Photo: Marc Skinner Redbelly Photography

Brother John Taylor award presented to Frank Pearce, Polding Centre, Sydney, 18 April 2012

The annual Brother John Taylor Award honours an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to Catholic education in New South Wales - one that has benefitted the Catholic education community generally, has facilitated the work of others in their professional role, and has strengthened the ethos of Catholic education.The field of nominees is usually strong, which makes the choice of winner a difficult one for the Award Committee. This year was no exception.

The Award Committee and the Catholic Education Commission of NSW are very pleased that the 2011 Award is presented to Frank Pearce. Frank has not been a career teacher as most award winners have been; and he never even knew Bro John. He is chosen for his achievements in supporting Aboriginal education in the Catholic system.

At the same time the choice of Frank recognises the importance of the field of Aboriginal education itself, a field in which Frank is the first to say he has had many wonderful collaborators.

There are many ways of measuring Frank’s diverse contribution to expanding the opportunities and consolidating the outcomes for his Indigenous brothers and sisters.

Here’s one: in Frank’s time at the CEC the number of Aboriginal students in NSW Catholic schools has doubled! Here's another: not only are so many more enrolling but they are staying at school longer and succeeding. Now Frank cannot claim all the credit for that, but his hard work and influence have been major contributing factors in building confidence in Catholic schooling for Aboriginal children with families, principals, advisers, communities – and of course the ones it’s all for, the students.

In addition to building confidence he has helped build capacity, teaching us all the importance of practising what we preach when it comes to ensuring that Catholic schools are welcoming, encouraging and challenging for Aboriginal students and their families.

We all know that Frank is the real deal. He is a humble man but tenacious and fearless in the interests of Aboriginal students. His is a great success story for the Aboriginal community and he is a highly regarded role model for Aboriginal students, teachers and workers generally.

Frank might never have known Bro John Taylor but Bro John would I think have been delighted by Frank’s work and by the fact that he attended a Christian Brothers’ School – St Mary’s Cathedral school – not because he had a beautiful cathedral chorister's voice but because St Mary's was the local school when he was a boy in Woolloomooloo.

Amongst his early jobs Frank was a bus conductor (some of us are old enough to remember conductors on Sydney buses) a bus driver and a clerk at Sydney buses. After that he joined the Commonwealth bureaucracy as an Aboriginal Employment Officer and eventually found his way to the CEC in 1997.

It’s during his period as State Co-ordinator for Aboriginal Education at the CEC that he has made his mark. Most of you know that part of the story and it is to honour that that you are here today.

What you may not know is that Frank was in his 30s when he successfully completed his secondary education! Since then he has continued to improve himself through further education and experience. He completed a degree in Adult Education in 1999 and has recently completed a Master’s Degree in Education.

So Frank's experience has been varied and colourful and he has brought all that to his work in Catholic education, as well as a personal passion to advance the educational opportunities for Indigenous Australians through advocacy, representation and pastoral care.

Frank’s story is unique and he has made a remarkable contribution to Aboriginal Catholic education in NSW, one that inspires all of us in this room. By his example and experience he has had enormous influence not just in NSW Catholic schools but beyond, in the non-Catholic, non-NSW and non-school spheres, including most recently university education through his work with student-teachers at the University of Notre Dame Australia.

Frank stands well in the company of past winners such as Peter Turner, Bro Michael Flanagan fms, Bro Jude Butcher cfc and last year’s awardees Glen Roff and Barry Bermingham.

Reflections on World Youth Day and Challenges for Australian Youth Today: Address of Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP to Affinity Intercultural Foundation, Auburn, Wednesday 14 March 2012

Dear Friends,

I am glad to be able to speak with you here tonight. I want to thank Mehmet Saral, President, and Ahmet Keskin, Executive Director, of the Affinity Intercultural Foundation for inviting me here tonight to be with you all. Thank you also for the kind introduction. This event illustrates the climate of respect and the greater sense of shared convictions on many matters that has grown up between the Catholic and Muslim communities in Australia, in no small part due to the work of Affinity. I congratulate you for this.

I have been asked to share with you tonight some reflections from my experience as the Coordinator of World Youth Day in Sydney in 2008 and what that experience might say about our society. I will then explore some of the struggles for young people in Australia today which WYD and other initiatives of religious communities seek to address. Finally I will reflect on how understandings and responses in this area cast light on the common ground – the affinities – between us.

1. World Youth Day 2008

“Incredible, amazing, staggering, phenomenal, overwhelming”: that’s how one American bishop and his pilgrims described World Youth Day here in Sydney in 2008. Better than anyone expected, he said. A real experience of God’s Spirit in our lives. A real chance for young people to embrace their mission to give public testimony to their faith.

Now, World Youth Day was openly and unembarrassedly a Catholic event. Yet it could never have happened, and happened so successfully, had not the whole community pulled together. Here I think we encounter the upside of the Australian version of ‘secularity’. Let me explain ...

Around the world there are many views of the proper relationship between faiths and their agencies (such as faith schools, hospitals and welfare groups), and governments and their departments, as well as business, unions and other associations. Increasingly in Europe, the tendency is to say “ne’er the twain shall meet”, with governments and courts increasingly excluding people of faith and their leaders and associations from decision-making, service delivery, the public square.  There is an intolerant strain of dogmatic secularism that would ban religious symbols such as Christmas cribs from schools, hospitals and public places and seek to rub out of the memory of law and policy religious notions about the sacredness of human life and love, the meaning and importance of marriage, and so on.

At the opposite extreme are countries where religious leaders of one particular faith and their associated organisations seek to dictate all the terms to government and society, including to people who do not share their faith, and to impose that faith through all organs of culture such as schools, universities, the media and entertainments.

Some other countries, such as the US, seem to be a strange mix of these two extremes, with lots of public religious rhetoric, especially around election time, as if religion was more or less compulsory, and lots of bans on religious things like prayers and religious symbols in public spaces.

Here in Australia we have a unique take on these things: we distinguish between church and state, between the public and the private realms, yet both realms regularly seek to cooperate and collaborate for the common good. Education is an obvious example of this. Many children are now educated in faith-based schools and the federal and state governments assist the parents and religious communities in funding this. This relieves the taxpayer of some of the burden of the education of a significant number of our children, while allowing those children to be educated in a faith environment that their parents want for them.

Another example of the way church and state collaborate in Australia was the 2008 World Youth Day. It was the biggest ever youth event in the history of our country and it brought together crowds in one place that were the biggest in the history of the Pacific. It was an extraordinary time for our city and country, for young people and for an old Pope. Many World Youth Day veterans say it was the best ever.

I think we did Australia proud. One of things that made me proudest was the way every sector of our community cooperated in its planning and delivery: not Catholics only, not Christians only, not the private sector or the non-profit sector only, but everyone. The young people were, for instance, offered special tours of several Mosques and the Jewish Museum. There were music and dance workshops involving Jewish, Muslim and Christian artists performing together. The Community Relations Commission for a Multicultural NSW arranged Interfaith Prayer for Global Peace and Social Justice. The Islamic school in Greenacre hosted some 300 pilgrims on its premises. People of every religion and none funded government involvement such as policing, or joined the 8,000 volunteers, or welcomed the pilgrims into their homes, on public transport or on the streets of Sydney. So when the Pope met an imam, a rabbi and other community leaders and when the Prime Minister spoke of the crucial place of religion not just in our nation’s past but in its future, it was symbolic of a deeper cooperation that had already been going on for some time.

All that said something very powerful to our world that many of our visitors commented upon. It demonstrated a model of the relationship between faith and politics, between different faiths and different politics, that can teach the world something very important. Many said admiringly: that sort of cooperation in an event to praise God would not happen in my country ...

Lots of people came! There were 110,000 registered internationals, 113,000 registered locals and who-knows-how-many thousands of unregistered pilgrims and onlookers; meanwhile the rest of the nation and a billion more worldwide looked on in awe through the internet and television ... Whether it was at the liturgy at Barangaroo that opened the week, the concerts and youth festival activities, the daily catechesis by the bishops, the extraordinary Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) celebrated on the city streets, the Vigil of Light and Testimony at Randwick on the Saturday night or the Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI on the Sunday: there was so much that moved us. Some young people have said it was the greatest week of their lives. Some have said it changed them forever. One way or another World Youth Day has left its mark on many of us. It was undoubtedly the happiest and holiest week in the history of Sydney, with its streets rocking with the Spirit of God, the spirit of youth, the spirit of friendship.

One visiting bishop wrote to me about the number of Aussies he met on the street, on public transport, or in pubs – I’m not sure how many pubs this bishop visited – who, though not necessarily all people of faith, were “filled with wonder, curiosity and joy at how well the young people behaved and their enthusiasm for Jesus Christ.” Some told him it had raised deep questions in their hearts, questions they knew they would have to reflect upon once WYD was over. A few years later those deep questions still echo in our hearts. “What will you leave to the next generation?” the Pope challenged the young people. “Are you building your lives on firm foundations? Are you making space for the Spirit in a world that wants to forget God? How are you using the gifts you have been given? What legacy will you leave to young people yet to come? What difference will you make?”

Pope Benedict offered a vision of young people of sincere faith and upright living. He noted that “Among yourselves there is a readiness to take up the plentiful opportunities offered to you. Some of you excel in studies, sport, music, or dance and drama, others of you have a keen sense of social justice and ethics, and many of you take up service and voluntary work.” Whatever your particular temperament, gifts, experiences, aspirations, God calls you to be his witnesses in 21st Century Australia. That was Benedict’s message and many heeded it.

2. Issues Facing Young Adults in Australia

Such a message is preached, however, against the backdrop of 21st Century Australia. It is a place of wonders and opportunities, both natural and human. Yet not everything is ‘cool’ about our physical and social environments. Climate change is occurring in both those environments – more radically I suspect in the human environment than the physical – and we are far from sure what to do about either. In our social environment we encounter growing hostility to faith. “There is a poison which threatens to corrode what is good, reshape who we are, and distort the purpose for which we have been created,” Pope Benedict observed. “Examples abound, as you yourselves know: alcohol, drug abuse, violence and sexual degradation, often presented through television and the internet as entertainment …”. There is “something sinister,” the pope thought, in the way relativism separates freedom and tolerance from truth and moral absolutes. This leads “not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.”

This is the downside of secularity, including the Australian version. Secularity often seeks to exclude God and the things of God and people of God from most of life and narrow ‘God business’ to a few special prayer times or festivals; it is hostile to religion whenever it seems to make a difference in people’s lives and that hostility to religion is omnipresent in organs of culture such as many sections of the Australian media – as was evident in the hostility of the media in the lead-up to WYD. This is a challenge for all people of faith: the pressure to check in your faith and ethics at the gate before entering the public square. Such secularity leaves young people confused about their religious identity, trying to negotiate attachment to aspects of the faith and morality of their ancestors and the compromises they are pressured to make to ‘fit in’ and ‘get ahead’ in a contemporary society. It leaves them disoriented as to their values, and especially as to whether there are any moral absolutes and if so what, and caught up in lifestyles that fail to honour God, human life, marriage and family, justice and more.

This is obvious in many areas of life today, such as attitudes to relationships, to material goods, to entertainments, to drugs, to violence and so on. Nowhere is it more evident than in the realm of sexual relationships. Before WYD I was asked by reporters whether we would be distributing condoms to the pilgrims. A generation ago no one would have taken such a bleak view of young people but now it was inconceivable to our secular reporters that young people could gather to praise God and enjoy each other’s company without fornicating! Despite real progress in our understanding of the dignity and rights of women and children, the importance of love and intimacy in marriage and family, and the positive values of sex, much of the cultural drift in this area in recent decades has been unhealthy and it is our young people who suffer most from the effects of this. Amongst the more problematical features of that cultural drift with which those who adhere to ‘the religions of the Book’ must now contend I would mention five.

2.1 Individualism

Individualism privatises sexuality and sexual morality. Orientations and values are now seen as personal choices, made according to taste. Autonomy, understood as freedom from capital-N Nature — from God and His order in the cosmos, from the requirements of practical reason, from any limit to the human will — has also become in the post-modern era freedom from our own natures and anything that restricts freedom, including commitments like marriage or the demands of the common good, is seen on this account as the enemy of happiness.

2.2 Consumerism

The consumer mentality can be and has been extended to even the body, sexuality and children so that all these things are planned, quality-controlled, exchanged, even traded, with consent. Sex becomes a recreational activity and fertility a customer choice. The sexualisation of culture, the loss of any sense of modesty in advertising and public appearance, the earlier and earlier onset of sexual activity, the big porn industry, are all symptoms of this consumerising of sex. Like most consumer goods, we want sex often and enjoyably and with no strings attached. If you are not having it regularly and in various ways, you are presumed to be repressed or sad in some way. Australian philosopher Peter Singer has even advocated sex with animals, saying that this is the last sexual taboo to fall. The sex supermarket both over-estimates the importance of sex – as if no one could be happy who had not had sex in the last few hours – and trivialises or under-estimates its power – as if it were no more humanly significant than defecating.

2.3 Non-commitment

A consequence of individualism and consumerism has been a reluctance to engage in self-sacrifice or commit to long-term obligations to God or others. Fewer and fewer people in the West are now marrying at all. They marry later and are much less likely to stay together. They have few if any children, and many of those children will grow up in fragmented or complicated families. All this presents a massive social challenge as well as a tragedy for many individuals, including people we all know and love. Sadly our culture tells young people to experiment with multiple partners and kinds of sex, supposedly ‘safely’ with a condom, to cohabit before marriage and to seek an elusive ‘compatibility’ before or instead of marriage. Having seen many relationships fail many young people are afraid to commit. Then they spend years in temporary commitments or non-commitments, learning how to have sexual relations or live together without giving themselves unconditionally to one another. In a world in which nothing is ‘for life’ any more – relationships, jobs, houses, ideals – we are habituating our next generation to live as if everything is temporary, conditional, revisable: a life without any life-long commitments.

2.4 No children

A related cultural shift has occurred with respect to children. Children are no longer presumed to be an ordinary part of coupling. ‘Safe sex’, in the modern world, is condomised sex, and that’s not just for HIV-AIDS prevention but also for baby prevention. The condomisation of sex and the demonisation of children tend to go hand in hand. In a contraceptive culture we are socialised not to love our bodies, life and children but rather to fear our fertility, to withhold it even from our spouses, to cauterise it temporarily or permanently. In the process our civilisation is becoming literally sterile.

2.5 Technologising sexuality

A fifth shift has been in the direction of technologising sexuality as the rest of human life. Technologies of fertility and anti-fertility, of child making and child unmaking, intrude into the most intimate areas of life. Years ago I heard it said that the two most common uses of the internet were for promoting and seeking religion and promoting and seeking pornography: the latter has, however, exploded at a much greater rate. The web is awash with porn and many young people are addicted from quite early. Social networking and other communications technologies present all sorts of good opportunities but also new challenges to faith and morals for our young adults.

3. The faith alternative

How might people of faith respond to such pressures upon our young people – and those not-so-young. The three ‘Abrahamic’ faiths share a view of the human person that speaks to these challenges and which, in my own tradition, has been especially well articulated as the ‘Theology of the Body’ of Pope John Paul II. He insisted on three simple points missed in our contemporary culture that I think are worth sharing with our young people: that we are our bodies; that we are what we do with our bodies; and that what we do with our bodies says something powerful. Let me explain.

3.1 We are our bodies

We are all somebody. We identify and know people by what they look and sound like. If someone punches me or kisses or tickles or has sex with me, they have doing this to ME, not just to my body. Sickness and health, hunger and satiation, location and movement, passions and perceptions – whatever happens to our bodies affects the whole person. Jews, Christians and Muslims insist that our bodies are not just extrinsic instruments, costumes, machines or prisons for some internal ‘real me’ to use. They are constitutive of our being and they reveal us to others. Of course there is a spiritual dimension to us also, but we are bodily beings.

Gender is one of those bodily givens. This is one of the insights of the Book of Genesis story of human origins: that God created ‘original man’ as man and woman, “male and female he created them”. There are, as it were, two different models, two different ways of being human, bodily creatures: male and female. Sex is not just an optional add-on to an otherwise asexual being, like air-conditioning in a car. Man and woman differ in the very depths of their being, not merely incidentally; and their maleness or femaleness is essential to their constitution and identity, permeating and colouring their activities and relationships.

The Genesis story offers another insight too: Adam, the man, is not happy alone and, contrary to Peter Singer’s wisdom, he finds no fitting helpmate amongst the animals. He is / we are made for love; it is our origin, vocation, destiny. Only the woman Eve satisfies Adam’s yearning: only she can adequately complement and partner him. Man and woman are so structured as to need each other and to find completion only through union with the other. Thus ‘male’ and ‘female’ can be understood only in terms of each other, the contrast and reciprocality of the pair. Because sexual union is so significantly different a way of touching for male and female, the very sexual act reveals something of the complementarity between the sexes. But there are many ways in which men and women differ.

Another point worth gleaning from the story of Eden: “God saw all he had made and indeed it was very good”. Adam and Eve are told by God to be fruitful and multiply, and so to engage physically; in this way they will take command of the earth, as its stewards and beneficiaries. Rather than fearing its power, its physicality, sex and the rest of the created order are to be enjoyed and celebrated.

3.2 We are what we do with our bodies

So, our Abrahamic faith traditions insist, as does sound philosophy, that we are our bodies. We are also what we do with our bodies. For if the body and those things which it signifies about our psychology and spirituality are largely givens, basic to our natures, there is much else about us that we make for ourselves. Our choices, including our sexual activity, our procreation and our fundamental commitments such as marriage and family, are self-creative. How? Because certain choices – promises, commitments – mean certain other choices follow logically. If I say “I marry you” then normally I will live with you afterwards, hopefully forever, and in certain ways. Choices also predispose us to further choices of the same or a similar sort or within the same horizons; they make certain things come more or less easily next time around; they make us into particular kinds of persons. Right choices make further right choices easier; wrong choices make further wrong choices more likely next time around. What we do, and the habits we get into, affect our identity, relationships and destiny. That is why we call some people life-savers and others murderers, some lovers and others rapists: they do certain things and those things affect who they are.

