Did you know you can visit an exhumed body on Gardiner Street, the coffin of a Dubliner on the road to sainthood?
Blessed John Sullivan was born in 1861 at Eccles Street into a wealthy Protestant family. But his cozy life would experience a massive twist. His father, Sir Edward Sullivan, was Lord Chancellor of Ireland. His mother, Lady Elizabeth Bailey, was Catholic. Like many such marriages in 19th-century Ireland, the compromise was sons raised Protestant, daughters Catholic. At school in Portora Royal School, and later at Trinity College Dublin, Sullivan excelled. Sullivan trained as a barrister, and acquired a reputation as a bit of an materialist character, considered one of the best-dressed men in the city. There is a version of his life that could have ended there, another successful Protestant professional moving through the machinery of the British administration in Ireland. Instead, something shifted in his soul. In 1896, in London, at Farm Street, he converted to Catholicism shocking himself almost as much as his family and friends. Conversion in that direction, given his background, meant stepping away from the world that had formed him. By 1900 he had gone further still, entering the Jesuits. He was ordained in 1907 and sent to Clongowes Wood College where he gained a reputation as a priest with a spartan lifestyle, who gave away all his posessions and devoted all his spare time to cycling around the country visiting the sick in their cottages and hospital beds. They called Father Sullivan the “Cycling Jesuit” and it was around this time when those he prayed for began to claim miraculous improvements and cures. Healings attributed to his presence circulated, despite Father Sullivan never claiming to have any special powers. By the time of his death in 1933, Father Sullivan had already passed into a kind of living folklore. He was buried at Clongowes, among his fellow Jesuits, but that was not the end of his physical story. In 1960, as devotion to him deepened, his remains were exhumed and transferred to St. Francis Xaviers on Gardiner Street. People leave notes, photographs and small tokens. Among the relics near his body is the so-called “John Sullivan Cross,” a small brass crucifix that once belonged to his Ma. It is still used in blessings, especially for the sick. Father Sullivan was beatified in 2017, becoming “Blessed John Sullivan” in 2017. It was the first beatification ever to take place on Irish soil. The miracle accepted by the Vatican was the 1954 healing of Delia Farnham, a Dublin woman whose cancerous tumour disappeared after prayers to Sullivan. The machinery of canonisation requires one more step, a second verified miracle, occurring after his beatification in 2017. As of 2026, the process continues. The Jesuit postulator’s office in Dublin is gathering accounts, “favours received,” cures, interventions, moments that resist easy explanation. There is a monthly healing Mass at Gardiner Street, held on the third Saturday. To learn more about him https://frjohnsullivan.ie/2014/05/fr-john-sullivan-sj-a-loyal-servant-of-god-1861-1933/
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