What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding:
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral Honors NYC’s Immigrants with Historic Mural
The Cathedral’s Largest Commissioned Artwork in 146 Years
Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic (pronounced TSVEE-ya-no-vich) was working in his studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a song from the radio stopped him in his tracks. Elvis Costello’s cover of Nick Lowe’s “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding” was playing – and right then, Cvijanovic knew he had found the title for his mural destined for Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
“It was at a time when the news was really bad for immigrants with terribly cruel attitudes towards their plight,” he recalls. “It made me wonder where all this permission to be cruel came from. Costello’s song was from an earlier generation of people who seemed to pay attention to the plight of others. Where had they all gone?”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan came to agree, and on September 17, the powerful mural bearing that provocative title was unveiled at one of New York’s most iconic landmarks – a rock-and-roll rallying cry for compassion now permanently installed in the heart of a cathedral built by the very immigrants whose treatment inspired it.
A Vision Carried Across the Ocean
Commissioned by His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Adam Cvijanovic’s expansive mural reflects Saint Patrick’s Cathedral’s historic role as both a beacon of faith and gathering place for New York’s diverse Catholic community.
The work draws its central religious theme from the Apparition of Our Lady of Knock, an event honored by the Vatican, with visits to the holy site from Pope John Paul II in 1979 and Pope Francis in 2018.
The Apparition at Knock: A Sacred Connection
Remarkably, the Apparition at Knock occurred the same year St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated, uniting two sacred sites across an ocean. Just three months after Saint
Patrick’s Cathedral opened in May 1879, on the evening of August 21 in the village of Knock, County Mayo, 15 people ranging in age from five to 75 witnessed a silent vision at the gable wall of their parish church. The figures included the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, and a lamb on an altar surrounded by angels. The apparition lasted nearly two hours, bathed in radiant light, yet no words were spoken.
Today, Knock remains a major pilgrimage site and place of prayer, a lasting symbol of spiritual resilience carried by generations of Irish immigrants to America.
The Artist’s Vision and Technique
Cvijanovic’s immersive composition unfolds across four sections, weaving together the sacred and the everyday. The figures of the Apparition appear above disembarking migrant families, linking divine presence to lived experience. Rendered in oil on canvas with areas of hand-applied gold leaf, the painting draws from Baroque drama, Byzantine iconography, and modernist abstraction, blurring boundaries between past and present to invite viewers into a sacred and unfolding story.
Rather than confining the vision to a single moment in 1879, Cvijanovic reimagines it as an enduring source of consolation and belonging, carried across the ocean by today’s immigrants and kept alive in the collective memory of the Church.
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1960 and now based in Brooklyn, Cvijanovic is a self-taught painter renowned for expansive, site-specific works that seamlessly integrate art into architectural space. His paintings explore historical and imagined landscapes, probing the complex relationship between place, memory, and American cultural narratives. His major public commissions span the country, including: “10,000 Feet,” a sweeping mural of the Indiana countryside for Indianapolis’s Alexander Hotel; and an ambitious project for the Birch Bayh Federal Building and a Courthouse in Indianapolis featuring 164 individual murals totaling more than 7,000 square feet, chronicling America’s battlefields from the colonial period to the present.
For the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral commission, he was one of six major artists invited to submit a proposal. His vision prevailed, and two years later, his completed work was unveiled to the public.
A Living Portrait of Faith
The mural serves as both an homage to the visual traditions of European Catholic art and an inherently American work – a portrait of a living, pluralistic church that continues to evolve. It speaks to shared experiences of faith, migration, and belonging, ideals that define St. Patrick’s Cathedral as “America’s Parish Church.”
Recently, when Cardinal Dolan was asked if he considered receding from the political controversy that may greet the unveiling of the mural, he never wavered.
“There is a bit of timeliness with the controversy over immigrants,” he said. “If somebody says this speaks to the sacredness of the immigrants and to a cherished part of the legacy of the church, that’s all to the good. Immigration used
to be a unifying principle. It was almost patriotic to be pro-immigrant. Now it’s a cause of division. I’m hoping this will help bring people together.”
In concluding his homily on the Sunday following the unveiling, invited guest Fr. Richard Gibbons, Parish Priest and Rector of Knock, suggested that a fitting way to consider the scope of the new artwork was simply to look around at the Cathedral and the artwork itself. With its interplay of sacred vision and everyday life, the mural affirms that each person who enters the Cathedral becomes part of this continuing story.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Irish America. ♦
Leave a Reply