3.3 Sex says something powerful

What we do with our bodies also says something. Our bodies communicate things not just by speech but also by dress, eye contact, facial features, dance, mime, gesture. Sexual activity is also part of bodily self-expression: it tells people things, especially about ourselves. So our Holy Scriptures describe sex as language or knowledge: a revelation of the self, told in commitment and self-giving. Sexual intimacy can be a beautiful form of human expression in which each explores the other emotionally and physically, forming a special bond of trust, wantedness and love. We can say with sex honestly, “I love you, I give you myself completely, as I am; I let you see me, as I am; I invite you to be part of me; I trust you not to hurt me”. Sex can unite in conversation, communicate feelings, hopes and promises, tell a love story, a life story.

But sex can also cloud thinking, become self-centred, exploitative, manipulative, humiliating, even violent. We can lie with sex, saying “I love you, I give you myself”, but with our fingers crossed, really meaning “just while it’s fun” or “just for tonight” or “as long as it gives me pleasure”. It is can be a specially powerful kind of lie, told with the whole person, physically and emotionally. Thus the sexual language can be an occasion for, a means to, and an expression of the most noble and other-directed side of our nature. On the other hand, it can be used to tell a lie, allowing or excusing using another person for our own pleasure.

Many people today think like Humpty-Dumpty who said in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Many think the same way about sex; they imagine that it has no meaning in itself and that they can give it whatever meaning they choose. That is not the wisdom of the peoples of the Book.

3.4 What sex says

We know that sex has two inseparable dimensions or significances. First, bodily, sexual self-giving is ‘making love’ – something our culture vaguely remembers in the language it still uses for sex. It represents a choice to give and receive love through union with another person. It constitutes us as ‘lovers’ in our identity, relationships and destiny. This kind of union is a unique form of communication of love by touch. Two become one flesh by a sacred mathematics in which 1+1 = 1.

Secondly, bodily, sexual self-giving also represents a choice of the good of life, a purpose of giving and receiving life, to and from and through the other. Sex constitutes us not just as lovers but also as potential parents in our identity, relationships and destiny. Once again, it is a unique form of communication in this respect, the only mathematics by which 1+1 = 1, and then 1+1 = 3 and 4 and 5 and so on. The same act which unites people ‘as one flesh’ can also give life to a new human person.

The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s began the disintegration of the sexual act, of the life-giving dimension from the love-giving dimension, which led us a generation later to hear voices for ‘recreational sex’, pet-sex, computer-sex and umpteen other ways of disintegrating life from love, and love from marriage. What our religious traditions offer our secular society is a nobler picture of the human being and his and her calling by God and the law of God for human life and love, as for other aspects of our existence. Our religious traditions encourage the reservation of sex to marriage and assist young people to live chastely until then and afterwards too.

Chastity or sexual liberates and integrates our sensuality, passions, emotions, affections and sexual desires with the rest of our life-story, so that our sexual life coheres with the rest of who we are and are called to be by God. It means we say what we mean and mean what we say with sex. And that’s good not just for Christians and Muslims but for every young person of whatever religious background.

4. Young people can make a difference

After World Youth Day the Police Commissioner said to me what a good thing it had been for the police to see so many young people being so good. Many police only relate to young people when they are in trouble and this can give them a rather pessimistic view of youth. WYD, the Commissioner said, had restored their confidence. I think good young adults can restore the confidence of all our community, by standing up for values greater than just acquiring lots of stuff and using it and discarding it – stuff that includes using and abusing other human beings.

It is to that beautiful yet confused world that all of us are sent. Reflecting on the dignity of every human being as an image of God, we must be especially concerned for God’s little ones: the poor, elderly, refugees, the victims and voiceless. That is another example of the common ground between our faiths. “How can it be,” Pope Benedict asked, that in societies with so many advantages still “domestic violence torments so many mothers and children? How can it be that the most wondrous and sacred human space – the womb – has become a place of unutterable violence?” Such ugliness on the moral landscape is no cause for despair, the Pope said, for deep down everyone craves for more and better. “Our world has grown weary of greed, exploitation and division, of the tedium of false idols and piecemeal responses, and the pain of false promises. Our hearts and minds are yearning for a vision of life where love endures, where gifts are shared, where unity is built, where freedom finds meaning in truth, and where identity is found in respectful communion.”

The young people at World Youth Day then brought their world to God. They returned to be recharged, redirected, re-inspired. Listening was followed by some real hearing; hearing, by some real learning, even conversion; learning by some doing; and action by a return to listening. But what was clear was that it was for something. We don’t do a World Youth Day or get involved in an organisation like Affinity because we like meetings: we gather for what comes afterwards, for what we’ll do tomorrow, together.

My encouragement to the young people after World Youth Day is extended to all of you here tonight, especially the young people: Don’t let your passion for God be quenched by a world that sells you short and tries to make you cynical or paralysed or lazy. The world says young people aren’t interested in God, in high ideals; that all they care about is comfort, security, getting ahead. Don’t you believe it! Young people in every generation can do great things! There are many ways to give ourselves in service to God and humanity. What matters is that they are full-on, not just a passing fad, a commitment for a week, but heart and soul, the gift of ourselves. Christianity and Islam are not comfie zone consumer ‘spiritualities’. They are about the whole of life. They call the young – and the old – to examine their consciences, face up to the failures, recommit to God and the good, be willing to sacrifice themselves, and keep trying to fulfil God’s law. There is much that people of faith can say to each other and to the world outside, much that we can do together and for the world outside. I thank you for this opportunity tonight to share some thoughts with you and I look forward to our conversation.

Photo: Alphonsus Fok & Grace Lu

Presentation: Celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Bishop Kevin Manning’s Ordination to Priesthood, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta, Saturday 4 February 2012

My Lord Bishop Manning – Father Kevin – Your Eminence, George Cardinal Pell, my brother bishops David Walker and Terry Brady, my brother priests of Jesus Christ whose priesthood we have celebrated today, my fellow religious, and my dear friends all.

Please excuse me if I first address our 11 seminarians for the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta, from our senior seminarian Larry who, God willing, will be ordained a priest later this year, down to the five fine men who have joined our seminary this week.

Let me say to you young men, look and learn. Learn from this faithful priest of Jesus Christ, for 50 years His servant and friend to God’s people. Learn his generosity and fidelity and in 50 years or so from now it will be your Golden Jubilee which the People of God celebrate!

For most of us retirement means taking things a little easier. But as his retirement project Bishop Manning took on the administration of the See of Wilcannia-Forbes, a diocese that covers about half of NSW and allows an easy 9½ hour drive from his cathedral to his presbytery!

We thank God for the gift of the priesthood today. We thank Christ that He called Kevin Manning to share in His priesthood and graced him to respond to that call. We thank God for allowing Kevin five decades of such service so far and that Kevin has given without counting the cost as Christ the Priest and Good Shepherd did.

Pope Benedict XVI has said that it is more important for us to have good priests than to have many priests; best of all to have both! Bishop Kevin is a good priest. Everyone who knows him knows that it the pastoral things, the priestly things which would bring light to his eyes, a smile to his face, the energy to keep going amidst the rest of his life as bishop.

Not that our lives as priests are ever meant to be superficial or boring; but when we enter the sacred territories of God’s sanctuary and people’s lives we priests are touched profoundly.

A passion for God’s ‘battlers’

Photo: Alphonsus Fok & Grace Lu

He served in parishes of the Catholic Diocese of Bathurst until 1978 when he went to work to serve the entire Australian Church in the Bishops Conference. In 1991 he became one of that Conference as pastor of the Catholic Diocese of Armidale. In 1997 he was named Bishop of Parramatta and, most recently, Apostolic Administrator for Wilcannia-Forbes. So he’s had a very varied experience of priesthood.

At the end of his time with us in Parramatta we celebrated his many achievements. I will not rehearse them, except to note that they include everything from building a cathedral complex, welcoming a pope, promoting the Catholic faith, building bridges to other faiths, campaigning for justice for workers, Aboriginal people, migrants and refugees, women and families, and building up the body of clergy, religious and lay ministers in this Diocese. Bathurst, Armidale and Wilcannia-Forbes have been blessed with similar leadership from him.

But behind all these headlines was a humble priest of Jesus Christ, a down-to-earth, straight-talking Aussie priest at that, with a passion for God’s ‘battlers’ and a strong sense of duty. We love him for his balance of toughness and compassion, his humility, good humour and an unfailing sense of the Church.

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Address by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP: Launch of Catholic Bioethics for a New Millennium, University of Notre Dame Australia Sydney, Tuesday 31 January 2012

Your Eminence, fellow clergy and religious, academic leaders and scholars, healthcare leaders and practitioners, and friends all:

May I begin by thanking His Eminence Cardinal Pell for his gracious words tonight and for doing me the great honour of launching this book. He is my brother bishop from the Eastern part of Parramatta (also known as Sydney). More importantly, he is my metropolitan and dear friend. For years he has encouraged my ecclesiastical and scholarly pursuits, even if he has tried to make me too busy with the first to much pursue the second. After having me organise a little youth festival he was gracious enough to allow me the sabbatical in Oxford which Christopher and Paula Flynn helped finance and which meant I had the leisure and research tools to complete this book.

Tonight I also thank all at Cambridge University Press, including Melissa Zarafa who is with us, for taking on this project and tonight making the first copies available in Australia.

I record my gratitude to the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Governors, staff and students of the University of Notre Dame Australia for hosting us tonight. Trish Egan and Amy Higgins have worked especially hard to make this happen. Late last year I had the privilege of attending the university’s first graduation of medical students, including Trish’s son, Tom, along with law, theology and philosophy students, and as my work has been at the intersection of these four disciplines I was delighted to graduate with them.

Deputy Vice Chancellor Prof Hayden Ramsay has, like Cardinal Pell, been a huge support and encouragement to me. I have come to hold his university in great affection and very much enjoy my own occasional teaching here. I am also pleased that my little book will add to their research points for 2012!

I wrote my first book while I was an undergraduate at the University of Sydney, an institution now best known for being near the University of Notre Dame. I was very involved in the pro-life movement at that time.

The book was on Abortion in Australia and I have been somewhat type-cast ever since: most of my publications have ended up being in the area of bioethics. I never dreamed where such pursuits might take me! Since then the questions in health ethics have only multiplied, such as:

• When do people begin and how would we know?
• What’s all the fuss about stem-cells and are there more and less ethical ways to achieve therapies?
•  Is abortion a new form of eugenics? Who should live and who should die on the basis on their genes or wantedness, who decides and in whose interests?
• Are organ transplants a good thing or do they kill the donors? How should we think of the relationship between donor, recipient, families and community?
• Do unresponsive patients still matter and should we keep feeding them, even artificially?
• Why are Christians so hung up about killing patients, even those who are already at a very low ebb or who want to die?
• What is the role of a Catholic healthcare institution in today’s world and how can it protect its Catholic identity and ethical integrity in the face of all the pressures?
• How about the healthcare professional? What is their vocation and when may they cooperate in the morally dubious choices of an institution or other professionals?
• What sorts of laws and policies should we make in this area and are pro-life politicians able to vote for ‘bad but better’ laws?

In the face of such questions and many more I now write not just as an enthusiastic pro-lifer or as an academic but also, as the Cardinal pointed out, as a bishop. Many of you will know that I took as my episcopal motto ‘Speaking the truth in love’ – St Paul’s shorthand description, in the fourth chapter of his Letter to the Ephesians, of the tasks of Christian leaders and disciples.

Here he described the lived words, even more than the preached ones, of those who attain ‘the unity of the Faith and the knowledge of the Son of God’ and so mature as fully as possible, both as human beings and as children of God. That we might be assisted in this, he said, God graces ‘some to be apostles, prophets or evangelists, some to be pastors or teachers’.

Without reliable teachers, Paul continues, people can be carried about by the latest fashions, and become dim of wit, hard of heart or deaf to God. So I write in the hope that my words help. Of course the Church, as Pope Benedict XVI so often says, and Blessed John Paul II said before him, proposes rather than imposes her ideas: people are free in practice to accept or reject them. Christians hope to be given a fair hearing even by non-believers and judged on the basis of their arguments; but the Church is not merely a competitor in some war of ideas: what she believes to be the truth the Church proposes as a lover to the beloved.

One of my hopes, therefore, is that this book will serve as a catalyst for public discussion on some of the most important and pressing ethical issues surrounding human life. This is because, as the Holy Father recently said to the US Bishops, “The Church’s witness is of its nature public: she seeks to convince by proposing rational arguments in the public square.”

Though the Church may sometimes be contra mundum in the sense of offering a different wisdom, it is always for the world, in the sense of offering her message freely and lovingly in the hope that there will one day be not Cowboys and Indians, affirmative and negative debating teams, but one human family under God.

Those outside the Church who would seek to silence her on the great issues of the day, those inside who would prefer to repair to some haven of the like-minded, and those inside or out who want the Church to follow the latest opinion poll, all misread that legitimate separation of Church and State that Christianity first offered the world.

Though the Church may not dictate to the state, including those making laws with respect to human life, or to the professions, including those in the healthcare professions, she must always be a voice for the voiceless, including the voiceless unborn, sick and dying, and propose a wisdom she believes she has received from God and which drives her faithful who are themselves leaders and voters, doctors and patients.

Because of the public nature of the many issues in bioethics, much of this book utilises the language of the age, of philosophy and healthcare, of ideals common to people of all religions and none. But the Church also speaks with the authority of her Master, and so readers of this book will from time to time encounter a more distinctively Christian argumentation, including appeal to the Sacred Scriptures and Tradition.

There is much about contemporary healthcare and bioresearch worthy of celebration. Lives are saved. People are cured of debilitating diseases or prevented ever from suffering them. Others have the advance of sickness limited or symptoms relieved. Many more are well cared for while they are sick, recovering or dying. People, in the more developed economies at least, can now expect to live to ‘a ripe old age’.

Of course there are limits to the technology and art of healthcare – the limits of the possible and also of the moral. In medicine today ethics often bumps up against the technological imperative – the idea that if a thing can be done it should be (or inevitably will be) done; or the rescue imperative – the natural desire to save those at risk of damage or death no matter what; or a pragmatism that masquerades as efficiency but results in abandonment of the weak or the compromise of the ethic internal to healthcare.

In response to such pressures it is important that, when we talk of the ‘right’ to life, the ‘dignity’ of the human person, being pro-life in our healthcare institutions or life-affirming in our practices, we are clear that we are not fighting for some abstraction. Dignity and life are dimensions of real, flesh-and-blood human beings who matter, indeed matter very much. That’s what bioethics is about. To propose as our starting point that every human being should be reverenced, protected and assisted to flourish is not some rigid moral absolutism or abstract ancient formula but about love for humanity under grace.

Many people have affected my thinking in these chapters or helped me shape them. My family, of course, taught me first about the preciousness of human life and health, of truth and love, and I am pleased that my father Colin is with me tonight and my mother Gloria, recently the recipient of a new knee, is watching from her hospital room through the kind assistance of Xt3’s live-streaming. Margaret Fisher is commonly accused of being my sister but I am connected with her in other happy ways such as through this university.

My Dominican brothers saw to my education in moral theology and bioethics and supported me while I undertook much of this research: many of them attended the Melbourne launch of this book last week and I am grateful to have Fr John and Fr Paul here tonight.

Then there are those fellow scholars and clergy with whom I share my teaching mission and from many of whom I have gained my confidence that the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions can be synthesised with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today.

Present tonight are several who helped in one way or another with the detail of this text, including Susan Holmes, Brett Doyle, Ben Lucas, Helen Howard and Lisa Garland. Many other colleagues from the Diocese of Parramatta, including the Vicars-General Monsignor Robert McGuckin and Fr Peter Williams, from the Archdiocese of Sydney, from Catholic healthcare, education and welfare, and from the Order of Malta are here tonight and I thank them for their constant support. In the introduction to the book I thank many others who have affected my thinking.

For the reasons I outline in my book I think this is a particularly promising time to be involved in Catholic bioethics. Healthcare continues to do so much that is so good and has the potential to do more in the future. It is great that with us tonight are leaders or staff of several Catholic and secular hospitals, aged care facilities and healthcare groups, as well as practitioners from all branches of the healthcare and allied professions, who are the frontline of the healthcare mission.

They know better than any of us the potential and the challenges, including moral puzzles, not just for our institutions but for practitioners, funders, patients and our whole community. I offer them, and the young people preparing to follow them through their studies in this university, this book and my prayers. Thank you all for your support.

Bishop Anthony addresses staff, graduands and guests at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney Campus graduation ceremony following the conferral of his Honorary Doctorate.

Address of Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP on receiving honorary degree of Doctor of Laws, University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, St Benedict’s Church, Broadway, Tuesday 20 December 2011

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor, governors and staff of the university, Dr Daintree and representatives of other academies; Cardinal Pell, Bishop Comensoli, Fr Saunders, priests and religious, Prof Ramsay, theologians and philosophers; Attorney-General Smith and Hon. Greg Donnelly, Justices O’Keefe and Meagher, Prof Ryan, law lecturers and practitioners; Prof Bennett, faculty and members of the profession celebrating the first University of Notre Dame Australia medical graduations today; other distinguished guests, students and friends of the university, mums and dads including my own, and especially those who are about to graduate.

