Archbishop’s homily at Congress of European Lay Dominican Fraternities

Mass for the Opening of the Congress of European Lay Dominican Fraternities

Maynooth College, Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Homily of Archbishop Dermot Farrell

The woman the Church puts before us in today’s Gospel reading is a person of rare courage, conviction, and freedom. Despite being first ignored, then denied help twice by Jesus, she endures in asking him to help her daughter. Her motivation is love of her daughter. Her commitment and endurance are in stark contrast to the approach of Jesus’ closest disciples. You’ll remember last Sunday’s Gospel where, seeing the huge crowd, the disciples even ask Jesus to send the crowd away (see Matt 14:15). When they set out on their journey with Jesus, the Apostles show themselves to be concerned with their own advancement and agenda: anxious for places on Jesus’ right and left (Matt 20:21), they repeatedly fall asleep in garden of Gethsemane (Matt 26:37–45), and in the end they either run away, or deny knowing him.

The Canaanite woman is in stark contrast to the Apostles at the start of their journey. While their concern is initially for themselves, hers is totally for her daughter. This woman is very aware as she approaches Jesus that she has nothing to bring. She is a nobody, an outsider, a person beyond the boundaries of the Jewish world. She is not concerned about her own status. Her concern is for her daughter, and she is totally convinced of what Jesus can do for her child. “Love endures all things,” said Saint Paul, “it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things…” (1 Cor 13:7) The love of this woman endures the refusal of Jesus, and expresses itself in humility, deference, courage, singlemindedness, and wit.

Such is her dedication to her daughter, that she brings Jesus to reconsider. He comes to appreciate – for the first time, perhaps – that what God his Father, had put into the hearts of the “House of Israel,” (see Ezek 36:22), into the hearts of his Chosen People, he had also put into the hearts of the Gentiles. “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you;” he tells them through the prophet Ezekiel. “And I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you…” (see Ezek 36:26–27)

Through her, Jesus learns. This woman brings Jesus to see the Gentiles in a new way, no longer to look upon them from the outside, but to see them the way his Father sees them, to see them from within. This conviction that she has, her confidence in his mercy – “Lord, have mercy” is her prayer, as it was ours at the beginning of this Mass, her trust in his power, and, above all, her faithfulness to her child is what brings Jesus to a new place.

Here we seek the greatness of Christ, who “did not come to be served but to serve.” (see Matt 20:28) Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life (see John 14:16). He not only shows us the way, but he himself is the way. There are many who reduce the richness and mystery of God in him to a set rules and regulations, often grounded in the very fear that his mission seeks to “cast out.” (See 1 John 4:8). “We [then] create the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of [our living] faith appears.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Conclusion of a Meeting of the Holy Father with the Bishops of Switzerland, November 9, 2006.)

The woman in the Gospel we have just heard has a radical trust in Jesus. The community of lay Dominicans is properly viewed as “a community of trust” – founded by the One who so trusts in us that he gives us his Son, who in turn, embodies a radical trust in his Father who sends him: “not my will but thine be done (Matt 26:39), “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (see Luke 23:46), and ultimately who trusts us to live in the way he created us to live: in service of each other. As women and men living in the world according to the Dominican charism, you share the Order’s mission, by study, prayer and proclamation of the Good News in the ways that are proper to people in the world. (See Rule of the Lay Fraternities of Saint Dominic, par 4.)

Your motto as Dominicans asks you “to praise, to bless, to preach” – not to perform, not to judge, not to proselytise. Dominic and the great Dominican saints – Catherine of Siena, Thomas Aquinas to name but two – saw the needs of the people around them. “Lay people are in the world,” and as Yves Congar – Dominican and Council Father – put it, are called to do God’s work “in so far as it must be done in and through the work of the world.” (Lay People in the Church [Revised ed, 1965] p.19; emphasis original) Living in the world, you know and share the world’s problems first-hand. You know and share its hopes, and its expectations. But you are also ‘signs of contradiction’ in the world. In the vision of Congar, someone who is “authentically lay” can never turn away from the world because God allows that person to be the place par excellence of his divine activity, his presence among the people he is making his own (see pp. 19-24). The Irish Dominican Vincent McNabb put it succinctly: “The world is waiting for those who love it… If you don’t love men and women, don’t preach to them – preach to yourself!” (An Old Apostle Speaks – with a Memoir by Fr Gerald Vann OP [Blackfriars, 1946], 3)

Mission is not just physically going out to others; it is much more the reaching out, according to the Spirit of Christ, to the other in their otherness (see Matt 25:31–44). The Canaanite woman puts flesh on the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3–11) and in his Final Discourse (Matt 24–25, especially 25:31–44): “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…” (see Matt 25: 35–36). This is not some anonymous donation. No! This is a giving to another. It is relational.

In story of the Canaanite woman, what Jesus calls “faith” is a relational reality. One would have to be made of stone not to feel the woman’s love for her daughter. This child is more to her than her own life. But there is more: this woman also establishes a relationship with Jesus. Living faith always involves a relationship, not just with God, but also with God’s people. It is this ethic, born out of relationship, which shapes your Dominican community to walk with people in their darkness, and bring a word of hope to those who are hurting and suffering, or forced to carry heavy crosses.

Through the persistent pleas of this remarkable Gentile woman, Jesus came to see the Gentiles in a new way. Today, part of God’s call to us, is that we look at our mission in creative ways, realising that his Kingdom holds a welcome for all people. Missionary activity is never simply a repetition of the past. We, who are called to continue the mission of our Risen Lord (see Matt 28:19), are called to find new ways of bringing his life, his joy, his consolation, and his hope to new generations. “The lay faithful … have the vocation and mission of proclaiming the gospel: they are prepared for this work by their Baptism, their Confirmation and Eucharist, and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” (See Saint John Paul II, Christifideles Laici, 33) It is in the world, and not beyond the world, that the laity embody the compassion, power, and faithful presence of Christ. Precisely, because you are in the world, you can put flesh on the closeness and mercy of God “for all his creatures” (see Psalm 144 [145]:9). Laity can do this in a way that your sisters and brothers in religious life cannot. This is your dignity, and your essential mission. May Saint Dominic, and all the Saints of the Dominican family, accompany you on this journey. May the Lord bless you, and may Mary, the Mother of God and Mother of the Church, keep you close to her Son.