's throw from his old family home. He was buried at Clongowes, and people carried away earth from his grave.

In 1960 his remains were moved to St. Francis Xavier Church on Gardiner Street in Dublin. Pope Francis declared him Venerable in November 2014, and in April 2016 approved a decree recognizing a miracle through his intercession, an approved miracle that opened the way to beatification. Cardinal Amato beatified him at Gardiner Street on May 13, 2017.

Symbols of Blessed John Sullivan in art

Many photographs of him survive, so his image is unusually well known: the sunken cheeks, the thick hair, the bowed head and the penetrating eyes that the artist Seán Keating caught in a famous drawing. Devotional images usually add:

• His brass crucifix: his mother's cross, with which he blessed the sick and which is still brought to the sick today.
• A bicycle: his sick calls along the lanes of Kildare.
• A worn black cassock: his poverty.
• Holy water: the sacramental he loved to use.

Feast day and prayer

We keep his feast on May 8, his birthday. Pilgrims come to his tomb in the Sacred Heart Chapel at Gardiner Street, and a Jesuit still visits the sick with his crucifix. The cause for his canonization offers this prayer:

O God, who honour those who honour you, make sacred the memory of your servant, John Sullivan, by granting through his intercession the petition we now make [bring to mind your intention] Hasten the day when his name will be numbered among those of your saints. We make our prayer through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Let us ask Blessed John Sullivan to pray for the sick and the dying, for teachers, for converts and for unity between Christians. Blessed John Sullivan, pray for us.