As a reformed lawyer myself, a student of philosophy and theology, and then a teacher of doctors and nurses, it is a special pleasure to be joining the graduates in those very disciplines today. Your subjects are precisely my academic passions and so I feel very much at home with you.

Some of you might have seen last week’s reports of unethical medical experiments conducted by Americans in Guatemala after the Second World War. Dr John Cutler, who eventually rose to US Assistant Surgeon-General, led this project and was associated with a parallel one in Tuskegee, Alabama. To study the course of venereal diseases and the effect of penicillin, the US Public Health Service deliberately infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis, without their knowledge or consent. The 1997 film, Miss Evers' Boys, brought the Alabama part of that story to public attention and led to an apology by President Clinton.

But only last week did the Commission of Inquiry report the full horror of the Guatemalan phase of the study: instead of the few dozen or few hundred victims previously acknowledged, there were in fact at least 2000 healthy men deliberately infected, many of whom, in turn, infected their wives and children. Instead of treating them with penicillin they were all given placebos so the researchers could observe the course of the disease as it took its terrible toll on their bodies and minds and eventually killed them.

Such research is obviously monstrous. But what shocked many people was that it was still going on in 1970s America. The international legal instruments and World Medical Association declarations that came after the terrible Nazi experiments of the 1930s and ’40s were supposed to prevent such things occurring again. No doctor was ever again intentionally to torture or kill, and no government or profession was ever again to sponsor such practices.

For sensitive doctors, lawyers and ethicists – such as are graduating today – this must raise deep questions. Why would some people fail to abide by the most basic principles of morality, known not only to the world’s great religions, but to sound medicine, the common law and good philosophy?

Today some of you will swear a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath known as ‘The Declaration of Geneva’. It is one of those crucial post-war documents intended to help medicine recover its soul. It lays down certain non-negotiables for ethical practice, whatever the fashions of the age, pressures of government or insurers, or interests of professionals.

Yet at the very time that the American and Australian Medical Associations were signing on to this Declaration, the world’s leading ‘free’ nation was sponsoring the syphilis experiments. So declarations of principle are never enough: eternal vigilance is required and we need practitioners of good character.

Last week I saw an article entitled Euthanasia Goes Against All We Stand For. In it one of those graduating today, Samuel Birch, made an excellent case for doctors maintaining the ancient ethic that distinguishes them from witchdoctors and hired guns. In the struggle for the soul of our culture the battlegrounds are increasingly the very places where our graduates will practice: hospitals and aged care facilities, parliaments, courts, bureaucracies and academies.

If our highest values are to survive it will require young men and women of intelligence and courage. From my brief encounters with Sam and from what I’ve heard from his teachers, his pro-life commitment is much more than a theory or slogan: he cares passionately for people and this will serve him very well as a young doctor.

If medicine – and law and other professions, for that matter – are to be worthy of the reverence and rewards they receive in our community, if people are to continue to trust them, their practitioners must be principled. We must understand, for instance, what healthcare is for and how its internal goals might reasonably be pursued.

The therapeutic and research imperatives to get results ‘no matter what’; the technological imperative to pursue the technically possible even if morally impossible; the demands of patients, administrators and financiers, feelings of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence: all can militate against ethics in practice.

Doctors are not alone in this. Lawyers can be pressured to achieve results for their clients at any cost, even to justice and ethics. Journalists can be rewarded for invading people’s privacy, endangering national security or exposing people to public humiliation just to up the sales or ratings. Athletes can be drawn into doping or match-fixing to maximise medals and kick-backs. Philosophers and theologians can become window-dressers for the ideologies or convenience of the age.

Yet ordinary people still count theology and philosophy, medicine and law, amongst the highest human pursuits and still look to their professionals for moral leadership. Here’s one reason why. When the best pagan doctors sought to follow Hippocrates or the best Christians doctors the Good Samaritan, when Jews and Muslims brought the wisdom of Maimonides and Avicenna, when moderns reconsecrated themselves according to the Geneva Declaration, all swore an oath. Not an employment contract or protocol, but an oath: a prayer and promise to God, or the gods, or whatever people hold most precious.

That is a humble act, acknowledging that both goodness and health ultimately come from a source greater than ourselves; what I am joining is more than a job, more like a God-given ‘vocation’. Solemnly to consecrate my life to the service of humanity; to say I will put the life and health of my patients first and always respect their dignity and privacy; to resolve to save and heal and care, never kill or harm or abandon; to promise to honour my teachers and build up my profession – to commit to such things requires all that is best in the human spirit and God’s help also. That is something our Catholic university understands and hopefully conveys.

Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania and Chair of the Guatemala Commission, said last week that these experiments “should shock the conscience not in spite of their medical context, but precisely because of it”. We rightly expect more of our professionals and so of today’s graduates. We expect our medics to be protectors of life and health and dignity, as we ask our lawyers to defend public order and private justice and our philosophers and theologians to guard truth and culture. We hope for this from you not just because you will swear an oath today, but because this university has tried to form you as people of character and ideals, of practical wisdom, compassion and fairness.

Amidst the pride and joy of today’s ceremony there is sadness, as one of our medical students will graduate posthumously. His death makes us all the more conscious of the vulnerability and preciousness of human life and health. With his family and friends we grieve him. We pray that Christ the physician of bodies and souls now holds Dr Joshua Scott-Paul close to his heart. As we look forward to Christmas we also look forward to that day when we shall all be united in a life that has no end.

A Call to Action on Homelessness

Address by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP to the Community Forum on Homelessness, Parkroyal Hotel, Parramatta, 8 November 2011

As they were going along the road, a man said to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” But Jesus replied, Really? Well let me warn you: “foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” (cf. Lk 9:57-8; Mt 8:19-20)

Not that Jesus was homeless in the ordinary sense. After his adolescence and young adulthood in a stable family home of a builder in Nazareth (Mk 6:3; Mt 2:23), he moved to Capernaum and lived either in his own house or that of Simon Peter (Mt 4:13; 8:5; 8:14ff).

Even when he was on the road people regularly took him in (e.g. Mt 9:10) and a team of loyal women tended to his needs and those of his apostles (e.g. Mt 27:55). So you might say it was three star homelessness or a gypsy existence rather than the kind of emergency described in our conference today.

But in another sense Jesus did indeed live rough. St John tells us that when the Word who was God and was at home with God took flesh and came to live among us, His own people rejected Him (Jn 1:11; cf. Mt 13:57-58).

Luke describes his mother being forced to give birth to him in a stable as there was no room in the inn (Lk 2:7). Matthew says they then fled from the dictator Herod the Great, as refugees to Egypt (Mt 2:14). When Herod died they returned to Israel but then hid in Mary’s town of Nazareth for fear of Herod’s son Herod Antipas Archelaus (Mt 2:19-23) who arrested and killed Jesus’ kinsman John (Mt 4:12; 14:1-13) and would in due course have a part in Jesus’ own death (Lk 23:6-16).

In the meantime Jesus fled the Herodians once again, this time deeper into Galilee (Mt 4:12-13). And while friends hosted him there from time to time, he chose an itinerant life (e.g. Mt 4:25; 9:9,35; 11:1; 15:21,29) and was often on the run from those who wanted to do him harm (e.g. Mt 8:34; 12:14-15; Lk 4:28-30).

My point is that Jesus knew homelessness and in turn cared for many who were outcasts and homeless themselves (e.g. Mt 8:28). He called his disciples into a kind of dispossession (e.g. Mt ch 10; 19:16-22), worrying not about how they were to feed and clothe and house themselves (Mt 7:25-34) but trusting in the hospitality of God and those to whom they were sent and so becoming itinerant preachers like himself (e.g. Mt 10:11-14, 23; Acts).

Jesus also taught them by his own example to be concerned for the ‘little’ or powerless ones who now included not just the widows, orphans and strangers, but even those who brought their suffering upon themselves, such as prisoners and those some would have regarded as the ‘undeserving poor’.

The test was how they cared for the needy, simply because they were in need, in whom they met Jesus himself (cf. Mt 25:31-46). His Good Samaritan provided not only nursing but emergency housing for the man mugged and left for dead; he responded to crying need and did not first ask whether the man had acted responsibly by walking down the road to Jericho (Lk 10: 25-37).

So the Church in due course had not only her itinerants but her hostels, orphanages and refuges, religious orders devoted to the poor including the homeless, St Vincent de Paul Society, CatholicCare and the rest.

I am very pleased we are co-hosting today’s community forum and that you have all taken part in it: it is a sign that this remains a passion amongst Christians. As we’ve heard today the other Christian Churches are also very involved in provision in this area of need.

Preventing homelessness among those at highest risk

Photo: Alphonsus Fok & Grace Lu

Over the years stamp duty rebates, first home owner schemes and other initiatives have been used to encourage home ownership and make it more affordable. But such schemes assume people can obtain credit and keep up their mortgage repayments. Meanwhile the price of buying and renting in Sydney keeps escalating, the stock of public housing relative to population declines, and for some people reasonable accommodation will cost half their income or more.

Add a global financial crisis or two and associated unemployment and mortgage stress and before you know it more than 100,000 are living homeless on any particular night. Add longer term social and cultural change and the proportion of the homeless who are children, families, divorcees or older people keeps growing, as do the victims of domestic violence, long-term unemployment or mental health issues ...

Four highly qualified speakers have taken us today through the whys and wherefores of all that and what can be done about it. What is clear to me is that we cannot look only to governments to address this need. Churches and charitable organisations, commerce, the academy, the media and others must combine if we are to do more than set targets.

Part of why our best-intentioned targets and strategies fail to solve homelessness is that homelessness is, in a sense, the human condition. This is told in the Old Testament where Adam and Eve are driven out of, or, effectively exile themselves from, their first home in the Garden of Eden and their descendants spend the whole of the Old Testament seeking, sometimes achieving, being dragged into exile from, and returning to the land they called ‘home’.

It has ever been so, with diaspora and return a constant theme in the history of the Jewish people and their spiritual children the Christians and Muslims. If Adam and Eve were the first exiles their children have been so ever since and that never-completely-at-homeness described by St Augustine and the mystics will only be satisfied by ultimately resting in God.

In the meantime we do our best to be at home in this world even as we look to our real home in heaven, and to assist those whose homelessness is more radical and painful. Since the late 19th Century when Catholic social teaching received a new impetus, the connection between housing and work has been a theme of Christian activism for social justice. The homeless are amongst those for whom the Church increasingly claimed to have a preferential love or option and for whom the community were said to have a responsibility.

By the early 1950s Pope Pius XII was drawing attention to homelessness and listing the need for a secure home amongst the core requirements of family life. Since the 1960s the Church has used the language of human dignity and rights when asserting that people have a right to a home.

But apart from wagging our prophetic fingers at the surrounding society what can the Church in Western Sydney do? One easy answer: sell all its artworks and other assets and build affordable housing. That is an understandable if simplistic solution, first, because the Church in Western Sydney doesn’t have many artworks or saleable assets! Most of what it has is already spoken for, such as the churches and schools which communities helped build on the understanding they would be dedicated to worshipping God and educating our children.

Through its parishes, diocesan agencies, lay associations and religious congregations the Church is also heavily involved in working with people suffering the range of disadvantage – helping prevent homelessness amongst those at highest risk.

The Church is also at the coalface assisting people in dealing with the effects of homelessness. We’ve heard today about agencies of the various Churches that provide accommodation of various types – Catherine Villa and San Miguel are two on my patch. UnitingCare and other faith-based agencies also provide accommodation services. These services range from intensive 24/7 support to crisis accommodation to supported accommodation and more. So no one should suggest this is an area of need neglected by Christians. But we have the asset base and the influence to do more.

What else, then, can we do? I am heartened that CatholicCare Parramatta has partnered with Churches Housing to put on today’s forum and that people from a variety of backgrounds have taken part. Few people realise just how much unmet need there is in Western Sydney for emergency accommodation and longer-term affordable housing.

Cathy Tracey drew our attention to an ACU study that found that last year alone 84,000 Australian children tried to get help from a homelessness service – 1 in 60 of our children – but more than half were turned away (Seen and Heard: Putting Children on the Homelessness Agenda). Catherine Villa has experienced similarly overwhelming demand amongst pregnant women and young women with infants. With the population of Western Sydney projected to double in my term as bishop we can expect the gap may well widen.

God-loving people in stable accommodation can easily miss the seriousness of this issue or feel a deficit of responsibility for it. So the Church must heighten awareness and again teach its own members about the right to housing and the need for all to assist in achieving this entitlement.

The Church must also walk her talk, and lead by example. I have asked the Diocesan Business Manager and the Executive Director of CatholicCare to explore how the Diocese of Parramatta can better contribute to reducing homelessness.

I’ve asked those responsible for our pastoral planning process to put this on their agenda. I do not have any pre-conceived notions of what we may end up doing, but I do hope we can do more. Today’s forum is a start. We will leave better informed.

I would like to thank our Master of Ceremonies Noel Debien (ABC Radio Religion Unit), our speakers Rev Derek Yule (Executive Officer of Churches Housing), Rosemary Bishop (Chair of Affordable Community Housing and CEO of Mamre Services at St Marys), Tanya Gadiel (CEO of Community Services, Parramatta Mission) and Cathy Tracey (Senior Manager Community and Family Services, CatholicCare Parramatta), as well as our organisers Collette Thatcher, Amber Ritchie, Jane Favotto and of course the Executive Director of CatholicCare, Otto Henfling.

Called to be a priest?

A Reflection by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP for Vocations Day, Our Lady of the Angels Parish, Rouse Hill, 2 October 2011

Introduction

Elijah took shelter in a cave on Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Word of the LORD came to him, ‘Why are you hiding here, Elijah?’ He answered: ‘I have been most zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts, but the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to the sword. I am the only one left and they are out to kill me.’ Then the Word of the LORD said, ‘Go outside … for the LORD himself will be passing by.’ A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing the rocks – but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake – but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire – but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a whisper in the breeze: on hearing this, Elijah covered his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. The voice of the LORD said to him, ‘Elijah, stop hiding here ... Go, take the road back to Damascus.’ (1 Kings 19)

It is good to take time to listen to what God is saying to you, as you are doing on this vocations reflection day. Elijah couldn’t hear God in the midst of the storm, the earthquake and the bushfire, but only in a ‘still small voice’, the whisper of a gentle breeze. Likewise it can be hard for us to hear God amidst the bustle of daily life, the studies and work, the electronic gadgets, the social life, the roar of the traffic and so on.

God doesn’t generally break through those barriers by sending us personal text messages on our mobiles or interrupting pop concerts with an announcement on the public address system. When we talk about ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ from God, it really is a metaphor at most, as Elijah’s hearing Him in silence or the breeze makes clear.

Which raises the question: how would I know God was calling me? How do I let His mind so inspire mine and His will so penetrate mine that I can hear and respond to His still small voice? What if I’m tone-deaf to the quiet promptings of the Holy Spirit? How do I release myself from the noises that distract me from hearing God’s mind and the anxieties that stop me from embracing God’s will?

There is a path to this, along which God draws us. It is a lifelong work that can be described as the four stages of:

• denunciation;
• renunciation;
• annunciation; and
• me-nunciation.

I would like to explore those with you this afternoon, with the aid of the Word of God.

Denunciation

Though God’s voice is insistent it can be drowned out by our own passions, fears and prejudices; or by alternative voices saying things like: ‘this religion stuff doesn’t really matter, not enough to give your life to’ or ‘is any of it really true anyway?’ or ‘sure, it’s true, but you’re not worthy, you’re not the sort’ or ‘you’re not really certain enough, postpone, take your time, no need to rush’ or ‘try other things first, try this apple instead …’.

Just as conversation is near impossible in a loud bar or beside a jack-hammer and we need to move to a quieter place to hear each other, so a still small voice will not be heard if there are too many powerful distractions, too many outer or inner voices, temptations, obstacles.

When Elijah finally heard God’s voice he was sent on the road to Damascus: that immediately evokes for us Christians thoughts of St Paul. Paul, as we know, needed a really loud voice to penetrate his resistance: the voice of Christ Himself charging him, ‘Saul, why do you persecute me?’ A voice powerful enough to turn Saul the persecutor into Paul the Apostle.

As St Paul reflected on own life and sought to teach others, he realised how deaf he had been at times and we all can be to God’s promptings. He told the Jews that though they had the gifts of the Covenant, the Law and the Prophets they had missed the point; he told the pagans that though they had the gifts of philosophy and law and road-building and the rest, they were fools. Here is what he wrote to the Romans:

God’s wrath is being revealed against every impiety and wickedness of those who suppress the truth … For much about God is evident enough: ever since the creation of the world, His existence and attributes could be seen in what He has made. So unbelievers have no excuse: though they should have known God, they did not accord Him glory and thanks. Instead, they became vain in their reasoning and their minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools … So God left them to their impure lusts and mutual degradation. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator … They exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and did shameful things with people of their own sex … They pursued every kind of wickedness, greed and malice; full of envy, violence, treachery and spite; gossips, scandalmongers and blasphemers; boastful, sly, disobedient; they behaved as if they were senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. What’s worse, they encouraged others to do the same. (Rom ch 1)
 

St Paul could have been describing aspects of the modern youth culture or university life! The point here is that even in the most sophisticated places in world, private passion and corrupt culture can block our ability to hear God.

For just this reason, prophets like Elijah and Paul denounced institutions, practices and people that put anything before God. They wanted us to understand that God must come first in our lives if we are to be truly happy. Jesus, too, though often gentler, could be a fiery prophet at times: He cursed Scribes and Pharisees and Lawyers and the Moneychangers and the Rich and Powerful who pursued their own agenda rather than God’s.

