Sister Stanislaus Kennedy was a “powerhouse of good” and “a woman who was hope for the hopeless”, her funeral Mass heard on Friday.
Sr Stan, as she was known, died on Monday aged 86 after a short illness.
A member of the Religious Sisters of Charity and a long-time campaigner on homelessness and immigrants’ rights, she founded Focus Point (now Focus Ireland), the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Young Social Innovators and an ecumenical centre for meditation, The Sanctuary, in inner city Dublin.
Br Richard Hendrick, Capuchin Order provincial in Ireland, told mourners in the Church of the Sacred Heart, Donnybrook, Dublin, that Sr Stan’s founding of so many pioneering charities would “remain as testimony to the legacy of this powerhouse of good”.
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She “swept into so many lives and sometimes without them even realising what was happening, pulled them along in her wake, transformed them to the good”, he said.
For many, he added, she “raised them up and allowed them to see themselves, to know themselves as beloved, worthy of respect, as full of potential for good, that perhaps they had until then never even suspected was within them”.
Br Hendrick characterised her as a “campaigner for social justice and equality and a woman who did not take no for an answer from anyone, any institution where there was a question of love or dignity to be defended or simply a person to be helped”. He said many had in recent days honoured Sr Stan’s work.
But “even more important”, he added, was “the being” of Stan.
“Her being was simply and fundamentally her commitment to Christ,” he said. “This underlaid everything she did and everything she was. She breathed his presence in prayer and meditation.”
Sr Stan taught people how to meditate and to “be still”, and to be with her in those moments was “like suddenly descending into a pool of divine presence. She had reached that level of prayer and contemplation that most of us only ever hope to attain,” he said.
“From the time I really got to know her, some 25 years ago now, it was clear her prayer fuelled her work and her work had become her prayer.”
Nowhere was this seen “more beautifully”, said Br Hendrick, than in The Sanctuary centre she cofounded.
“The stillness of meditation bloomed in the midst of a noisy city and an oasis of peace was born.”
Gifts brought to the altar to symbolise Sr Stan’s life’s work were a cup with Focus Ireland’s values inscribed on it, a small model of a house and a house key, her newest book of meditations, and a copy of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
Traditional Irish music was played on harp, fiddle and uilleann pipes throughout the service, including the Irish air, Táimse mo Chodladh (I am asleep). She had asked that this be played, mourners were told, because it brought her back to her “southwest shores” of her native Co Kerry.
Closing his eulogy, Br Hendrick urged mourners to remember the deceased by hoping as Stan hoped.
“We hope by becoming hope for others as she became hope for the hopeless ... Perhaps all of us here today could resolve to live a little more like Sr Stan, to live from faith, to be hope for the hopeless, to be on fire ... with love as charity.
“For in the end ... there are only three things that last: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.”
Among those who attended the funeral were President Michael D Higgins, Tánaiste Simon Harris and Comdt Joe Glennon, aide de camp to Taoiseach Micheál Martin.
Also present were former president Mary McAleese, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, Labour leader Ivana Bacik, Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó Broin and Social Democrats TD Rory Hearne.
Senator Aubrey McCarthy, founder of the Lighthouse homelessness charity, Trust homelessness charity founder Alice Leahy, John Mark McCafferty chief executive of Threshold, former tánaiste Joan Burton and singer Andrea Corr were also in attendance.
