Gardiner Street Jesuit Church is the setting for Mr Kernan’s retreat in “Grace,” where Catholic ritual gathers Dublin’s commercial and civic men into a formal congregation and Father Purdon addresses them as people who must live in the world. Its orderly, sacred atmosphere contrasts with the ordinary business interests represented in the pews, making the church a place where worldly conduct is brought under religious instruction.

Setting and Atmosphere

The transept is almost full. Gentlemen continue to enter through a side door, following a lay-brother along the aisles on tiptoe until they find seats. Under the lamps, black clothes and white collars dominate the congregation, broken here and there by tweeds; dark green-marble pillars and sombre canvases frame the distant red light before the high altar. The men arrange their hats securely and sit formally, their attention directed toward the sanctuary.

The scene’s careful decorum is also physical: the men hitch up their trousers before sitting, lay their hats aside, and kneel on handkerchiefs when the congregation rises to pray. The solemnity is not simply an abstract religious setting; it is established through coordinated gestures, subdued movement, and the orderly placement of bodies in the pews.

Congregation and Social World

Near the pulpit sit Mr Cunningham and Mr Kernan. Mr M'Coy, seated alone behind them, first tries unsuccessfully to join the group and then attempts comic remarks; when these go unreceived, he falls silent. Even he begins to respond to the religious atmosphere. Behind him sit Mr Power and Mr Fogarty, while Mr Kernan gradually recognizes other familiar faces among the congregation.

The church brings together men whose positions extend well beyond religious life. Mr Cunningham points out Mr Harford, a moneylender, and Mr Fanning, a registration agent and political fixer, seated under the pulpit beside a newly elected ward councillor. Elsewhere are Michael Grimes, owner of three pawnbroker’s shops; a nephew of Dan Hogan seeking a Town Clerk’s office job; the chief reporter of The Freeman’s Journal; and O’Carroll, once a significant commercial figure. As Mr Kernan recognizes them, he becomes more at ease. His rehabilitated hat rests on his knees, and he adjusts his cuffs while holding its brim.

Sermon and Significance

Father Purdon, a powerful figure in a white surplice, struggles into the pulpit as the congregation settles and kneels. After praying toward the red light, he rises, and the men rise with him. He surveys the assembly and begins with the Gospel passage: “For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the mammon of iniquity so that when you die they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.”

Purdon treats the passage as difficult to interpret and acknowledges its apparent tension with the lofty morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ. He then presents it as counsel especially suited to business and professional men: people not called to religious life, but obliged to live in and partly for the world while still wishing to avoid living merely as worldlings. The sermon thus makes the church’s social composition central to its meaning. The men whose livelihoods involve worldly affairs are not asked to leave that world; instead, the preacher offers them a religious framework for navigating it.