If we are to hear God, we have to let the prophetic Word of the Lord denounce us, convict us of any resistance we’ve built up to God’s Word, to His promptings in our heart, His quiet nudges. Unless we surrender to being in God our own defences or the noise of others will keep us from hearing and responding to His call.

So we must be ready for uncomfortable truths about ourselves, not just affirmation. If whenever you go to Mass and hear the Scriptures read and the faith preached, or whenever you read the Bible for yourself, if you always feel consoled and encouraged to just stay the same, then you are not really hearing. The Word of the Lord is alive and active, it cuts more sharply than a double-edged razor. When God speaks He doesn’t whistle our tune: He calls us to join in the symphony of His tune, playing in harmony with His saints.

The Truth held out clearly before us by God’s prophetic word denounces whatever is ungodly about us and so is resisted; as Elijah and Paul complained, they killed the prophets and even the Lord God Jesus Christ. But if we are willing to hear the sharp Word of God, ready for a life of re-formation, then the Divine Sculptor will gradually chip away at the dross to get to the artwork within each one of us.

Renunciation

Jesus told them this parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure which a man finds buried in a field ... Full of excitement he goes and sells all that he has to buy that field. Or, again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great value, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.’ (Mt 13:44-46)

To be called to be a priest is to be called to something so exciting that like a treasure-hunter, like a pearl merchant, you would willingly give up everything else.

In my own case I had had a fairly ordinary Catholic upbringing, in a loving home (the domestic Church) with a family who got me into the habit of Mass and taught me God comes first. I had a great-aunt who was a nun, I went to Catholic schools and was an altar boy, so serving Christ was not unthinkable. From about age 15, priesthood was in the back of my head, but I went ahead with my university studies, employment and social life.

Now, we’ve all got shameful things in our past and one of mine is that I was a lawyer! In fact I loved the law. My big city firm donated me for some weeks to the Legal Aid office in Kings Cross, where I helped some disadvantaged people, often with mental health or drug issues. It was a clash of cultures with the firm’s international corporate finance section to which I was attached. We were big boys – even the girls – working for the bigger boys, and we billed out our time at fabulous rates in five-minute blocks.

I enjoyed the intellectual puzzles, the self-confidence and energy, and occasional sense of getting someone justice.

Then one night we worked through the night on a big corporate contract. The others on my team were really ‘pumped’ the next day when we’d done it in the nick of time and were rewarded with the rest of the morning off. I remember thinking: hold on, what if you had a family, or a prayer life, or any other life? This profession, like many others, demands your soul, all of you, ontologically, as it were.

Soon after that I took leave and went backpacking around the Holy Land and Europe to make up my mind about my vocation. I did a lot of praying, thinking, imagining, feeling and weighing up, as I suppose I’d done on and off for years, and finally decided I must take the plunge. So when I came back I tried postulancy in the Dominican Order. I loved singing my prayers in choir with the brothers, hearing them preach, studying with them, nutting out the three great mysteries of God, creation and ourselves, and at last I could do that fully, that is, theologically.

Within a week of my joining the Dominicans I knew it was the place for me. It took the Order a little longer – six years in fact – to be sure about me, but eventually we agreed I should make solemn profession. Soon after that I was ordained a deacon and then a priest. At times I lived the Dominican thing quite well; at other times less so. There are conversions and reversions even within such a school of perfection. But at least I now knew I would eek out the rest of my earthly existence in a Dominican community – or so I thought ... In due course I found that every time I think I’ve got God’s plan for me figured out, He delights in upsetting it. You see, a perfect sense of humour is amongst the divine perfections, along with omnipotence, omniscience and infinity. He is, as they say, a God of surprises and He asks us to let go of our plans and securities even as He is revealing His plans and securities to us. It’s not just vices of Roman university students, but many good things too that we have to let go of.

St Thérèse – when she was asked whether she wanted to be a nun or a soldier or a priest or an apostle or a doctor or a martyr she famously said she wanted it all, which was her common response when given options. Remarkably, though herself an enclosed contemplative nun, she did get to become a patron of missionaries. But the fact was being an enclosed nun precluded being an actual missionary, let alone a soldier or doctor or whatever.

That’s because every choice involves what economists call opportunity costs, other things we forgo: there is no such thing as a free lunch, not just because those who offer it to us will one day ask something in return, but also because when we are at lunch we are not doing umpteen other things we could be doing, and, perhaps, would like to be doing. In everything we do in life we pay, at least, the price of the alternatives we forgo.

People sometimes say celibacy is a terrible price to pay for priesthood; but even the married man must learn chastity and chastity for a married man will include abstaining from sex, sometimes for the time being, as when he gets the urge at work or in the shopping centre or at church, and sometimes for more extended periods, even for years, if his wife is sick or hostile or away. When a man chooses Mrs X he is renouncing three billion other women many of whose charms might interest him, sometimes even more than his wife’s. Choosing Mrs X for life means choosing not to choose anyone else, it means embracing the uncertain future of his own changing feelings and her changing looks and moods and the rest … So marriage, like priesthood, comes with an opportunity cost, a price tag; it calls a man to renounce his own will in a thousand different ways.

Consecrated religious life also involves renunciations, as told in the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But even diocesan priests, who do not take these vows, must live simply, chastely and obediently if their preaching and sanctifying and leading are to be effective.

That presents each of us in the process of discerning our vocation with the question: am I willing to let go of some of the control, comfort and intimacies of my present life or of my various possible future lives, in order to give myself totally to the service of God and His kingdom? In appreciating and hoping to possess so great a treasure we have found ‘the pearl of great price’ and must be ready to sell up to get it.

The paradox of Christianity is that we recover our life by giving it up; we find our freedom by renouncing our wilfulness; we discover our treasure by renouncing possessiveness; we find our intimacy in the quiet solitude that frees us to be close to many others and to God.

Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, we have given up everything to follow you.’ Jesus replied, ‘Honestly, I tell you: no one who has given up his family or wealth for my sake and the sake of the Gospel will go without receiving houses, siblings, parents, children and lands a hundred times more in this life, though not without persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.’ (Mk 10)

Jesus obviously was not against family (in fact He was big on family), or houses or lands or a fishing businesses … but He was against anything that got in the way of throwing ourselves headlong into the Kingdom of God. It is better to be blinded or lame, He said, than to miss out on God’s kingdom and enter hell whole. We must renounce whatever holds us back from throwing ourselves headlong into the adventure of God’s kingdom: it might be our love of possessions, or our desire for security, or our anxiety about being a success and not being humiliated by getting it wrong, or our craving for intimacy or whatever. Only by conquering such fears and longings are we free to embrace a life of virtue and service.

In essence, we must be brought into the kenosis – the self-emptying – of the Son, who gave it all up for our sake. We must be ready to be heroes; in the language of popes we must be afraid of nothing, except mediocrity. At WYD11 in Madrid Pope Benedict said to your generation:

If you abide in the love of Christ, rooted in the Faith, then even amid setbacks and suffering you will encounter the source of true happiness and joy. Faith does not run counter to your highest ideals; on the contrary, it elevates and perfects them. So do not be satisfied with anything less than Truth and Love, do not be content with anything less than Christ ... May no adversity paralyse you. Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your own weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, His name will continue to resound throughout the world.

Annunciation

The Virgin Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child. Now Joseph, a righteous man, did not want to expose her to shame, so he resolved to divorce her quietly. But behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son whom you must name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.’ When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him. (Mt 1)

The annunciation to Joseph is one of several in the Bible: that to Mary is the most famous (we call it THE annunciation), but the Word of the Lord or the angel of the Lord called many people to a new mission, such as Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, Zechariah and Elizabeth, the magi, the shepherds, the apostles, Paul …

The annunciation to Joseph is interesting I think. He was not the obvious choice, the way Mary was. Mary was the finest flower of our race and had been readied from her conception, by being preserved from original sin. As far as we know Joseph was a fairly ordinary bloke, a good man to be sure, and in due course a good husband and father, but not a stand out like Mary and some of the others. He must have thought himself totally unworthy to be step-father to the Son of God and husband-protector for the Mother of God. He must have been bamboozled by God’s choice.

Perhaps you know the story of St Turibius. He was a layman, a law professor at Salamanca University in Spain. One day he got a letter informing him that the Pope had appointed him Archbishop of Lima in Peru. He was astonished. He wrote back to the Nuncio saying there must be a mistake, presumably they’d got the wrong Turibius; after all, he was only a layman and, worse than that, he was a lawyer. He did have some experience as an ecclesiastical judge and presumably that’s how they’d heard of him. The Pope doesn’t make mistakes, was the Nuncio’s response; if the Pope thinks you are the best man for the job, then you are. So he had to get himself ordained deacon, priest and bishop, pack up, and move to the other side of the world.

Three times he traversed the 450,000 square kilometers of his diocese on foot, frequently defenceless and often alone. He was exposed to storms, deserts, wild beasts, tropical heat, fevers and hostile natives. He preached and taught and baptised and confirmed nearly half a million souls, among them the Dominican saints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Rose_of_Lima Rose of Lima and Martin de Porres. He built roads, schoolhouses, churches, schools, convents and at Lima, in 1591, founded the first seminary in the Western Hemisphere. He championed the rights of the natives against the conquistadors. In due course he was a saint. God does, indeed, delight in surprising us.

St Joseph probably thought, like Turibius, that the angels had got the postal address wrong. Yet in trust he handed himself over to providence and let God make of him the servant he wanted him to be.

Having allowed the Word of God and our own growing self-knowledge to identify and denounce whatever blockages there are in our hearing, having renounced, in turn, whatever might stop us responding, we are free to hear God’s call, that ‘still small voice’, and we dispose ourselves to serve Him. So is God speaking right now? What is He saying? Do we yet mean what we say when we pray ‘Thy will be done’ or does its real meaning frighten us?

This much is clear: Jesus has many ways of speaking to us about His plans for us: the gentle attraction of the things of a priest, of a life of closeness to God and the things of God, of a life of closeness to people and the needs of people, of a life of bringing those two together. As we come to know ourselves better, we come to know our suitability or not for such a task.

As you search your own soul and exercise your imagination, you might be attracted more by one or another aspect of the priest’s roles as pastor, leader, sanctifier, preacher, teacher. But this much is clear: God does not ask us to enter into chaos, into something to which we are totally unsuited and unattracted; God doesn’t make a mess and He doesn’t want to mess us up, or for us to mess up ourselves and others. God calls us to order and beauty and goodness.

Yet, what He might be calling me to can seem so big – as it must have seemed to Joseph and Mary and Turibius and Paul and so many others. As he said to them, so the Word of God constantly says to us: ‘Do not be afraid ... Put out into the deep ... Take the plunge ... I am with you.’

All friendships are built on trust and communication and so the time spent in quiet prayer alone with God builds and maintains our friendship with Him. If Joseph was dreaming with God, if Mary was reading her Bible, when the angels appeared to them, it was this presence to God that allowed them to say ‘Fiat, Yes, let it be done’, when ordinary worldly wisdom would have said ‘run a mile’!

The annunciation, a calling to something new, greater, to commitment, even unto death: this calls for trust, that God is the Master of the Universe and, so, of my life; that He has great plans for me, weak as I am; that He can do great things in me and through me, because of His greatness, not mine. And that means that I don’t have to have it all worked out already; I only need to say: ‘Yes Lord, I’ll give it my best shot.’

Me-nunciation

Jesus said: ‘Don’t worry about what you are to eat and drink and wear... your Father knows what you need. Seek first His kingdom and all these other things will be given you. Do not be afraid any longer, little ones, for your Father is pleased to give you His kingdom. Sell all you have and give alms. Get wallets that don’t wear out and credit that will not run out. Get treasure in heaven, for where your treasure is, there also will your heart be... You, then, will be the faithful and wise steward whom the Master puts in charge of his household, to provide his servants’ needs at the proper time!’ (Lk 12:29-42)

This brings me, last of all, to the question of whether Jesus is calling ME in particular and how I would know and how I should respond; am I one of those He wants to appoint as a steward over His household?

Essential to finding out is spending time with Him, such as this afternoon and others like it; such as time spent in prayer and solitude with the Blessed Sacrament; such as time spent in worship at the Eucharist and Confession; such as time spent with wise friends who know us and objective counsellors such as Father Warren. It is in those situations that we can best reflect upon who I am, what I’m good at, what I’m attracted to, what great thing I could do with God’s help, what would really make my life make sense, what would make the most of me, not a mediocrity but a hero, the greatest man I can be under grace.

The matter is simple enough: do I love God and trust him completely? Does the life of a priest appeal to me and would it make sense of who I am and what I’m made for? Do I have courage, the be-not-afraidness, to give it a go, to give myself time for discernment and formation in the seminary so that the Church and I can work this out together? Am I set on the path of putting God first in all aspects of my life, on the path of discipleship?

The discernment of God’s call is different for each person. Though the Spirit enables us to transcend our limitations, we must be aware of them and not discount them, not imagine we are perfect and that God and His Church would be lucky to have me. That is just vanity. But so is a lot of “I’m not worthy’ thinking, as if it all depended on me. My simple message for you today is this: be ready for denunciation by the Word of the Lord, purifying your heart and ears so you will be able to hear God’s still small voice; be ready for renunciation, too, as you let go of everything from your vices to various good things, so that there is no obstacle to your responding to God’s call; be ready, then, for annunciation, as God calls you, in various ways, to join him in the great adventure of preaching the Gospel and sanctifying and leading His household; and finally, be ready, for Me-nunciation, your personal response in humility and courage.

You cannot live your faith alone

Photo: Alphonsus Fok & Grace Lu

Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP's Post-World Youth Day Madrid Catechesis

St Patrick’s Cathedral cloister, Sunday11 September 2011.

Many of you were with me on Mount Tabor in the Holy Land, at our pre-pilgrimage on the way to Madrid. From very early, Christians visited that mountain to recall the Transfiguration of Christ. Soon they built churches and monasteries there. We celebrated Mass in the modern Franciscan Basilica on the very peak of the mountain. Its facade is the shape of three triangle-topped stone tabernacles or tents, joined together and continued down three naves. It is a deliberate fulfilment of St Peter’s offer to the transfigured Jesus: “Lord it’s so good for us to be here. Let us build three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah?” Now there’s a chapel there to each.

In the middle of the central chapel is a domed mosaic of the transfigured Christ floating in the air, with Moses and Elijah to right and left. Above them all we read the Father’s words (in Latin): “This is my beloved [Son], listen to him.” Hearing those words Peter, James and John fall on their faces, as any of us might seeing our mate go nuclear and then hearing God thunder from heaven. It was a strange message from God this one, telling them to listen to Jesus when Jesus wasn’t saying anything. I suppose it was a lesson to all of us: to listen to Christ, all the time, not just when we’re ‘up a mountain’, experiencing a high with him.

The three young people started gibbering. They didn’t know what to say, what to do. All they knew was that it was good to be there. They wanted to pitch camp and stay there forever. We can feel like that. I saw a blog of one of our returnees this week asking: is it possible to bring back home the peace, the love, the constant revelations we experienced on our pilgrimage, instead of wishing all the time that you were back there in Madrid or the Holy Land?

It’s a good question. After the jet lag, the text messages to our fellow pilgrims, the photo exchanges and the rest comes the realisation that we are back home, no longer surrounded by a million young people united by their faith in Jesus Christ, their love for the Church and their ideals for the world. Our young blogger got a text from a friend saying “I wish I was back there” and she confessed feeling a bit that way too. Like Pete, Jake and Jonno, they wanted to stay up the mountain with Christ.

But that was not to be: Jesus led them back down the mountain with the image of Himself still burning on their eyes, their minds and their hearts. Back to their familiar world, back to the world to which they must give themselves, back to the world that needed to hear the Gospel from Him and from them.

At least they had each other. For as Pope Benedict told us in his homily during the Closing Mass in Madrid: “You cannot live your faith alone ... To follow Jesus in faith is to walk with Him in the communion of the Church. You cannot follow Jesus alone.” The 26th World Youth Day was an extraordinary time for a million+ youth, including 283 young Parramattans, with their pastors and group leaders. It was an extraordinary gift from our supporting priests and parishioners, families and friends, Catholic Education Office, schools and fellow students, everybody who helped it happen. A truly graced time.

But pilgrims, we know, are not tourists. Tourists expect comfort at every point, an emphasis on seeing the sites, getting all the photos, shopping and being entertained. Pilgrims might want some of that, but they are there to meet Christ, and to explore with Him the purpose of their lives. With His graces come challenges. In Madrid it was scorching heat, water and toilet shortages, a double-capacity crowd, a thunder storm and so on. There were plenty of occasions to chant our pilgrim litany: “I will remember I am a pilgrim not a tourist”!

It’s an adage I hope you will long remember. Most of us started somewhere before Madrid, such as in the Holy Land: that was our pilgrimage BM, before Madrid. Then we had our pilgrimage AM, at Madrid. Now we are on our pilgrimage PM, post Madrid. The pilgrimage isn’t over, even if we’ve come down from the mountain: in fact it has hardly begun. The PM pilgrimage carries on for the rest of your life. As St Mary MacKillop put it, in words carved on her tomb: ‘Remember we are all but travellers here.’ We are here to encounter Christ, discover and do His will, including building a better world with Him. We’re not here to be free-loaders, just here for the ride, getting what we can out of it while putting in as little as possible ourselves, expecting lots of buzzes for little personal commitment. We are pilgrims not tourists.

In Madrid we got the Stations of the Cross Spanish-style, with lots of blood and gold, the exotic carved Holy Week tableaux from all around Spain and a young man chanting a haunting cry of Good Friday grief. “Dear young friends,” the Pope said, “may Christ’s love for us increase your joy and encourage you to go in search of those less fortunate. You are open to the idea of sharing your lives with others, so be sure not to pass by on the other side in the face of human suffering, for it is here that God expects you to give of your very best: your capacity for love and compassion.”

