St Mary’s Bornish, Isle of South Uist
6^th August 2025, Feast of the Transfiguration

I want to thank Fr Michael MacDonald for this opportunity for myself, for those present and for the wider diocese. We rightly revere the early Irish missionaries, especially St Columba but since coming to the diocese I have also realised the importance of the post Reformation missionaries and the laity who welcomed and sheltered them but who have been often overlooked. We can learn so much from them. When Fr Michael invited me to celebrate Mass and bless the new stain glass window and carved statue in honour of Fr Dermot Duggan I was pleased to do so but over the past fortnight I’ve been learning and thinking a lot about Fr Duggan and I believe that this is an opportunity for us all to celebrate the heroics of the past, among your forbears, but also to discern in our own radically changing world and society what God is asking of us today and how we can be better missionaries.

Tonight we celebrate the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord. Peter, James and John saw with their own eyes and heard with their ears who Jesus truly is: divine, God. This knowledge and the difference it made deep within their hearts transformed their lives. Peter, James and John had an authentic authority to be apostles and missionaries which came from the personal call of Jesus. However, people were drawn to Christ not because the apostles had a hierarchical position but due to the authority which arose from their authenticity - having been transformed by grace, changed by their encounter with Christ.

On this Feast of the Transfiguration it is good to remember that Jesus draws us into a personal relationship with him which, if we are open, transforms us. This year is the 400^th anniversary of the founding of the Vincentians by St Vincent de Paul. Vincent de Paul initially sought an easy life as a priest but the Lord transformed him whilst hearing the confession of a dying peasant. He now had an authenticity, an integrity which drew people to Jesus.

And what of the early Irish Vincentian Fr Dermot Duggan? Born in County Tipperary he studied for the priesthood in Salamanca for his home Diocese of Emly but the brutality of Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland forced him to France where he joined the Vincentians. In the mid-17^th century what is now our modern diocese literally had no priests. In 1561 Fr Dermot accepted Vincent’s request to be a missionary in Scotland’s Western Highlands and Islands. He evangelised Glengarry, the Rough Bounds, Islay, the Small Isles and eventually Barra and South Uist. He died aged only 37 years but in his short six years he reconciled to the Church approaching 10,000 people. What a life! To achieve this he must have gazed on the Lord and been transformed by him!

Dermot stated as much in one of his letters to Vincent de Paul: ‘I went to the Hebrides, where God has deigned to make use of me, a most unworthy instrument, to work the effects of His great mercy, having prepared for me the hearts of all these people, who welcomed me as an angel from heaven.’ He had complete trust in God’s providence and recognised that God was at work in him but also in the soul of every single person he encountered, even before he had reached them. Only one who is united with the Lord and thereby transformed can see divine providence so clearly, not with physical eyes, but with the heart (spiritual senses).

And what of us? What can we learn today? We live in challenging times when many are indifferent or even opposed to Faith. This disconcerts, saddens and even frightens us. We live in a time of change yet today it is our privilege and obligation to proclaim Christ. Today is our time to evangelise. Nothing is impossible to God, who makes all things new! Dermot came to realise that there is no such thing as a spiritual vacuum. God is everywhere, is present within everyone even if he is unrecognised. However, do I – like Dermot - believe that God’s grace is constantly active within me and in others, even those who seem completely indifferent? The apostles were initially blind to the Transfiguration because they were sleeping. What makes me blind to the Lord’s presence? What is my heaviness of sleep? On this Feast of the Transfiguration let us ask the Lord to wake us up, to enlighten us, make us open, be sensitive to the Lord’s presence among us and grow in trust of God’s providence and grace.

As we commemorate Dermot Duggan, ‘Apostle to the Hebrides’, on this Feast of the Transfiguration and in this Holy Year let us boldly go forward as Pilgrims of Hope.

+Brian McGee

St Mary’s Bornish, Isle of South Uist

6^th August 2025, Feast of the Transfiguration