Sr Mary passed away peacefully to Eternal Life on Sunday, 7th December 2025 in the loving care of the Sisters and staff at the Loughshinny Residential Home.
Removal of remains to Convent Chapel, Magheramore, Co Wicklow on Tuesday, 9th December 2025 at 5.30pm
Funeral mass on Wednesday, 10th December 2025 at 11.30am in the Convent Chapel followed by burial in the Convent cemetery
Homily
We are gathered this morning to bid our farewells to Mary. It is fitting that we are doing this here in this chapel in which Mary prayed so often and so fervently. Now she needs no physical place in which to connect with God as she is surely in his presence.
Mary entered the Congregation as a qualified teacher and began her first mission experience in the Philippines where she was very happy to be teaching in Molave and Labrador. Later, when she was assigned to USA for Formation work, she put into practice what she had learned from the Masters in Religious Education she had gained from Immanuel College in Boston. Here, Mary learned of, took to heart and was to later share with so many of us, the primacy of love in Religious Life – the total gift of our whole being. With her studying taking place after Vatican II, she came to see that obedience involved a constant seeking of new opportunities for listening and dialogue with God in the present moment in order to be ready to meet each new situation with the freedom of the children of God.
I got to know Mary when she was my Novice Mistress. In this role, she missed nothing and let us away with nothing, but she always treated us as adults and showed us by the example of her life how to be Columban. Nothing got past Mary and she let us away with nothing but at same time, she was always compassionate. Mary was not a singer but when we heard her humming, we knew we were in trouble! It meant that there was something we had done which we shouldn’t have, or it was something we had omitted to do!
She schooled us in the writings of Adrian Van Kaam, especially his book on the Dynamics of Spiritual Self-Direction. As we struggled through this tome of a book, we didn’t realise how well Mary was preparing us for mission in Asia and South America. She was teaching us to stand on our own two feet as she was fully aware that our future missionary experience would be, to a large extent, unstructured.
We all know that Mary came from Ballinlough, Kells. Always proud of her birthplace, if anyone was heard to complain that the County Meath scenery was boring in its flatness, Mary would be quick to point out the beauty of the vast expanses of land with few hills blocking the view. Maybe having been born within this historical barony of Kells gave her a unique interest in and sense of history. When we were novices, at a time when there was only one car available in Magheramore, she would regularly book it and we would set out with the AA book of maps for guidance on trips to a whole series of places of historical and, of course, religious interest and significance.
Her baptismal name and her birthday on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes ensured that as she grew, Mary would develop a deep connection with our Blessed Mother, no doubt a devotion which I am sure she inherited from her parents and which she shared with you, her sisters and brothers. When she professed her First Vows in 1956, she was given the name Sr. Mary Carmel. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is known as the one who points most surely to God and Mount Carmel is known in the Hebrew as the garden or vine of God.
Maybe this connection with Mount Carmel was the source of Mary’s love of gardening. In the grounds here in Magheramore, we have a garden that is known as Mary Keogh’s patch. Although Mary was unable for quite some time to tend to her plants, she continued to check that Paddy and Angela were meeting her standards. She called it Roisin’s Garden because many of the plants came from your garden, Roisin, but for us in Magheramore I think we will continue to think of this as Mary Keogh’s patch – one of the places where she encountered God.
Carmel of Mount Carmel is also known as the symbol for the contemplative life – a life totally dedicated to the quest for God. Mary was famous here in Magheramore for her very uncluttered room. In the several weeks before she went to Loughshinny, when we thought she was slipping away from us, I often sat in silence with her at different times and wondered, looking around at the sparseness of her room, if this was more than just a need to have a tidy room and live simply. Gradually, I had a sense that this lack of clutter was most likely a symbol of Mary’s search for and deep experience of the presence of God and that was all that mattered to her. It is no wonder that at the profession of her Final Vows she chose for her motto, ‘I can do all things in Him who strengthens me’. Surely this motto has been a source of consolation for her especially in these last several weeks as she waited for God to take her to himself. In striving to live her motto to the full, no problem was an insurmountable challenge for Mary. This gave her a gift for empathy, listening, a quiet presence that through the years has supported and encouraged so many of us.
We are going to miss you desperately, Mary, but we are happy for you that your journey with us here has come to an end and we continue to pray as we did yesterday evening that you, Mary, ‘may ever behold your Redeemer face to face and ever stand before Him enraptured by the beauty of Truth itself and, placed in the ranks of the blessed, may you delight in the vision of God for ever and ever’. Amen.
Sr. Ann Gray