I saw this compassion in action among you at WYD. I was inspired by how well you looked out for each other, if needs be even carrying each other long distances. Some of you had disabilities, sickness or fatigue to contend with – and the Young Order of Malta accompanied a number with much more significant disabilities – and all experienced the helping hand of Christ through their fellow pilgrims. The converting and purifying effects of the pilgrim experience were very evident. Long may that continue in you!

Many of you have told me WYD11 was the best experience of your life and truly ‘life-changing’ for you. You’ve told me of moving moments when you came to appreciate crucial things about yourself or God. Jesus is much realer for you now and that so is God’s love for you and your love for God. Some of you told me it was your first time to think really deeply about such things.

In addition to deepening your friendship with Christ many of you said it had renewed your relationship with His Church. Some who’d been attending Mass only irregularly till then said you’d be joining us every week from now on! More regular prayer and Confession is also on your agenda. Some of you are discerning your vocations. Many of you have commented on the very positive experience of the size and universality of Christ’s flock and that the Pope and bishops take so seriously His charge to Peter to ‘Feed my lambs’. You now know as never before how much God and His Church love you and you realise you need both.

The official theme for WYD11, the bishops’ catecheses and the papal messages all focussed directly on the faith foundations of your lives. At the Papal Welcome in the Plaza de Cibeles the Holy Father walked through the gates of Madrid, was greeted by, amongst others, our very own Bethany Lentern, and was treated to a performance by Spanish dancing horses. Then he addressed the post-modern question: Do we really need foundations for our lives?

“There are many who ... believe they need no roots or foundations other than themselves. They take it upon themselves to decide what is true or not, what is good and evil, what is just and unjust; who should live and who can be sacrificed in the interests of others; leaving each step to chance, with no clear path, letting themselves be led by the whim of each moment.”

Christians, the Holy Father argued, have an alternative approach to life. We know “that we have been created free, in the image of God, precisely so that we might be in the forefront of the search for truth and goodness, responsible for our actions; not mere blind executives, but creative co-workers in the task of cultivating and beautifying the work of creation.”

“God is looking for a responsible interlocutor, someone who can dialogue with Him and love Him.” He’s looking for someone to talk to, someone to love, someone who can talk back and love back. Not a puppet or a robot or a slave, but a responsible interlocutor: someone like you. “Established in Christ, our freedom has wings. Is this not the great reason for our joy? Isn’t this the firm ground upon which to build the civilisation of love and life, capable of humanising all of us?” Post-WYD the Church looks to you to be deepening your faith, by learning more about it, by talking with God in prayer and by living it in the world.

At the Vigil, amidst thunder, lightning and driving rain, and the fall of the WYD Cross directly on the head of one of the bishops, Pope Benedict refused to leave the stage. Once things calmed down the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in the Toledo monstrance – the most beautiful in the world, made from the first gold brought back from the New World. Your devotion was palpable.

Whatever storms come your way the greatest truth is that God loves us. “This is what makes everything else meaningful. We are not the product of blind chance or absurdity; instead our life originates as part of a loving plan of God.” But faith is much more than “the mere acceptance of certain abstract truths”. It is “an intimate relationship with Christ, who enables us to open our hearts to this mystery of love and to live as men and women conscious of being loved by God.”

“If you abide in the love of Christ, rooted in the faith, you will encounter, even amid setbacks and suffering” – the thunder storms! – the source of true happiness and joy. Faith does not run counter to your highest ideals; on the contrary, it elevates and perfects those ideals. Dear young people, do not be satisfied with anything less than Truth and Love, do not be content with anything less than Christ,” the Church says to you today.

Now this WYD was about foundations, and foundations are not for their own sake. You don’t dig foundations and then put up a plaque and leave them like that for everyone to admire. They are for building on. Pete, Jake and Jonno just wanted to stay put, stay on their spiritual high forever with Jesus. Jesus promised He would be with them, with His Church, forever. Now they had their foundations, their mission would be back in the ordinary world which it was their job to make extraordinary, to transfigure with God. So the Holy Father cautioned you against the temptation of ‘going it alone’ and “living the faith according to the individualistic mentality predominating in society”. This risks “never meeting Jesus Christ or ending up following a false image of Him.”

“Having faith means drawing support from the faith of your brothers and sisters, even as your own faith serves as a support for others. I ask you, dear friends, to love the Church which brought you to birth in the faith, which helped you to grow in the knowledge of Christ and which led you to discover the beauty of his love.”

Growing in friendship with Christ and His Church, the Pope explained, “means recognising the importance of joyful participation in the life of your parishes, communities and movements, as well as the celebration of Sunday Mass, frequent reception of the sacrament of Reconciliation, and the cultivation of personal prayer and meditation on God’s word.

“Friendship with Jesus will also lead you to bear witness to the faith wherever you are, even when it meets with rejection or indifference. We cannot encounter Christ and not want to make him known to others. So do not keep Christ to yourselves! Share with others the joy of your faith. The world,” B16 stressed, “needs the witness of your faith: it certainly needs God”. He exhorted you to be “disciples and missionaries who aspire to great things and, glimpsing in their hearts the possibility of the most authentic values, do not let themselves be seduced be the false promises of a lifestyle without God.”

I hope you’ll download all the Pope’s addresses to you during WYD: after all, it’s not often that the Pope speaks directly to you, writes letters and speeches intended especially for you. Get them, then, read and reread them, and meditate upon them in the months ahead. And then think about what it means for your future. How are you going to carry forward the new evangelisation in our part of the world? In my third catechesis in Madrid I offered 10 commandments for new evangelisers. They were:

• Christian, become what you are
• Get inspiration from the best places
• Be open to God’s call
• Let God lead you down new paths
• Dare to be creative
• Make ordinary life your first field of evangelisation
• Take a genuine interest in people
• Give personal testimony to your encounters with God
• Focus on the basics of salvation in Jesus Christ
• Seek the support of wise friends.

There’s a lot to be said about each one of these, but that’s enough for now. The Pope has now set us a new horizon: at Rio our theme will be “Go and make disciples of all nations”. I think there is every reason to hope that the Catholic Diocese of Parramatta now has 283 of those B16 disciples and missionaries. The challenge now will be for us to keep unpacking the Pope’s rich messages; to find new places to lead and serve as agents of the New Evangelisation; to draw ever more closely into the ordinary life of the Church while making that ordinary life extraordinary. Can you do it? Will you do it? Will you walk with me as disciples of Christ and His missionaries in Western Sydney? By God’s grace I know you will!

Witnesses to Christ in the World

Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP's World Youth Day Catechesis for Friday 19 August 2011, Parroquia Sta Teresa y San Jose, Plaza de Espana, Madrid

A recent English survey found many people had never heard of Moses or the Magi, thought miracles were magic and that the cross is a piece of jewellery. You probably know people like that. Many who still identify as Christian have little personal faith, don’t really know much about it, and live as practical atheists, that is, as if there were no god. Others, though baptised, no longer even identify with any religion. While we’ve been away a census was held in my country. About a quarter of the people or more will probably have said ‘No religion’ or else just left the religion question blank. Things might be different in your country: they might even be worse.

Now, most of these no-religion and blank-religion people are not ‘pagans’ in the traditional sense: they are not people who’ve never heard of Christ or Christianity. Most of them were Christened. They grew up in nominally Christian families and may even have gone to Catholic schools. Their surrounding culture was ostensibly Christian or at least had a long Christian heritage. But now they inhabit a world without God. As Pope Benedict has observed, secularism marginalises God by promising a ‘paradise’ without Him. Yet experience suggests that a godless world is not a heaven but a hell: ‘filled with selfishness, broken families, hatred between individuals and nations, and a great deficit of love, joy and hope’ (Benedict XVI, Message for the 26^th World Youth Day, 3). All too often our media, educational, cultural and political institutions conspire against the civilisation of love and truth, of respect and communion, and against our best efforts to share our Faith with the world.

Sometimes we bring it on ourselves. Some aspects of our lives can be a real ‘turn off’ for others: Christian ‘faithful’ whose faith is lukewarm or angry or hypocritical; families that neglect to encourage the practice of the Faith in each other; schools that fail to present it fully or attractively; pastors whose terrible misconduct undermines people’s faith; parishes that are unwelcoming; liturgies that are uninspiring; injustices and uncharities that are ignored. Rather than passing on the Faith we can actually inoculate people to it. You probably had vaccinations as a child or when first you travelled. They work by giving people small doses of dead or impotent examples of that to which they will build immunity. Sometimes I think we build up resistance to the Faith in people by injecting them with a weak or dying religion.

One example of this is what I call Watermelon Catholicism. What do I mean by that? I mean a sweet but watery and even seedy kind of religion, with plenty of green-and-red moralising about ecology and justice but with no goal of a deeper conversion of hearts, a richer relationship with God and His Church. As Edinburgh philosopher, John Haldane, has observed, this focus on important ethical, social or political issues can ultimately amount to no more than ‘mere echoes of notions acceptable to the secular world, and familiar because of it.’ (‘The Waiting Game’, The Tablet, 5 Feb 2005, p. 9) Watermelon Catholicism apes secular modernity and reduces faith to morality, morality to a few politically correct causes, devotion to quaint customs, and Catholic identity to good citizenship. But Evangelising Catholicism should challenge our culture and ourselves, always calling us to more and better – to the communion of saints with God in this life and the next.

The last few popes have talked a lot about evangelisation. Not all Catholics are comfortable with that. The word can conjure up images of televangelists after your money, soap-boxers predicting with relish that most people are damned, or door-knockers with dire warnings about the evils of the Popish Church. The idea can seem intolerant of other religions, which after all are other people’s paths to God. Some years ago, a UK survey found that evangelists were regarded as ‘better than tax inspectors but worse than prostitutes’ (The Tablet, 26 Oct 2002, p. 37). But evangelisation need not be so scary.

Put simply, evangelisation means proclaiming the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. It seeks to bring people to faith through a personal encounter with Him. Before he died the Father of World Youth Day, Blessed John Paul II, said that the time had come to commit the Church’s energies to a new evangelisation in previously Christian communities that are falling away from the Gospel in the face of secularisation and other cultural change (Novo Millenio Ineunte 40; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 113-4). The same might be said about formerly Christian institutions, families and individuals.

So concerned is our present Holy Father about the decline of faith in some places that he’s called for a Synod on the New Evangelisation next year and established a permanent Vatican department to work on this. As a conversation starter the working document for the synod (‘lineamenta’) has already been published on the net. It reminds us that our proper concern to be tolerant must never blunt our ‘sense of boldness in proclaiming the Gospel’. We must grasp every opportunity to respond to people’s thirst for God. We must purify ourselves of fear, laziness, weariness or retreat into the self, embracing wholeheartedly our baptismal mission to communicate Christ to the world (Lineamenta for the Synod on the New Evangelization 5). Ask yourself: what is it that’s holding me back from proclaiming Christ crucified and Risen for all humanity?

So the new evangelisation is not just a job: it’s a whole ‘frame-of-mind’ (Lineamenta 6) or mind-set, a way of looking at God, ourselves and the world, of making sense of those things, and of understanding our own place and destiny. As we rediscover it for ourselves, we also help ‘weary and worn-out communities [to] rediscover the joy of the Christian experience’, to ‘find again the love they once had but lost’ (Lineamenta 6). So as the Lineamenta put so directly: “‘Being Christian’ and ‘being Church’ means being missionary; either one is or one is not. Loving one’s faith implies bearing witness to it, bringing it to others so they can participate in it. Lack of missionary zeal is lack of zeal for the Faith.’ (Lineamenta 10) If you imagine you can be a ‘spiritual’ Catholic without the ‘institutional’ Church or that you can be a Church-going Catholic without being missionary, you are not really a Catholic! But when Catholics are Church-connected and truly missionary they build up the Church as ‘the community of witnesses’, ‘the community of hope’, ‘the community of brotherly love’. Our world today needs that kind of testimony to Christ, that kind of communion with the saints, those kinds of reasons to believe, to hope and to love (cf. Lineamenta 17).

A young woman recently challenged me: I liked what you said about my generation being called to evangelise – but I’m not sure how. Her concern was a very practical one. Theologians and bishops can tell us a lot about the big picture, but what am I to do in my particular world? So in answer to her plea, here are my 10 commandments for the new evangelisation. Pope Paul once said ‘Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.’ (Paul VI, Address to the Council for the Laity, 2 October 1974) It’s a very important point. How often have you been impressed by someone’s personality or example more than any speeches they gave; conversely, how often have you been turned off by someone’s failure to practice what they preach. The Church evangelises by being real. No pretence, no tricks. We tell it like it is. We live what we tell.

Thus my first commandment for witnesses is St Augustine’s: Christian, become what you are. Be proud of being a Catholic, live your faith honestly, with obvious joy, not ashamed to speak up when you have the chance but more importantly speaking with those silent but powerful words that are the living a fully Christian life, a holy life. There’s nothing more seductive than that, nothing more likely to allure and persuade and convert others.

Yet as the old adage goes, nemo dat non quod habet: you can’t give what you ain’t got. If you’re going to have any good ideas, anything interesting to say to the world, you need inspiration. So commandment number 2: Get inspiration from the best places. Go to God in adoration and prayer. Go to the Word of God in the Scriptures and the living tradition of the Church, told in documents like YouCat. If after WYD you have a hunger for more, do a good course on your faith, read some good books, iPod the great apologists, Google and YouTube what will really enrich your faith. Today I am so very honoured to speak to you only inches away from the relics of St Therese of Lisieux; above me are statues of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. Read the lives of the saints and develop a relationship with them: they’ve struggled with issues like yours and by God’s grace came out on top. Above all, develop a relationship with Jesus Christ through those most privileged encounters with Him in Confession and Holy Communion.

Third commandment: Be open to God’s call. Some of you here are being called, right now, to give your lives to Christ, full time, in the sacred ministry as priests or religious. ‘Receive the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you now are,’ says the bishop to the newly ordained deacon. ‘Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you preach.’ That powerful charge sums up the evangelical purpose of clerical and religious life. If you have a nagging sense that you could be a herald of the Gospel, that that might be how you could do most for God and the world, that that might be what would make you most happy, have the courage to take the plunge and give ‘a vocation’ a go.

Fourthly: Let God lead you down new paths. Ask yourself: how will I be different when I go home from this big spiritual wow that is WYD? In what new ways will I contribute to the Church and the world, or with what new passion will I continue to contribute? As the Pope said yesterday, your parishes need you! So have a good look at the things they do and ask how your youthful energy, vision and creativity might help.

Fifth: Dare to be creative. What new thing might you try for God? After WYD in Cologne a young woman decided to start a thing called ‘Night Fever’. Young people now gather on a Saturday night once a month in inner-city churches across Germany and beyond, to adore Christ in Eucharistic exposition, with gentle chants and candles in the darkness; others roam the streets, pubs and nightclubs inviting people to come and spend a few minutes with the Lord. It works: many come.

A sixth commandment: Make ordinary life your first field of evangelisation – family, fellow students, work colleagues, friends. The mission today is not so much to a foreign land as to the non-Catholics and nom-Catholics (nominal Catholics) right where you are. Make your life in those places into a Gospel where people may read of Christ.

Seventh: Take a genuine interest in people, when approaching them to raise matters of faith. They are not just numbers in some conversion competition, not just evangelical projects. They are people, searching for answers like you are. They are persons, unique images of God in our world. So listen to them, befriend them, find common ground with them. Only then will deep conversations begin.

My eighth commandment: Give personal testimony about how encounters with God have changed your life. As Pope Paul said, it’s witnesses contemporary people are interested in more than experts. Don’t just give arguments and scripture quotes, important as apologetics is. Let them see that it really matters to you, that faith is what makes you tick, makes you interesting, makes you happy.

Ninthly: Focus on the basic proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ. If you do that, you will then be able to range around the whole field of Christian faith and worship, morals and prayer, past history and future dreams, as the Catechism does.

And finally: Seek the support of wise friends, whether they are in a movement or youth group or wherever. It can be tough, lonely or emotionally exhausting at times, standing up for God in a culture, amongst people, maybe even friends and family, who don’t share your faith. So make sure you have a good support group.

There was once a lad named Tom who was big and slow and rather shy. His mates at Paris Uni called him ‘the Dumb Ox’ because he was so strong but taciturn. His teacher, whom they perversely called ‘Big Al’ because he was small, could tell that Tom had a lot of potential. ‘He might be quiet at the moment, but one day you’ll hear this ox bellow,’ Al said. So he taught him well, gave him every opportunity and made sure he got his chance to speak. And speak he did. He roared. They both became stars in what was then a new ecclesial movement devoted to a new evangelisation: the Dominicans. They both more or less followed the 10 commandments of evangelisation that I have outlined this morning.

The student ended up being the greatest theologian in history, St Thomas Aquinas; the teacher, Albert the Great, also got canonised in the end. Both inspired lots of other young people to take up the adventure of preaching the Gospel. By the time Thomas died they were calling him ‘light of the Church’ and painting a glowing sun on his chest in iconography to highlight his divine wisdom. Albert ended up patron saint of science and scientists. But he rightly thought young Tom was his greatest achievement. He’d encouraged young Tom to tell the world about Christ. Your generation must likewise support and encourage each other to be witnesses.

Established in Jesus Christ

Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP's World Youth Day Catechesis for Thursday 18 August 2011, Parroquia Santa Monica, C/ Rio Manzanares 2, 28529 Rivas-Vaciamadrid, Madrid

Yesterday you talked with your catechising bishop, with each other and with God about Faith. I don’t know what you said or thought, what really struck you. We’ve all got our questions, especially about the big mysteries of God, creation and ourselves. To believe firmly in God is to believe that there is a meaning to the universe, a meaning that includes each individual person and their day-to-day lives. It means there is a Beauty, a Wisdom, a Guiding hand, a universal Law, an ultimate Truth, a Purpose behind the story of the universe and our personal stories. To grasp and hold on to this big idea, to have it planted firmly in our hearts, is called... Faith.

