On Friday morning, the vestibule of St. Patrick’s Cathedral gleamed with something unfamiliar: not the soft glow of votive candles or the flash of a tourist’s camera, but the shimmer of fresh gold leaf. Filling all three walls of the Fifth Avenue entrance, Adam Cvijanovic’s mural What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding was unveiled before Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the artist himself, and benefactors including Kevin Conway, who with his wife Dee helped make the project possible—and a peppering of New York media. For a Gothic Revival landmark that hasn’t added a permanent artwork of this scale in nearly a century and a half, the morning carried a sense of both pageantry and surprise.
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Cvijanovic’s painting is vast: composed of thirteen panels and stretching across 1,920 square feet, it completely changes the threshold of what’s often called “America’s parish church.” The painting’s title, borrowed from an Elvis Costello song, is tongue-in-cheek while the painting itself is serious, which makes the pop reference stand out all the more inside a cathedral. But the work itself is earnest, devotional, and rooted in history. Costello, who was raised Roman Catholic, would probably love it.
At the heart of the work is the Apparition at Knock, a vision of the Virgin Mary reported in Ireland in 1879—the same year St. Patrick’s was dedicated. That apparition, silent and communal, was experienced by fifteen villagers and carried across the Atlantic in the memory of Irish immigrants who built much of the city and its church. Cvijanovic reimagines it here not as a distant miracle but as a living backdrop to migration, struggle, and civic life in New York. The Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John, and the Lamb of God appear not above clouds but above disembarking immigrant families on the city’s shore.
The mural’s cast is expansive: St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants; Félix Varela, the Cuban-born priest who fought slavery and championed the poor; Dorothy Day, radical journalist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; Pierre Toussaint, the Haitian philanthropist who bought freedom for others; Al Smith, New York’s first Catholic governor; and Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint—all stand among today’s immigrants, painted from life. Towering angels cradle the city itself, one balancing the skyline, another lifting the helmets of first responders. Cvijanovic’s figures, painted from some 75 live models (and one obliging lamb who today is living his best life as a pet in bucolic Franklyn Township, New Jersey), collapse centuries into a single community.
A new mural painted by artist Adam Cvijanovic, the north and west panels seen here, was unveiled at St. Patrickís Cathedral on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025, in New York. The mural, which is the largest permanent artwork commissioned for the cathedral in its 146-year history, celebrates the 1879 Apparition at Knock, Ireland, the faith of generations of immigrants to New York, and the service of New York Cityís first responders. (Diane Bondareff/AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York)
AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York
If that sounds ambitious, the execution is equally so. The project required 80 yards of Belgian linen, more than 5,200 sheets of five-karat gold leaf, and seven shades of mica powders to create its metallic depth. Transporting the massive panels from Cvijanovic’s studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to the Cathedral was no less a feat. UOVO, the fine-art logistics company, managed the shipping and installation—sliding the monumental canvases through the Cathedral doors and into place. For a work that aims to embody continuity and permanence, its arrival was an operation of precision and muscle.
The project didn’t appear out of thin air. Suzanne Geiss, the New York art advisor who facilitated the commission, recalls that it began with Cardinal Dolan’s desire for a work that could anchor the Cathedral in both tradition and the present. Brought in by Zubatkin, the firm that oversaw the Cathedral’s renovation, Geiss convened a group of collectors and Cathedral board members, and eventually narrowed a long list of possibilities to ten contemporary artists invited to submit proposals. Six did, and Cvijanovic’s stood out.
“Adam really understood how to bring an expansive vision into the space,” Geiss said, noting his ability to balance sacred imagery with civic life and to populate the mural with figures that made the Cathedral feel both historical and alive.
A new mural painted by artist Adam Cvijanovic, the south and west panels seen here, was unveiled at St. Patrickís Cathedral on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025, in New York. The mural, which is the largest permanent artwork commissioned for the cathedral in its 146-year history, celebrates the 1879 Apparition at Knock, Ireland, the faith of generations of immigrants to New York, and the service of New York Cityís first responders. (Diane Bondareff/AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York)
AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York
Stylistically, Cvijanovic draws on a wide spectrum: the gilded timelessness of Byzantine icons, Ribera’s theatricality, and the color harmonies that tease Matisse. Rather than pastiche, it reads as inheritance. Centuries of sacred art reassembled for the present. The gold leaf doesn’t just shimmer decoratively; it refracts the ambient light of the nave, echoing the Cathedral’s organ pipes above. In daylight it burns, at dusk it softens, shifting with the hours like stained glass.
The commission came directly from Dolan, who framed it as a renewal of the Cathedral’s mission: a sanctuary not only for Irish Catholics but for New York’s diverse faithful. By featuring saints and civic leaders shoulder-to-shoulder with contemporary immigrants, the mural declares that the church’s story is still unfolding. It is both retrospective and forward-looking, a portrait of pluralism rendered in sacred terms.
At the unveiling, Dolan and Cvijanovic stood together beside the rector, Reverend Enrique Salvo, and the Conways, the gold leaf behind them catching the flash of cameras. The artist, who has long specialized in large-scale, immersive paintings, seemed aware of the irony of quoting a pop song in a cathedral. Yet in this setting, the title reads less as a joke than as a challenge: what could be more urgent, in an age of polarization and displacement, than peace, love, and understanding?
By late morning, as visitors filed into the Cathedral, the vestibule had already taken on a new rhythm. Some crossed themselves automatically, some reached for their phones, some simply looked upward, surprised. In its blend of sacred and secular, historical and contemporary, Cvijanovic’s mural positions St. Patrick’s not as a museum of Catholic grandeur but as a living stage where the city’s faith, politics, and migration stories converge. The gold will keep shifting with the daylight, but the invitation remains constant: to see oneself, however ordinary, inside the unfolding story of America’s parish church.