Last Sunday on RTE Radio’s Sunday Miscellany , there was a section of the programme entitled The Boy Named Ignatius by the Irish poet and physicist Iggy McGovern. Like a number of other boys of his generation, Iggy (Ignatius) McGovern was called after the renowned missioner and healer, Father Ignatius Gibney c.p., the centenary of whose entry into the Passionists occurs this year. In his tribute to Father Ignatius, Iggy McGovern quoted an obituary from 1952 which described Ignatius’ preaching as dramatic and versatile: he could equally enthral a church of tiniest children and enrapture a congregation of Cistercian monks…. but, the obituary continued, his preaching was but a shadow of his greater quality: his appeal as a confessor.
As a postulant in Saint Gabriel’s Retreat, The Graan, in the early 1970s, and later as a student in Mount Argus, I heard many a tale of the miraculous cures worked through the Blessing of Father Ignatius. The story, however, that touched me most was not about Ignatius’s intercession for others, but of a saint interceding for him. Throughout his life, Ignatius Gibney had a very strong stammer, because of which those charged with his formation wondered if he was wise to have entered a congregation whose main work was preaching and if he would be better elsewhere. One night after night prayers, the young Ignatius, who at that time was coming close to ordination, came along to the Director of Students and, with great difficulty, told him that Thérèse of Lisieux (whose Cause of Canonisation had just recently been introduced) had appeared to him and had told him that, although his speech impediment would be with him for the rest of his life, it would not affect the exercise of his priestly ministry. The Director handed him a Bible and told him to read a passage, which he did without stammering, and, on that basis, he was later admitted to ordination. While it is true that sometimes people who have an impediment in conversation are able to express themselves without any speech impediment when acting or singing, I like to think that by ‘only half-curing’ him, the Little Flower, as Father Ignatius loved to call her, was reminding him that everything we have or say or do is ultimately a gift of God’s love.
I kiss the wounds in your sacred head
With sorrow deep and true;
May every thought of mine today
Be a million acts of love for you,
Of love for you, dear Lord.
I kiss the wounds in your sacred hands
With sorrow deep and true;
May everything I touch today
Be a million acts of love for you,
Of love for you, dear Lord.
I kiss the wounds in your sacred feet
With sorrow deep and true;
May every step of mine today
Be a million acts of love for you,
Of love for you, dear Lord.
I kiss the wounds in your sacred Heart
With sorrow deep and true;
May every beat of my heart today
Be a million acts of love for you,
Of love for you, dear Lord.
(Prayer of Father Ignatius Gibney c.p.)
To listen to The Boy Named Ignatius, click here, move to 36 minutes into the programme, and wait until the music stops!
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Today Pope Benedict spoke at the Wednesday Audience about Paulinus of Nola, one of my favourite poet-saints. He said: In his poetry and his vast correspondence, Paulinus expressed his deep faith and his love of the poor. His letters to such contemporary churchmen as Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Martin of Tours, reflect his asceticism, his deep sense of the Church’s communion and his cultivation of the practice of spiritual friendship as a means of experiencing that communion within the mystery of Christ’s mystical Body, enlivened by the Holy Spirit.
Laus Crucis 