But many of us live in a very secular culture. Secularism, with its amnesia about God, pushing mystery to the margins, sells young people short. It says your big questions are meaningless, too hard or unprofitable; that you should be satisfied with accumulating money and gadgets, partners and experiences; that you don’t need a firm faith or ideals, commitment or self-sacrifice. It sells you short because by God’s grace you really are capable of so much more. You have the power and the passion within you to do great things: the power and passion of Faith, a divine gift through which both God and humanity are revealed in all their possibilities.

Of course if Faith is to be any use to us it has to be more than a vague confidence about life, a trust that things will turn out well in the end, a sense of your own capacities. If that’s all it is, it will easily be shaken when the hard times come. And in the meantime it won’t help things make sense or give us much direction. By Christian faith we know things, deep things, with a certainty that comes only because it’s God who is behind them. It is a firm faith that endures despite all our questions, confusions, challenges.

But is knowing things about God and creation and ourselves enough? No: it’s not enough for God or for us. God wants us to know Him, not just know things about Him. He wants a richer relationship with people than just being recognised as their cause. So Jews and Christians and to some extent Muslims believe that God chose to relate to humanity by having a special relationship with Israel and with her spiritual children. He gave us not just His name but also His twitter address so that there could be some real communication. He revealed Himself in a tradition, a context, a sacred history, through events and prophets, laws and wisdom. He invited us to tweet back. In the fullness of time, God revealed Himself as completely as is humanly possible.

So the focus of our Faith is not the Bible, the Catechism or any book, crucial and informative as these are. It is not the Church or any other building or institution, essential and supportive as these are too. No, the focus of our Faith is a person: Jesus of Nazareth. ‘In many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors, especially through the prophets. But in our times He has spoken to us through his Son’ (Heb 1:1-2) – so begins the Letter to the Hebrews. St John opens his Gospel with a beautiful poem about The Word or λόγος, the reason or argument, the communication or love-long that God has sung to Himself from all eternity and 2,000 years ago chose to sing to us (Jn 1:1-14). That Word or Reason or Song is also God’s only-begotten Son, who took flesh and dwelt among us in Jesus Christ, whom we saw in all His grace and truth and glory. He became one of us so we might be raised up to be one with Him.

God so loved world, He gave His only Son (Jn 3:16). He gave us His love-song to sing. You know how sometimes you hear a jingle and then can’t get it out of your head. God wants to be that song we hum, even unconsciously, even in our sleep. He wants to be the thought we think, the outlook we have on life, the force within, the way forward. Of course, there are plenty of alternative foundations for your life on offer in today’s supermarket of ideas. Jesus called these alternative foundations for a life ‘sand’ (Mt 7:24-27). We all know that if your house or office-block is not built on the right foundations, when the storms or earthquakes come they will be terribly damaged: this past year or so we’ve seen plenty of examples of that. It’s the same with a life. We need something solid to build on, fall back on, to ground us.

I think that’s why Pope Benedict calls the relativism of post-modern society a dictatorship. At first that sounds back-to-front. Surely dictators are the people with absolutes, who want to impose those absolutes on others, who think they’ve got a monopoly on truth and want everyone to conform to their version of it. People like that made a real mess of our last century. Millions died as a result. So isn’t Truth the real dictator? Aren’t the people who are sure of themselves the ones most likely to be the bullies, the bigots, the inflexible people? No, says Jesus, only “the Truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). “I am the Truth” (Jn 14:6) and I will make you free. I imprison no one. I take nothing from anyone. I give. I give My all. My words and deeds are pure gift. Receive them or reject them, it’s up to you. But if you accept them, they will be the rock-solid basis of your life, your identity, your destiny.

Relativism says there’s no such thing. Despite being so sure there are no absolutes, it’s absolute about that. It says Jesus is not God’s love-song, because love is just a power trip. It says Jesus is not God’s last Word, because words are just games. It says Jesus is not God’s sure foundation because relativism is anti all foundations. It’s like termites in the floorboards, concrete-cancer in the soul. It undermines our confidence that we can know anything for certain and that we can rely upon anyone but ourselves. And that is the real dictatorship. To care about facts, the absolute reality of things, and what God tells us to do about them, to be willing to trust in God and His Word, His Church and other people, may be counter-cultural, but it is essential. It can take guts to switch on the lights when everyone’s living in comfortable obscurity, with no demanding black and white, only grey. It can take courage to say True and False, and live by Right and Wrong, when those around you are conveniently agnostic, carefully anonymous or deeply cynical, when they won’t commit themselves, won’t declare their hand.

It can take guts, yet Christians know that the Gospel, God’s Word, is really ‘Good News’. The past century, more than any other in history, showed what Bad News it is when people abandon the rock of Christ, the rock of Peter, the rock of the Church and build their lives on sand. Think of the lies we were told as 20th Century men flirted with atheistic Nazism and Communism, with genocide and terrorism, with exploiting the planet with every available technology, with maximising consumption on credit like there was no tomorrow. Think of the lies we told ourselves, like happiness through infidelity in relationships, through aborting our babies, through dosing ourselves up on drugs or fleeting entertainments, through abandoning our poor, sick or elderly people, through excluding foreigners and warring with our enemies, through self-indulgence and cruelty and indifference of a thousand different kinds. To build a life on such things is to build on moving sands and the results can be catastrophic.

Sometimes Jesus was exasperated with His disciples. I guess He still is sometimes. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and then not do what I tell you?” He asked (Lk 6:46). Is all this World Youth Day stuff just empty words? He then used the image of building a house: “You know those guys who come to Me, pretend to listen to my words and then go and do their own thing? They’re like people who build their houses on sand. When trouble comes, like floods and storms, their house topples over, their hopes are dashed, their dreams wash away. But think of the guy who really listens to what I say and then does it. He’s like a person who builds on deep and solid foundations, on rock, so that when floods and storms come the house stood firm.” (Lk 6:47-48; cf. Benedict XVI, Message for the 26^th World Youth Day, 2) Responding to God’s call, trusting Him, putting His word into practice is being established, planted, built on Christ. That’s probably where St Paul got his idea for our WYD theme.

“Since you have received Christ Jesus our Lord, now live in Christ Jesus our Lord. Since you have been planted in Him, built upon Him, strengthened by Him, taught by Him, give thanks abundantly!” says St Paul (Col 2:6-7) Notice it’s Christ who takes the initiative in Paul’s text. He gives, plants, establishes, strengthens, teaches. The verbs used are in the passive voice – for the grammatically minded amongst you. The idea is that these are things that are done not by us but to us. We are passive at first. But then we respond. We choose to live in Christ or not to, to give abundant thanks or not. The word Paul uses here for thanks is ‘Eucharistia’, the Greek word from which we get our word ‘Eucharist’. Giving thanks is at the heart of what the Mass is about, so much so that St Paul called the Mass the Thanks, the Thank God (1 Cor 14:16; Phil 4:6; Col 4:2; 1 Tim 2:1). Paul’s thought here seems to be: to live in Christ is to thank God, especially in the Eucharist. And we can only do that because of what Christ has first done for us.

Jesus Christ gives Himself to the foundation on which to build our life. That’s why we are willing to do something as dangerous as coming to a WYD, or to Mass or Confession, or to the Bible or the Catechism. Dangerous, because really to listen to Christ, to respond, means to change, commit, act. Before you know it the God Word will be in your head and the Jesus Jingle in your heart. Who knows where that might take you? Before you know it God might be saying to you: my young and gifted friend, with so many opportunities, and often so generous. Yet how much more could you be doing with those gifts and privileges. I only give you one life to write your life-story with. Will it be a living Sermon on the Mount or a more mundane, more sordid story? Are you just going to go with the flow or are you making of your life a fifth Gospel, where they may read Me when they read you?

Firm in the Faith:

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Catechesis for Wednesday 17 August 2011,
Parroquia San Antonio, Calle Bravo Murillo 150, Madrid

Listen to audio version of Bishop Anthony's Catechesis

Nothing could bring together hundreds of young people such as are in this beautiful church and in churches all around this city this morning, from every continent on earth, except Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church. Even the Olympics can only bring us together as rivals. Here we are joined together by a glue called faith, more powerful than sport or music or politics or anything else that might bring people together. Hold on to that thought, because I will return to it a bit later.

I was coordinator of the last World Youth Day (WYD), held in Sydney, Australia, in 2008. Thousands of young people say they encountered God very personally there, that their faith and idealism were deepened, that it was the best week of their lives (so far!). Amidst the massive crowds to be gathered, transported, fed, accommodated, toileted and the rest, and the complexity of organising the main events, there were so many individual stories of God and me.

Let me tell you just a few. ‘Philip’, a young atheist from New Zealand, was persuaded by his mother to come to WYD. He told a young nun, “You have this life, this flame about you. You’re so full of joy and I want that for myself.” It was the beginning of a profound conversion for him.

Two other nuns told me how they met some young people in the street from Communist China. They were in Sydney for university, not WYD; they knew practically nothing about Christianity. But the sisters talked them into coming to the Opening Mass with them and they gave them a crash catechism course along the way. By the time of the consecration in the Mass the Chinese youths were crying: they had got it!

A visiting bishop from Canada wrote to me about the number of ordinary Australians he met on the street, the railway or in pubs – I don’t know how many pubs that bishop visited! – who “though not people of faith, were filled with wonder, curiosity and joy at how well the young people behaved and their enthusiasm for Jesus Christ. A few of them said it really raised deep questions for them, that they knew they would have to reflect upon once World Youth Day was over. This is a great working of the Holy Spirit!” he said.

It raised deep questions. From a very early age children ask questions: What is it? Is it me or not me? What does it taste like? How do I manipulate it? Why, Mummy? Why, Daddy? Why, universe? At first babies think they are the universe or that the whole purpose of the universe is to satisfy their wants. In due course they discover rivals for the attention of the universe and the complexity of negotiating this.

As they become increasingly reflective, children discover not only that the universe is not them and not even for them, but that the universe doesn’t need them. They don’t even have to exist. They come to understand that there was a time when they didn’t, that they were brought into existence and constantly sustained by others; and that their continued existence is rather tenuous.

Eventually, they learn that the universe, too, is made of many parts that come and go and that each part depends on others for its beginning and its continued existence. This is natural science, the study of the what and how of things, which we learn at school or by reading or by our own exploring. Behind those explorations there is a deeper awe before the mystery of existence itself and those deep questions that even guys in pubs ask themselves.

Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing at all? Does the universe have to exist? How can that be, given its comings and goings, its causes and effects, its wholes and parts? Is there something necessary that grounds our unnecessary world, something unchanging that sustains our changing world? I know I don’t have to be: there was a time when I didn’t exist and time will come when I’m dead. In the meantime: why this me in this universe? What am I for? Is there more for me after this life is over? Does that something, that Someone, behind the universe care about me, have a plan for me?

Our deep wonder and awe at the beauty, complexity, resilience and vulnerability of the universe and of ourselves is the beginning of the adventure of science but also of the adventure of religion. Science helps explain what and how things are, but not the ultimate why. Our inner child keeps asking “But Daddy: why?” We are left wondering not just how the world is, but that the world is. As the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What is it that breathes fire into these equations and makes there a world for them to describe?”

Wise men and women, through the ages, have concluded that there are only two possible answers: either there is no reason, it just is, the way it is, but there is no ultimate cause, no ultimate sense to make of it all; or there is some cause and sustainer of things, of all life and being and meaning, some ‘necessary Being’ that gives the world its existence and sustains it, without which or Whom the world would not exist.

Some things are mysteries. I don’t mean theological Sudoku puzzles that are hard to solve. I don’t mean gobbledegook that no one can understand. I mean things that are so profound yet intelligible, that we can explore and learn and understand so very much and yet never exhaust them.

Take the mystery of evil, especially of innocent suffering. Or the sometimes more stunning mystery of good, such as the hard loving some people do in face of exhaustion, ingratitude or persecution. Or the mystery of human life that parents experience when awestruck at the baby that came from them but didn’t entirely. Or the mystery of a spider’s web or the Milky Way or our own minds or so much else in the natural world that is not just big or small or intricate or simple, but truly wonder-ful, full of wonders. All these things we can explore from the different perspectives of the natural sciences, the human sciences, the arts, the trades, but still there is more to know.

God is the first and greatest mystery and before it we may gape uncomprehending. Our minds glimpse but never fully comprehend the mystery of God. We see and know things God has made and how they point to Him as the source of being, creativity, life, knowledge, love. But this is very partial because for every similarity between creature and Creator there is always a greater dissimilarity. That’s why the posture of the ancients towards God was to bow, to cover their eyes. God is transcendent and tremendous, that is, something that makes us tremble with both terror and delight.

To have faith in God is not to identify and comprehend yet one more object in the universe: God is not a thing. To know God is not to know something like our Dad writ large, or a kryptonite-immune superman, or a super-computer with Wikipedia on it, only more reliable. No, God is not in or of our universe. But to believe in God is to believe the whole universe has source, direction and meaning. It is to ask the big questions and be ready for some unexpected answers.

It’s risky saying God is not a creature but the source of creatures, not a thing but the reason of things, the big-b Being behind all beings. It can make God seem rather remote and hypothetical, like a maths theorem or an alien who got the universe going and then zipped away into hyperspace. But to believe firmly in God is to believe that there is a meaning to the universe, a meaning that includes not only the big bang and the laws of nature, but each individual human being and our day-to-day lives. It is to believe that there is a Beauty, a Wisdom, a Guiding hand, a universal Law, an ultimate Truth, a Purpose behind the story of everything.

To grasp and hold on to this big idea, to have it planted firmly in our hearts, is called ... Faith. There are three more aspects of faith I would mention just briefly today. First, that the awe at the heart of faith, at the beauty, truth and goodness of things, at the inexhaustible mystery of things, at the impossibility of ever grasping the allness of things, is something worth exploring to our graves – and beyond. It’s not just little kids that ask what and why: we are all at heart explorers. Secondly, that beauty, truth and goodness is, for all our limitations, something we can come to know something of, know with certainty, appreciate with wisdom, and live with passion. And thirdly, that sort of seeking and finding requires commitment. “Be awake to all dangers,” says St Paul, “stay firm in the faith; be brave and strong; do everything in love.” (1 Cor 16:13-14) That’s brave faith, adult faith. “After saying this, what can we add? With God on our side who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31)

Sadly, some people never really grow up spiritually. They may be very knowledgeable and sophisticated in their particular profession, art or science. Yet on the level of faith they remain five-year-olds. They never go on pilgrimage beyond their own little world. They never read or study or reflect upon the big questions as adults. They leave their faith stunted at the level of belief in Santa Claus, a vague memory or sentiment. Then, unable to reconcile their grown-up lives with their childish faith, they either live a double life – adult most of the time, childish when they are being ‘spiritual’ – or else they jettison their five-year-old gods and think that being adult means being agnostic or even atheist. That, frankly, is just intellectual and emotional laziness. “Brothers and sisters,” says St Paul, “don’t be childish in your outlook” (1 Cor 14:20); grow up in Christ. If people are going to abandon the Catholic faith as adults, they should at least know what, Who, they are abandoning, understood in an adult way.

Tomorrow’s catechesis will consider that Who question? Faith is all very well, but faith in what, in whom? We will consider what the encounter with Jesus Christ does for our outlook and identity. To say “My Lord and My God” is to change everything, deepen everything, find a new joy in everything. So on Friday we’ll consider what that means for who and what we are in the world and for the world. Let me conclude today’s talk with a last thought: the world needs you to ask the big questions and not be satisfied with glib answers. Secularism, with its amnesia about God, its pushing faith and mystery to the margins, sells you short by saying these questions are meaningless, or too hard, or unprofitable, and that you should be satisfied with accumulating money and gadgets, or with a physical and emotional rollercoaster ride through a series of partners and experiences, but with no firm faith or commitments, no self-sacrifice, no possibility of transcendence.

Secularism sells you short because by God’s grace you really are capable of so much more than this. You have the power and passion within you to do great things. That power and passion is Faith, a divine gift through which both God and humanity are revealed in all their possibilities. Secularism sells you short because without reference to God, without relationship to Him, we quickly lose the sense of our own dignity and purpose. But if I can declare that ‘I believe in God’ who creates and sustains all this wonderful universe, visible and the invisible; that I believe in His communication to me through the natural world and my own reason informed by faith, through His Church, His Scriptures and His sacraments, above all, in Jesus Christ who is the Word for my mind and the Holy Spirit who is the Inspiration for my heart: if I can profess those things, then my life is built on rock, firm and secure. And if I can say ‘I believe’ these things, then I must say ‘We believe’ also, for these are things I come to know and live with others – others called the Church, the only institution that could bring together in love two million young people from every continent. God, faith and the Church come together or not at all.

Bishop Anthony’s address at the Catholic Association of Sydney Tamils’ 20^th Anniversary Celebrations, 19 June 2011, Bowman Hall, Blacktown

Dear Reverend Fathers, chaplains to the Tamil community not just here in Western Sydney but around Australia and even from Sri Lanka and India, Honourable civil leaders, including NSW Opposition Leader John Robertson MP, former Premier Nathan Rees MP, and Member for Chifley Ed Husic MP, current leaders and members of the Catholic Tamil community, friends of the Tamil community, brother and sisters in Christ,

In the very year that I was ordained a priest, the Catholic Association of Sydney Tamils was founded. I am delighted to be with you on your 20^th anniversary and honoured to be Patron of your Association. Tonight I give thanks to Almighty God and to each of you for the deep Catholic faith you bring to enrich the Church and community in Australia; for your works of welfare and development, especially in assisting Tamil refugees; and for your many activities aimed at preserving your Catholic and Tamil culture and sharing it with the wider community.

