Through Snow and Sacred Darkness: The Xavier Society for the Blind at 125
On a Gaudete Sunday blizzard at St. Patrick’s, a blind priest and the Xavier Society reveal a clearer kind of sight—Faith guided by touch, sound, and Grace.
“Ain’t nobody got no sickdays?” the bus driver chuckled as he opened the door, welcoming a dozen commuters who stood freezing in the pre-dawn dark.
It was the Third Sunday of Advent, and the Northeast was in the embrace of the season’s first snowpocalypse. But snow or no snow, I had to get to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to cover Mass, so off I went.
Wind-driven flakes came at the windshield like feathers. I crept to the park-and-ride where the bus waited, a shining, iced-over behemoth of public transportation. But the driver drove through that impenetrable veil…lanes invisible…as if it were a bright, sunny day in August. A true professional… and maybe a comedian on the side.
I arrived early, grateful I hadn’t attempted the drive myself. And stepping into the Cathedral’s warm embrace, I glanced up at Christmas wreaths wrapped around towering limestone columns and smiled.
I was home.
St. Patrick’s makes you look up.
Light filters through stained glass, drifts across marble, and the whole building whispers what the Church has always known: beauty is a language God speaks fluently.
And yet, on this wintry Sunday, St. Patrick’s offered something even more striking than its architecture.
The Xavier Society for the Blind had a section reserved in the left transept. Before Mass began, there was palpable glee, a real joy visible on faces that have learned to read the world differently. Blind and visually impaired guests sat with assistants and friends, greeting one another like family. This year marks the Society’s 125th anniversary, serving over 3,000 clients nationwide with free Catholic materials in Braille, large print, and audio formats.
Cardinal Dolan stopped to chat with Father Jamie Dennis, one of the concelebrants, clasping both the priest’s hands in his own, that particular gesture of his that says “I see you” without needing sight at all.
Father Dennis is blind and has long been served by the Xavier Society. He navigated with an altar server at his side and a cane in his hand—taller than the usual city white cane, more like a staff—touching the ground ahead of him the way a pilgrim tests the road. No drama. Just a priest doing priestly things.
The liturgy focused on Gaudete Sunday, that particular joy that breaks through Advent’s purple patience. The rose candle burned on the wreath, reminding us that Christmas is closer than the darkness suggests. Still, Father Dennis’s presence preached in a different key: Here, in a cathedral built to lift the eyes, stood a priest who navigates by faith in ways most of us never will.
During the Eucharistic Prayer, when it was time for Father Dennis to read his part, the device he relied on failed. Without fanfare, he asked another priest to read it for him, and the prayer continued, steady as ever.
The Mass simply carried on, because that’s what the Church does. She adapts. She makes room. She keeps moving toward Christ.
The deepest Christian sight isn’t visual. It’s spiritual.
For sighted Catholics, sacred art can be a doorway…often the eye catches the heart. But the doorway isn’t the destination. The destination is the Person behind the beauty.
The Xavier Society began in 1900, when Margaret Coffey…blind herself and teaching blind children in New York…met Jesuit Father Joseph Stadelman. She showed him the isolation her students faced, cut off from the spiritual reading that nourished Catholic life. They began with what they had: Coffey’s worn Braille stylus and a conviction that no Catholic should be denied access to the faith’s riches. Their first project was a Braille catechism—each raised dot punched by hand, each page a small act of defiance against the idea that blindness should limit access to Truth.
A century and a quarter later, that defiance has become a quiet institution. Work that doesn’t chase headlines but changes lives, one raised dot at a time.
It’s tempting to call this “blind faith.” Maybe the phrase belongs here, not as a cliché, but as a challenge to the rest of us. In a city that worships the visible, the Church keeps insisting on the invisible.
As Mass ended and we filed back out into the still-falling snow, I thought again of my morning bus driver, navigating surely through what I could barely see.
Some kinds of sight have nothing to do with what the eyes can perceive. Some kinds of faith find their way by touch, by sound, by an interior compass that points toward home.
The Xavier Society has spent 125 years proving this: a Church that learns to serve the unseen becomes a Church that sees more clearly.
For more information about the Xavier Society for the Blind, including how to receive materials, support their mission, or share their services with someone who is blind or visually impaired, visit their website at xaviersocietyfortheblind.org, call their Client Services team at 212-473-7800, or email clientservices@xaviersocietyfortheblind.org.