St Patrick’s Cathedral Unveils Monumental Mural Celebrating Immigrant Stories in New York

03 October 2025

Adam Cvijanovic’s mural in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

In the soaring, ivy-shadowed interior of New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, an ambitious new mural now towers over the western wall, its sweeping imagery both an homage and a social cry. The piece, titled What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, stands at 25 feet high across multiple panels, and represents the largest permanent artwork ever commissioned in the cathedral’s 146-year history.

The mural was conceived by New York artist Adam Cvijanovic and curated by Suzanne Geiss, and presents a congregation of immigrants Latino, Asian, Black ascending a hillside with modest bundles and hopeful faces. They pause, watchful, carrying the weight of journey and aspiration. Overhead, the Lamb of God presides atop a white altar, rays of gold leaf cascading like divine light.

What stands out is the narrative breadth Cvijanovic embeds. On the west wall flanking the cathedral’s doors, he paints two groups of figures: one side celebrates historic Catholic New York personages like Irish archbishop John Hughes, Dorothy Day, Pierre Toussaint, and New York political and spiritual icons. Across from them, modern immigrants (including Italian-born Mother Cabrini and Cuban-born Father Félix Varela) stand in vibrant color, their faces arranged with resolve. Above them hover monumental angels whose wings echo Byzantine iconography but here they shelter a firefighter’s helmet and a police cap, bridging faith, protection, and civic service.

On a facing north wall, Cvijanovic brings forward the rural Irish apparition at Knock, Ireland, in 1879 the same year St Patrick’s was consecrated pairing that to the fate of Irish immigrants arriving in New York. Below them he shows immigrant passengers disembarking from a ship, rendered in soft white and blue tones reminiscent of aged photography, suggesting both memory and displacement. The mural’s southern wall continues the immigrant narrative in bold hues, folding in both older immigrant waves and today’s arrivals, each face poised somewhere between hope and weariness.

To create this sweeping canvas, Cvijanovic labored for months five months sketching in his Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, then nine months painting on scaffolding, up and down walls, refining proportions, and installing precious metals onto sky stripes with a team of roughly 30 assistants. The golden vertical bands, he explains, merge visually with the cathedral’s organ pipes, integrating the mural into the building’s architecture. The choice to use gold leaf, platinum, and heated titanium in those stripes underscores the symbolic weight of light, transcendence, and aspiration.

Cvijanovic insists the piece is an American painting. He contrasts European traditions of ecclesiastical art with what he sees as a need in the U.S. to anchor faith places visually. He speaks of the mural as foundational something that can allow newer voices to build off it. He draws on a mix of influences: John Singer Sargent’s fluid portraiture, John Ford’s cinematic landscapes, Eastern Christian iconostasis form, and mythical traditions of angels in flight.

The cathedral itself is steeped in immigrant history. St Patrick’s has long been dubbed “America’s Parish Church,” serving millions in the New York Archdiocese and silently witnessing waves of newcomers: Irish, Italians, Hispanics, Asians. Its role as a spiritual anchor for immigrant Catholics provides a resonant stage for this mural. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who presided over the unveiling, affirmed that yes, the mural is making a statement about immigration that immigrants are children of God.

More than decorative, the mural engages public life. It emerges at a time when U.S. immigration enforcement, ICE actions, and debates over border policy are elsewhere manifesting in checkpoints, raids, and political clashes. In this setting the mural functions as a luminous plea for empathy, a visual insistence that stories of migration, faith, and belonging belong under a church’s gaze. As Cvijanovic puts it, “We’re all in this together.” He makes space for tension, for conflict, and still for shared humanity “Whether we like it or not,” he says.

The painting style is intentionally representational and rooted in clarity rather than abstraction. That choice invites viewers to recognize faces, to see journeys, not as symbols but as people. The realism is meant to speak plainly, to meet viewers where they are.

The mural has already drawn attention for its scale and ambition. For many cathedral visitors tourists, parishioners, New Yorkers it will be a new focal point, a site where faith, identity, and civic life converge. Some will read it as a political gesture; others as pastoral outreach. Many will find their own narratives in its folds.

In this gesture, St Patrick’s reaches outward in a moment when divisions over identity and migration seem especially riven. The mural claims space not from the street but from the sacred, remapping the sanctuary as one of inclusion, memory, and collective belonging. It is a work of art, a declaration, and a prayer.