Your program includes regular celebration of the Eucharist in Tamil, a Bible competition, a celebration of Our Lady’s birthday at the Mt Schoenstatt Shrine, Easter retreats for youth and others, Christmas carolling and dancing, an annual pilgrimage to the shrines in Berrima, a November Mass for the faithful departed, a Midnight Mass on New Year’s Eve to give thanks for the year past and entrust the year ahead to God, the publication of Vidivelli magazine, and a radiothon for Project Compassion to assist those devastated in Sri Lanka.

The big news event in the Australian Church in the past year was the canonisation of Mary MacKillop as St Mary of the Cross. I commend her to you as one who showed immense fortitude and strength in the face of hardship and injustice. Her strength came from her reliance on God and we have much to learn from her.

Now, you might say Mary MacKillop wasn’t very Tamil. But it struck me as I heard the children’s choir sing the Australian National Anthem and then a Tamil Anthem and when I saw your young ladies dance so beautifully in traditional Tamil style, how Australian you have become and how Tamil Australia has become in the process!

You see, in some other parts of the world diverse languages, cultures and religions are a cause for, or are used by various interests to create, divisions, conflicts, even wars. But you show they need not be. You reflect the message of Pentecost, when people of different languages found by God’s grace that they could understand each other, befriend each other, become one community. That is a lesson the Church ‘Catholic’, the Church universal, offers the whole human family

This year, the Diocese of Parramatta is celebrating its 25^th anniversary or Silver Jubilee and next year the whole Church will celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. When thinking of a blessing for this evening’s occasion, I thought what better prayer than the one used before every session of the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer invokes the Holy Spirit, which is especially appropriate today on the Octave of Pentecost. Western Christians tend to downplay the Holy Spirit unless they are Pentecostal or charismatic. It’s like He is a distant relative who is invited to family weddings, baptisms and funerals but isn’t really part of our day-to-day life. As a child when I heard of the Holy Paraclete I thought the priests were talking about a parakeet – an Australian version of the dove that appeared at Christ’s Baptism!

Fortunately, Eastern Christians have preserved a livelier sense of the Holy Spirit as God active in the daily life of every Christian. Now I know the word for Him was Paraclete, which means advocate or helper or defence lawyer. He is the advocate of our good causes; He is there for us amidst the injustices, including those suffered by the Tamil people in recent times. So here is the prayer of the Second Vatican Council, which I pray now for you:

Bishop Anthony’s address to Funeral Directors, St Patrick’s Cathedral Hall, Parramatta, 30 March 2011

I welcome you today to St Patrick’s Cathedral Hall and thank you for your attendance. The purpose of our meeting is to build up the already existing goodwill between the funeral directors and the Church. For centuries we have worked together at the crucial time of death and grief for the families of the deceased.

We all know that the culture around death and memorialising the departed has shifted in recent years, and that many people no longer want religious funerals. You are often left to try to provide some alternative and I know that you commonly draw on aspects of the Christian funeral tradition in these circumstances.

But others still want a Christian burial, without knowing much about its requirements and perhaps imagining that the Rites of Burial are reinvented or ‘customised’ each time they are celebrated.

Today we’d like to dialogue with you and draw on your experience as we examine some of the existing protocols around the conduct of Catholic funerals that should be known and respected.

We all know that the death of a loved one is a very sensitive time for families and in times of grief a huge array of emotions are at play as people come to make arrangements for the funerals.

Like the priests and deacons who celebrate our funerals, so too the funeral directors can end up as quasi-counsellors and mediators between tense or confused relatives.

Of course, people always want the ‘best’ for their deceased loved ones, and this can translate in all sorts of ways, often ways that tell us more about the relatives than the deceased.

Sometimes they want to turn the occasion into a kind of This is Your Life program. Or they’ve got some image in their minds from Hollywood. They want to sentimentalise their relative, perhaps to avoid facing up to the more complicated emotions they are feeling.

Often they seem to want to ‘canonise’ the deceased then and there. If you followed the process around the canonisation of St Mary MacKillop last year, you’ll know the Catholic Church doesn’t usually canonise people the week after their death.

The use of audiovisual presentations of the person’s life, the endless multiplication of eulogies, the preference for secular music – some of it with quite inappropriate themes for a religious celebration, the desire to place personal objects such as fishing rods on the coffin, all create a disjunction with what the ritual says and the Catholic Church teaches about commending the soul of the deceased to God and supporting the bereaved with the sure hope of the resurrection.

The reason why there is an expectation that a Catholic funeral will be held in a dedicated Catholic church or chapel is because the church is the place where the Sacraments of Initiation were administered, where key points of a Christian’s life are ritualised, where he or she gathered with the community to pray (at least from time to time) and where the community gathers again to express ritually its farewell with a strong emphasis on Baptism and the proclamation of the paschal mystery – the dying and rising of Christ. That is why a funeral pall may be placed on the coffin and why holy water is much used – these are reminders of Baptism.

The Catholic funeral rites are charged with signs that speak powerfully to the faithful about life and death in Christ, and it is imperative that these symbols be allowed to speak for themselves and not be lost. Many people, including many funeral directors, have spoken to me about the power of the liturgy, performed welcomingly and solemnly, to communicate hope amidst grief.

We are very aware that funeral directors try to provide a professional and caring service to their clients, and that they can sometimes be caught between the preferences of their clients and the demands of Catholic tradition.

Clear and open communication between all parties is obviously crucial here. There have been instances where parish clergy have been compromised and dragooned into situations which have led them to express great unhappiness with a particular funeral director. No doubt you’ve suffered some vice versa from time to time. Mostly, however, we have a very good working relationship and I am confident that will long continue.

We hope by this gathering today to clarify best practice in dealings between funeral directors and the Church, the protocols around arranging and celebrating Catholic funerals, the best ways to liaise with both the parish priest and the family, so as to minimise tensions, maximise pastoral care and recognise the roles of each in this important relationship.

With me today is Fr Peter Williams, who is the Director of Liturgy not only for the Diocese of Parramatta but, in a sense, for the whole country in his role as Executive Secretary of the Bishops Commission for Liturgy. I am sure you will find conversation with him enormously helpful.

Context and challenge

At the turn of the millennium the Medical Journal of Australia invited some experts to speculate on where we will go with love, life and sex in the years ahead. IVF providers Robert Jansen and Carl Wood argued that we have for decades now been gradually unravelling the ancient connections between love, life and sex and that in the years ahead we will separate them altogether. Just as “the contraceptive pill has assisted the development of recreational sex”, they wrote, so IVF will enable new practices such as single and lesbian parenting, eugenics and designer babies. A whole panoply of sexual options including “virtual sex” with a computer-generated 3-D image will be the way of the future. Natural sex and especially natural conception may come to be seen as altogether too unpredictable and … unhygienic.

Entrepreneurs of the lucrative embryo industry are always on the lookout for ways to extend their market and thus to break down any lingering taboos against the disintegration of life-making from love-making. Any caution is dismissed as ‘religious’ and therefore not be taken seriously in a modern, secular community; any government regulation or professional ‘interference’ is deplored. The marriage-based natural family and the sanctity of life, until now recognised in international and national laws and supported in umpteen subtle and more overt ways by culture and institutions are, on this view, obsolete.

Such things don’t just appear out of the blue. They reflect the enormous social and cultural shift of recent decades. Not all of it has been bad by any means. We have for instance made progress in our understanding of the dignity and rights of women and children, the importance of love and intimacy in marriage and family, the positive values of sex. But amongst the more problematical features with which a Christian vision of the human person and relationships must now contend I would mention four:

1. An individualism which privatises sexuality and sexual morality. Orientations and values are now seen as personal choices, made according to taste. Autonomy, understood as freedom from capital-N Nature — from God and His order in the cosmos, from the requirements of practical reason, from any limit to the human will — has also become in the post-modern era freedom even from our own natures. Not only nature, but anything which restricts freedom — including commitments like marriage or the demands of the common good — is seen on this account as the enemy of happiness.

2. A consumer mentality, whereby even the body, sexuality and children are planned, quality-controlled, exchanged, even traded, with consent. Sex becomes a recreational activity and fertility a customer choice. Like most consumer goods, we want sex often and enjoyably and with no strings attached. If you are not having it regularly and in various ways, you are presumed to be repressed or sad in some way. The sex supermarket both over-estimates the importance of sex – as if no one could be happy who had not had sex in the last few hours – and trivialises or under-estimates its power – as if it were no more humanly significant than defecating.

An extreme example of this is a recent proposal from Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, now at Princeton. Celebrating the triumph of individualist consumerism over superstitious religious taboos, he has declared that the last taboo – against bestiality – must go the way of those against contraception, etc. Animals should be protected from unnecessary suffering, he thought, but there is nothing special about humans or human sexual acts which make ‘mutually satisfying’ sexual relationships with household pets a problem! Singer was no doubt being deliberately shocking, but his other previously unthinkable causes such as abortion-on-demand, embryo experimentation and euthanasia for handicapped infants moved from shocking to commonplace in only a generation.

3. A consequence of individualism and consumerism has been a reluctance to engage in self-sacrifice or commit to long-term obligations to God or others. This, I recognise, is only part of the picture, but I think it is a significant part of why in Australia, as in most first world countries, the ‘vocations crisis’ in marriage and family life is arguably more grave than that for clergy and religious. Fewer and fewer people are deciding to marry at all. They marry much later, outside of Church, and are much less likely to stay together. They have few if any children, and many of those children will grow up in fragmented or complicated families. All this presents a massive social challenge as well as a tragedy for many individuals, including people we all know and love.

Sadly, our culture tells young people to experiment with multiple partners and kinds of sex, supposedly ‘safely’ (that is with a condom), and to live with several partners in order to have broad sexual experience and to seek an elusive ‘compatibility’ before or instead of marriage. Supposedly, this will make them better prepared for marriage when it comes. The sociological evidence is of course in the opposite direction: cohabiters are much less likely to marry at all and if they do, their marriages have significantly reduced ‘sticking power’. Having seen many relationships fail they are afraid to commit. Then they spend years in temporary commitments or non-commitments, learning how to have sexual relations and even how to live together without giving themselves unconditionally to the other. In a world in which nothing is ‘for life’ any more – relationships, jobs, houses, ideals – we are training our next generation to live a life in which everything is temporary, conditional, revisable: a life without any life-long commitments.

4. A related cultural shift has occurred with respect to children who are no longer presumed to be an ordinary part of coupling. ‘Safe sex’, in the modern world, is condomised sex, and that’s not just for HIV-AIDS prevention but also for baby prevention. The condomisation of sex and the demonisation of children tend to go hand in hand. In a contraceptive culture we are socialised not to love our bodies, life and children but rather to fear our fertility, to withhold it even from our spouses, to cauterise it temporarily or permanently. In the process our civilisation is becoming literally sterile.

The Good News: we are our bodies

In such a context the Church has great difficulty in communicating her Gospel on matters such as love, life and sex, marital and family ethics, especially to young people such as yourselves. Yet I am convinced that the anthropology articulated in our long tradition – stretching back thousands of years to the genesis of the Old Testament, through the New Testament, the Fathers and Scholastics, through to the recent popes – offers us important insights into these very questions which we never hear about from the media and the other makers of public opinion. This tradition of reflection, brought to a new height by the extraordinary Theology of the Body of Pope John Paul II and echoed in places by Pope Benedict XVI offers really Good News about sexuality to a world that needs it now more than ever.

The traditional Judeo-Christian conception of the ethics of love, life, sex, marriage and family, as recently enriched as ‘the theology of the body’,  begins with two simple but profound points, often missed in contemporary culture: that we are our bodies; and that what we do with our bodies says something powerful about who we are.

We are all somebody. We identify and know people by what they look and sound like. If someone punches me or kisses or tickles or has sex with my body, they are doing this to me. Whatever happens to our bodies – sickness and health, hunger and satiation, location and movement, passions and perceptions – all affect the whole person. It is impossible to have any of these experiences just as bodies and not be affected personally. So our bodies are not just extrinsic instruments, costumes, machines or prisons for some internal ‘real me’ to use. They are constitutive of our being and they express or reveal us to others. Of course there is a spiritual dimension to us also. But like all animals, we are our bodies. All human life as we know it is embodied; we are and, according to Christian faith, even after our death we will through the resurrection be again, bodily creatures. However ‘spiritual’ we are, certain bodily things always bring us back down to earth!

Gender is one of those bodily givens. This is one of the insights of the Genesis story of human origins: that God created ‘original man’ as man and woman, “male and female he created them”. There are, as it were, two different models, two different ways of being human, bodily creatures: male and female. Sex is not just an optional add-on to an otherwise asexual being. Man and woman differ in the very depths of their being, not merely incidentally; and their maleness or femaleness is essential to their constitution and identity, permeating and colouring their activities and relationships. There are plenty of contemporary writers on these themes, such as those who say men are from Mars and women from Venus. One example that has struck me from my own observations is how early infants distinguish male from female, compared with how late we discover race, colour, ethnicity, size, shape or other less radical distinctions.

The Genesis story offers another insight too: contrary to Prof Singer’s proposals, Adam finds no fitting helpmate amongst the animals. Nor can he be satisfied alone. He is/we are made for love; it is our origin, vocation, destiny. Only the woman Eve satisfies Adam’s yearning: only she can adequately complement and partner him. Man and woman are so structured as to need each other and to find completion only through union with the other. Thus ‘male’ and ‘female’ can be understood only in terms of each other, the contrast and reciprocality of the pair. Because sexual union is so significantly different a way of touching for male and female, the very sexual act reveals something of the complementarity between the sexes. But there are many ways in which men and women differ. But in Genesis, at least, this is no excuse for oppressive stereotypes: Adam and Eve are both made in the image of God and created as equal partners.

So it is, says Christ, that a man leaves his parents and indissolubly cleaves to his wife. Our bodies have a nuptial meaning; put baldly, they are made for marriage. Much of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is an exploration of ‘the nuptial meaning of the body’. It is a far cry from the days when even some Christians said the body, sex, physical expressions of love, were evil, dirty, ungodly. John Paul has shown how they can reveal much about the deepest mysteries of the human person and, ultimately, of God Himself.

Another point worth gleaning from the story of Eden: “God saw all he had made and indeed it was very good”. Adam and Eve are told by God to be fruitful and multiply, and so to engage physically; in this way they will take command of the earth, as its stewards and beneficiaries. Rather than fearing its power, its physicality, sex and the rest of the created order are to be enjoyed and celebrated. Christianity, one might dare say, should be inviting better not guiltier sex!

That said, the same story tells us of our brokenness. Last Sunday’s First Reading at Mass told of the first or original sin of man and woman against God, each other, creation, themselves. In the process they become disintegrated, what John Paul II calls ‘historical man and woman’. It is to restore the harmony with God, each other, creation and ourselves that God comes with His grace, above all in Jesus Christ. He it is who redeems our lives, our loves, our sexuality. He takes upon Himself our flesh that He might share in all its blessings and vulnerability, even death. The Word-made-flesh makes His home amongst us first in a mother’s womb and ultimately descends with us into the grave. And from the crib and the cross, from the tomb and the altar He promises us healing in this life and resurrection of the body, indeed of all that we are, in the life to come.

That is extraordinary Good News! The Gospel is so much richer an account of sex and love than Singer’s taboo-free sex with pets or the IVF industry’s partner-free sex with computers. But we are children of that culture too, and weak and confused at times. So we need periodically to explore anew not just what we are in our created natures but what we, including our bodies, are for.

What we say with our bodies

So, the Judeo-Christian tradition and sound philosophy insist, we are our bodies. We are also what we do with our bodies. For if the body and those things which it signifies about our psychology and spirituality are largely givens, basic to our natures, there is much else about us that we make for ourselves. Our choices, including our sexual activity, our procreation and our fundamental commitments such as marriage and family, are self-creative. How? Because certain choices – promises, commitments – mean certain other choices follow logically. If I say “I marry you” then normally I will live with you afterwards, hopefully forever, and in certain ways. Choices also predispose us to further choices of the same or a similar sort or within the same horizons; they make certain things come more or less easily next time around; they make us into particular kinds of persons. Right choices make further right choices easier; wrong choices make further wrong choices more likely next time around. What we do, and the habits we get into, affect our identity, relationships and destiny. That is why we call some people life-savers and others murderers, some lovers and others rapists: they do certain things and those things affect who they are.

What we do with our bodies also says something. Our bodies can be a means of communication, of conversation, through dress, eye contact, facial features, dance, mime, gesture. Sexual activity is part of bodily self-expression: it tells people things, especially about ourselves. So the Bible describes sex as language or knowledge: a revelation of the self, the language of self-giving and of personal commitment. Sexual intimacy can be a beautiful form of human expression in which each explores the other emotionally and physically, forming a special bond of trust, wantedness and love. We can say with sex honestly, “I love you, I give you myself completely, as I am; I let you see me, as I am; I invite you to be part of me; I trust you not to hurt me”. Sex can unite in conversation, communicate feelings, hopes and promises, tell a love story, a life story, be an experience of union and transcendence.

But sex can also cloud thinking, become self-centred, exploitative, manipulative, oppressive, humiliating, obsessive, even violent. We can lie with sex, saying “I love you, I give you myself completely”, but with our fingers crossed, really meaning “just while it’s fun” or “just for tonight” or “as long as it gives me pleasure”. It is can be a specially powerful kind of lie, told with the whole person, physically and emotionally. Thus the sexual language can be an occasion for, a means to, and an expression of the most noble and other-directed side of our nature. On the other hand, it can be used to tell a lie, allowing or excusing using another person to masturbate in or with.

