On the evening of Mother’s Day, Archbishop Hicks celebrated the Young Adult Mass at the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Lower Manhattan, drawing hundreds of young professionals, returning Catholics, and lifelong parishioners to one of the oldest churches in New York. 

Father Daniel Roy, the cathedral’s pastor, described the basilica as a place defined not by its stones but by its people, generations of immigrants from the famine-era Irish to the Italians of the Village to the young newcomers filling the pews today. It was to that latest generation that Archbishop Hicks directed his homily. 

‘Jesus is the friend who never abandons us’ 

He opened with words from Pope Leo, delivered just two days prior at a shrine in Italy, calling them brimming with joy. “Jesus is the friend who never abandons us and never rejects us,” the Archbishop proclaimed. “A brother who understands us and always walks beside us. He truly believes that Jesus is the center of our lives, and he wants Jesus to be the center of our lives.” 

The homily’s anchor was the Gospel’s theme of love between Jesus and the Father, a love extending outward to all humanity. Archbishop Hicks was direct about what that means for each person in the pew. “Because of that love, you are never orphaned, and you are never abandoned. You are definitely at home,” he said. “How many of us have felt orphaned or abandoned, or alone, at some point in our lives? It is a universal human experience. But not with Jesus. Jesus is always with us. Jesus always loves us. The world may leave you feeling abandoned, but Jesus never will.” 

He turned to Mother’s Day, inviting prayer for all mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, and spiritual mothers. He was candid about the day’s complexity: for some, uncomplicated joy; for others, grief or the weight of a difficult relationship. 

A father’s words to a grieving child 

The homily’s most moving passage centered on Saint John Paul II. When Karol Wojtyła was eight years old, his mother died. His father, grieving himself, brought the boy to a shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “From now on, Mary will be with you,” his father told him, “until Jesus reunites you with her in heaven.” 

The aArchbishop reflected on what the father was doing in that moment: pointing his son toward the Blessed Mother as a source of comfort, and giving him a faith in eternal life, the belief that death’s separation is not the final word. Saint John Paul II would later name it as the moment Our Lady became his true mother. 

Archbishop Hicks closed by returning to where he had begun. Jesus, he told the congregation, is not a distant figure but a present one, “the friend who never abandons us and never rejects us, the brother who understands us and always walks beside us.” Because of that friendship, he said, no one in that ancient basilica, or anywhere else, need ever feel alone.