Mural Honoring Immigrants to Grace St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York
182Aug. 20, 2025
A twenty-one-foot-high mural depicting nineteenth-century and present-day immigrants arriving in New York City is slated to be dedicated atSaint Patrick’s Cathedralin New York on September 21 during mass. Painted by Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic, the twelve-panel work was commissioned by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York. The mural is the largest artwork to be commissioned in the renowned cathedral’s 146-year history and the first since the massive bronze doors at its Fifth Avenue entrance were installed in 1949.
TitledWhat’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, in reference to the similarly named song popularized by Elvis Costello, the painting is inspired by the Apparition at Knock, which took place in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1879, the same year the cathedral was consecrated. The work is meant to celebrate the many generations of immigrants that have contributed to New York City’s diverse makeup, and to honor the City’s first responders.
The self-taught Cvijanovic, who is known for his realistic, large-scale, site-specific paintings centering historic events, was chosen from among six artists. “The rest of them were a little too Picasso-like,” Dolan told the New York Times. “I wanted something that people could look at and see the Holy Apparition at Knock, and not that you’d have to be on LSD to figure it out.”
Situated in the church’s narthex, the mural shows the figures from the Apparition—the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, angels, and the Lamb of God—in its upper regions, with nineteenth-century immigrants streaming across the panels from the right, as though disembarking from a ship, and contemporary immigrants of all stripes parading in a parallel formation. “I want people to be able to see themselves in it,” Cvijanovic told the Times. As anti-immigrant sentiment surged surrounding the election of President Donald Trump, “I thought [the archdiocese] might say, ‘We don’t want to wade in these waters’—and the opposite happened,” the artist told the newspaper. “They said, ‘We want to go right ahead.’”
“With this mural, the archdiocese joins the Church’s long tradition of exhibiting extraordinary artworks in our places of worship,” said Dolan in a statement. “It is all the more meaningful that we do so while honoring the Apparition at Knock, which connects us profoundly to the Irish immigrants who did so much to build the Archdiocese and St. Patrick’s. The mural also recognizes the contributions of a multigenerational host of great individuals and guardians of the city and pays tribute to the immigrants of many lands who continue to bring their faith and hope to New York.”