History and Roots: Peace House
Sisters Margaret Byrne and Christina O’Neill, Bishop Dermot O’Mahony, Superior General of the Sisters of St. Clare, Sister Consilio Cosgrave, and Sister Bernardine Comerford at the opening of Peace House
In 1978, the Irish Section of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement, asked the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace to consider coming to Dublin, Ireland to work for peace and justice. The sisters’ aims aligned with the goals of Pax Christi, and the invitation was accepted. Peace House was opened in 1980 and served the community for nearly 20 years.
The excerpt that follows is from Bishop Dermot O’Mahony’s homily at the farewell mass for Peace House, November 12, 1999.
I remember the occasion so well. We celebrated in joyful hope the opening of Peace House on a beautiful May evening at the beginning of summer 1980. The religious and secular press pointed out that this was the first convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace in Ireland – “a congregation founded by Mother Francis Clare Cusack, the renowned nun of Kenmare!”
We prayed for the founding sisters – Christina O’Neill, Concepta Costello, Ann Helen Byrne and Consilio Cosgrave. We begged the Lord that their work would be a sign and a source of peace.
“A sign and a source of peace”. That prayer has been answered a hundredfold. We will find nothing big or dramatic or spectacular in the story of “Peace House”. But then that is so often the way of peacemaking. “Small is beautiful” – that’s at the very heart of building the Kingdom of Peace. The call of the peacemaker is for the most part – not always, I must add – to do little things for “little people”. How often we have recalled together the words of Jesus: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed.... the smallest of all the seeds” (Mt 13:31). But how it grows!
The sisters, during the past 19 years, have planted countless tiny mustard seeds of peace. Every peaceful work, every prayer, every act of peace flowing from this house influenced, often in a hidden way, the coming of a new dawn for peace on our Island home. The sun has still to rise higher in the sky. We are tantalisingly close to the warm sunshine of just and lasting peace.
For now, it is the Autumn and the beginning of Winter. As I look out at my garden, the leaves are falling faster from the trees. They will soon be empty and bare. Autumn in the beautiful phrase of Macrina Wiederkehr is “the Sacrament of Letting Go”. The Lord, for some mysterious reason of Providence, has asked you to “let go” of “Peace House”. That’s a kind of dying and must be painful, but a dying to freedom and new life.
The closing of “Peace House” is a dying to new life. What kind of new life? I don’t know! There is also “The Sacrament of Waiting” – like the barren and empty trees in my garden during Winter time. The same Divine Providence gives us the time of waiting to explore, to search, to examine, and above all to trust.
“Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (Jn 14:27). This is a difficult time in the Church for Religious Congregations as they withdraw through lack of personnel from cherished apostolates. I have no doubt, just as during times of suffering and crisis in our personal lives, the correct question to ask is not: “Why is the Lord allowing this to happen, but where is the Lord in what is happening?” The Lord is definitely somewhere in this evening’s Liturgy which marks the end of a particular chapter in the story of your Congregation.
I believe that his Spirit wants to give you three guidelines for the future:
Don’t concentrate on what you are letting go. Look at all that you still have – the beautiful charism of your foundress still finding expression in works of peacemaking.
Give all that to me.
Leave me to do the rest. And together we will continue to bear abundant fruit in the most surprising ways.
This article appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Living Peace.