Many people today think like Humpty-Dumpty who said in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” We imagine we can give sex whatever meaning we choose individually or agree on together. It has no meaning intrinsic to itself, no natural significance. But from the classical perspective the “sex is what I make it” approach is a severely privatised notion of the language of love, alienated from faith, community and tradition; it is also dangerously abstracted from our biology, our animality, failing to do justice to the objective power and significance of the sexual body language, the ideas it inevitably expresses. We debase our sexual language, devalue the currency of sex, and underestimate its power, every time we try to make it express something different from its inherent meaning.

What sex says

So far, so good. We are our bodies; so what we do with our bodies affects who we are and what we say. The sexual act or language has a natural significance: it is not merely what we make it. While there has not been time to develop these thoughts more fully this morning, they will upon reflection make sense to many people. But now a problem arises: if sexual self-expression is a natural language which can be used and abused, what does it naturally communicate, objectively signify, intrinsically mean?

Traditionally, Christians have understood sex to have two, inseparable dimensions or significances. First, bodily, sexual self-giving is ‘making love’ – something our culture vaguely remembers in the language it still uses for sex. It represents a choice to give and receive love through union with another person. It constitutes us as ‘lovers’ in our identity, relationships and destiny. This kind of union is a unique form of communication of love by touch.

Secondly, bodily, sexual self-giving also represents a choice of the good of life, a purpose of giving and receiving life, to the other and from the other and through the other. Sex constitutes us not just as lovers but also as potential parents in our identity, relationships and destiny. Once again it is a unique form of communication in this respect, the only mathematics by which 1+1 = 1, and then 1+1 = 3. The same act which unites people ‘as one flesh’ can also give life to a new human person.

The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s began the disintegration of the sexual act, of the life-giving dimension from the love-giving dimension, which has led us a generation later to hear voices for pet-sex and computer-sex and umpteen other ways of disintegrating life from love, and love from marriage. Much of this was well meaning if rather naïve. The prophets of the sexual revolution promised that lots of (sterile) sex would be a cure-all for almost everything: sexual tension, loveless marriages, unwanted pregnancies, even war. But a generation later we seem more sex-crazed than ever, our marriages are collapsing at an alarming rate, unwanted pregnancy rates have soared fuelling previously unthinkable rates of abortion and ex-nuptial births, and there is no sign of us giving up on war. Instead of ‘making love not war’ as the flower-power brigade proposed we have adopted the ‘all’s fair in love and war’ mentality and engage in both with equal pragmatism and abandon.

To say that sex should say both life and love is not to deny that there are many ways of developing a deep and loving relationship without sex, and of relating as sexual beings without engaging genitally. But on the traditional view sex which does not say love and life is not good sex, not reasonable sex, not honest sex; if we seek to exclude either, by damaging our bodies or our sexual acts, permanently or temporarily, we are having sex ‘with our fingers crossed’; we are telling a lie or make-believe with body language. So too when we engage in unloving intercourse with our spouse, or fornication or adultery or homosexual acts with someone who is not our spouse, or pornography or masturbation or incest or rape … Christian faith and experience teach that the full expression of sexual love is when a married couple give themselves to each other honestly and completely: any other use of sexuality is a diminishment, impoverishment, debasement of the sexual language, at most imitating marital sexual love, but in the process demeaning both marriage and the persons themselves, their faculties and language.

This is where the crunch comes for many people. Most are happy enough with sentimental talk about the significance of sexual love, as long as this is some kind of distant ideal. But we are less happy with the notion that anything less is an impoverishment and unreasonable and that this has immediate, practical implications for what we should choose and do.

Sexual integrity

Chastity has had a bad press. People think he or she is a moralising policeman, a frigid prude, a half-repressed Jekyll-and-Hyde. Well if chastity is that, it is a vice rather than a virtue, something which does us violence rather than integrating and freeing us. Maybe sexual integrity is a better word for it. Chastity or sexual integrity heightens, liberates and integrates our sensuality, passions, emotions, affections, sexual desires. It is that character trait that integrates our sexual passions and choices with the rest of our life-story, so that our sexual life coheres with the rest of our personality and life story. It means we say what we mean and mean what we say with sex. So it is a doing virtue rather than an avoiding virtue, an empowerment rather than a restraint on the free expression of love, a precondition to happiness rather than an enemy of it.

Chastity or sexual integrity is for everyone, not just monks and nuns. We all need to cherish and reverence the goods at stake in sex, marriage and family life, according to our particular vocation and for the good of self and others. So married couples, too, must face temptations against chastity and integrate their sexuality into their married and parental love. This will not be achieved effortlessly, whether you are single or married. For many people chastity involves a constant struggle against desire and habit – a struggle to develop commonsense habits, a constant openness to grace especially through the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist, counsel of wise others, all in the face of temptation and fallings of various kinds. Sexual frustration will still be commonplace for many: here we bump up against the perennial problem of suffering, of unfulfilled desire.

Enhancing Spiritual Formation in the Parramatta Catholic School System
Keynote address for Parramatta System Leadership Day on Enhancing Formation, Rosehill Function Centre, 27 January 2011

1. Who is formation for?

Most of my Dominican years were spent in formation: first, as an object of that process and then, after a  few years away, back in the Student House as the agent of the process, as the Master of Students preparing for priesthood. Novices in religious congregations and students in seminaries are commonly said to be ‘in formation’, the implication being that they aren’t yet formed when they join up, but in due course will be ‘out of formation’, and that in the meantime something happens to them called ‘formation’ that gets them ready for their mission.

There are lots of problems with such talk of course. A young religious or seminarian is not a tabula rasa, a blank page, for formators to write on. They come in fact with lots of baggage, a history, temperament, gifts, foibles, already significantly formed and often very resistant to being re-formed. What then happens is some good informing and reforming, some bad deforming, some neutral conforming, all of which is formation. The goal is mission, and formation may or may not prepare them well for that, but further development is always possible: it isn’t finished on our Baptism Day, Profession Day or Ordination Day.

To meet some of these logical lapses, phrases such as ‘initial’ as opposed to ‘continuing’ formation have appeared in the lexicon of religious life. Formation of the human person starts at birth if not before. Our family of origin, the nurturing we receive from our parents, relationships with siblings, schooling, friendships, work, physical activities, aesthetic experiences, successes and adversity of various kinds – all shape our character, outlook and behaviour.

The process continues as we move through adult life and even after death in Purgatory, as we get ready for the really real life, the eternal life of heaven.

The quilt of experiences, learnings, information, skills and acquired habits of the heart can be called formation. Formation language, like the vision and mission language, has been translated to other areas of Catholic life and practice, and beyond into the secular world. Whether or not all formation experiences are equally purgatorial, these days formation is for everyone.

This morning I want to make a few points about spiritual formation for a particular being and doing, that is for the vocation and task of the Catholic educationalist in contemporary Parramatta.

In 2008 Pope Benedict XVI, addressed some of these issues in a talk given to Catholic educators (Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Meeting of Catholic Educators, Catholic University of America, 17 April 2008), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/april/ documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080417_cath-univ-washington_en.html)

Since he couldn’t be here today I thought I might report some of his thinking. “First and foremost, every Catholic institution is a place to encounter the living God who, in Jesus Christ, reveals his transforming love and truth.” In meeting Him we discover answers to the deep mysteries of God, of creation and of ourselves, and those answers always invite deeper relationship and more searching of the mysteries.

In the process we are changed, whether instantaneously or over so long a stretch of time we can only notice the difference in retrospect. Such a radical change is called conversion and it can occur at physical, intellectual, affective, moral, spiritual and/or social levels. The proclamation of the Gospel and the whole of evangelisation is aimed at bringing about that conversion through and to Christ. Formation can help prepare, accompany, sustain and deepen such conversion.

So my first principle of formation is: The formation of all involved in Catholic education is oriented towards enabling and sustaining a life-changing encounter with Christ. It offers various opportunities for meeting and for deepening a relationship with God.

Statistics are useful tools and you use them frequently in planning and budgeting, enrolling and assessing, in helping to determine the strategic direction of the school system and the individual school, in measuring the performance of a student body and the individual student at key stages of their schooling.

The Catholic Education Commission of New South Wales collects data on enrolments in Catholic schools, primary and secondary, systemic and congregational, data that was the jumping off point for Catholic Schools at a Crossroads (Pastoral Letter of the Bishops of NSW-ACT on Education, 2007) which I will re-introduce later this morning.

We know how many Catholic and non-Catholic students and teachers there are, how many from low SES, Aboriginal or ESL backgrounds, how many with disabilities, what has been the learning gain in their passage through our school system and so on.

Useful as all the data is, it does not define the Catholic school. Pope Benedict stated that a school’s Catholic identity is “not simply a question of numbers ... It is a question of conviction”.

To test that conviction he poses some critical questions: “Do we really believe that only in the mystery of the Word made flesh does the mystery of man truly become clear? Are we ready to commit our entire self – intellect and will, mind and heart – to God? Do we accept the truth Christ reveals? Is the Faith tangible in our schools? Is it given fervent expression liturgically, sacramentally, through prayer, catechesis, curriculum, acts of charity, a concern for justice and respect for God’s creation?”

In providing spaces for such encounters and convictions, Catholic education systems and institutions provide genuine formation for their leaders, staff, students and families.

But relationships can be illusory and conviction fanatic. Without faith and reason informing, expanding, critiquing, we may be in love with an illusion or committed to an ideology.

The true encounter with the living God in Jesus Christ “elicits a desire to grow in the knowledge and understanding of Christ and his teaching”. So a second principle of formation for Catholic educators is: The formation of all involved in Catholic education must serve their life-long growth in knowledge and understanding of the Faith.

Now, many of us know less about our faith than we wish we did. Some of those we work with don’t know much about it at all and don’t even know what they don’t know. Good formation elicits a hunger for a more informed faith. It offers opportunities for sating that hunger through learning, celebrating, contemplating, enacting and otherwise deepening that faith. Then the hunger grows some more.

After all our staff have had a chance to do a Masters in Theology as well as retreat days, various liturgical and prayer experiences, social service projects, visits to monasteries and missions, and so on, we can talk about some more!

We might have had several opportunities for encounter with the living God. We might have learnt a lot about Him. But still our faith might be immature, sterile or dead. “Those who meet (Christ) are drawn by the very power of the Gospel to lead a new life characterised by all that is beautiful, good and true – a life of Christian witness,” the Pope suggests. This suggests a third principle: that the formation of all involved in Catholic education must motivate and enable them to live as witnesses to the faith.

Catholic faith, like seed, is not for storing indefinitely. It is for sowing, preferably in soil already prepared by evangelisation and formation. We throw the seed of faith towards others by giving public witness to our faith in various ways. “The dynamic between personal encounter, knowledge and Christian witness is integral to the diakonia (service) of truth which the Church exercises in the midst of humanity,” Pope Benedict concludes. This is precisely what the Church is for.

But where is the novitiate for the formation of Christian educators? Benedict is clear: a life of Christian witness can only be “nurtured and strengthened within the community of our Lord’s disciples, the Church”. The encounter with Christ and His truth and love can only be sustained by active engagement in the Christian community, so that the individual moves from a merely private search for a personal spirituality to being “numbered among God’s people. This same dynamic of communal identity – to whom do I belong ? – vivifies the ethos of our Catholic institutions.”

Christian educators must “ensure that the power of God’s truth permeates every dimension of the institutions they serve”. And so the fourth principle of formation for us might be this: formation of all involved in Catholic education must build up the school as a community of faith and help build up the broader Church, including parish, families, school system and diocese.

The school as a community of faith cannot exist in its own universe any more than the individual believer. It is not a parallel Church, not one constructed by the individuals who happen to inhabit it.

The Catholic identity of the school, Benedict continues “is not (just) dependent upon statistics. Neither can it be equated simply with orthodoxy of course content. It demands and inspires much more: namely that each and every aspect of the learning community reverberates within the ecclesial life of faith”.

Such reverberation means celebrating the Christian mystery in the liturgical cycle; developing ever stronger working relationships with the priests and people of the parish; collaborating in diocesan initiatives; and gladly and faithfully drawing on the teachings and practices of the Church in formal and informal programs of evangelisation and catechesis.

Of course our schools are not only the Church in miniature and parts of the universal Church: they are also our society in miniature and parts of a wider culture. That culture is helpful in many ways with its social capital of Judeo-Christian assumptions and practices at many levels, its strong emphasis upon and resourcing of quality education, its support for professionalism amongst staff and real outcomes for students, and its openness to diversity in the school sector including a strong Catholic presence.

On the other hand, as the Holy Father observed in his address, secularist ideology turns tolerance of legitimate diversity into denial of moral right and wrong, “drives a wedge between truth and faith” and makes “the satisfaction of the individual’s immediate wishes” the ultimate criterion for everything. These cultural failures can be real obstacles to the school’s efforts to educate and to transmit the Gospel.

But as I noted in a talk to principals and priests last November (“Catholic schools as centres of the new evangelisation,” Parramatta Priests and Principals Meeting, 11 November 2010 http://www.parra.catholic.org.au/bishop-of-parramatta/most-rev-anthony-fisher-op/addresses-by-the-bishop.aspx), before we throw stones at the surrounding culture we must recognise that aspects of our Church’s internal life can be a ‘turn off’ for some young teachers and their students: uninspired and uninspiring liturgies and preaching; the misbehaviour of some clergy and religious; pastors who fail to connect with youth; schools that fail to present the faith fully or attractively.

I suggested that we dare to ask whether our schools sometimes serve to inoculate our young people to the faith rather than pass it on to them? Vaccination works, of course, by giving people small doses of dead or impotent examples of that to which they build up immunity.

So my question became: do we build up resistance to the faith in our young people by feeding them on a banal, half-serious ‘Christianity lite’, unlikely to inspire them to give their life to Christ? In the process are we undermining their hunger for ‘full cream Catholicism’ – that encounter, understanding, witness and community to which Pope Benedict refers?

The Pope suggests that in the face of unhelpful developments in our culture and failures in our own community we must cultivate a kind of “intellectual charity”. Educators must recognise that the profound responsibility to lead young people to the truth is the opportunity for an act of love. Indeed, the dignity of education lies in fostering the true perfection and happiness of those to be educated.

So a fifth principle of formation for educators might thus be this: formation of all involved in Catholic education must lead to an appreciation of the vocation of teaching as a kind of intellectual charity – a gift of the self for the good of the other.

3. Christian formation in the professional development of educators

When I Googled ‘formation’, the first three references that came up that day (out of approximately 149 million references) were from Wikipedia and from three different contexts: aerobatics, geology and soccer. Their immediate application to today’s task may not be obvious, but may still be instructive.

The reference to ‘formation flying’, the disciplined flight of two or more aircraft under the command of a flight leader, points us both to what formation is and to what it is not.

What it is: a joint effort to achieve an agreed mission, requiring a joint vision and coordination of efforts. Crossroads attempts to articulate the vision and mission for the Catholic school in contemporary NSW. It looks to its system leaders to help achieve that mission by forming all those involved so that they are ‘mission ready, willing and able’.

It must be absolutely clear to us that if our flight leaders – in the CEO, principals, APs and RECs – are not 100% behind the spiritual formation of the rest of our educators  there will be no common formation. You all play a key role in enhancing spiritual formation that is responsive to the religious dimension of our schools.

The risk with an aerobatic model of formation, however, is that it might suggest that formation is essentially about a set of complicated manoeuvres, spectacular dives that undeniably require great skill, aimed at satisfying the flight leader (the Bishop or Air Marshall Whitby) and thrilling the crowds (perhaps the parents).

But formation is not just about moving through a checklist of experiences which teach some clever drills. One could attend all the professional development days devoted to spirituality, tick all the boxes for participation, and yet be unaffected.

Spiritual formation requires engagement of the person’s spirit with the Holy Spirit, not merely with the set of activities planned for the day. Cor ad cor loquitur, heart – Sacred Heart – speaks to heart.

A spiritual formation day’s experiences are instruments of formation but it is the Holy Spirit who is the agent of formation. I don’t think that saying that sets the bar too high, far from it. I’m really talking about disposition.

In the very first chapter of Mark’s Gospel a leper comes to Jesus to beg a cure. “If you want to, you can heal me,” he says. Jesus responds, “Of course I want to. Be healed.” (Mk 1:40-45) That’s what I mean by disposition to formation: those involved must actually want formation for mission and be willing to be changed to make them mission ready.

A few chapters later in Mark’s Gospel Jesus returns to His home town and finds the people stubbornly resistant to Him. Mark notes with sadness that as a result no miracles could happen there (Mk 6:1-6). Even the Holy Spirit is disabled by the closed heart or mind.

Now the will to be formed for mission by the Holy Spirit may be a raging fire of desire or a nervous flicker at the dawn of an adult life of faith: that is not for us to judge. But for leaders encouraging staff to enter into formation, it is important to alert participants to the right disposition in a very encouraging way. All we have to do is co-operate, the Holy Spirit does the ‘hard yards’, if we let Him. No aerobatics required on our part.

Now for the geological formation. Given the diversity of faith backgrounds, experience and maturity amongst our leaders and staff today, it is more important than ever that they receive formation experiences that are substantial and that have substantial follow-up.

These must be as rock solid as the name and faith of Peter. By that I mean that formation must be grounded solidly on the Scriptures and Tradition of the Church, and not merely on the experiences of the individuals or the fashions of the age. I’m sure you have met many people, as I have, who are hostile to the Church because of something they imagine it teaches or does and who are nonplussed when told that’s not what Catholic believes at all!

Sound knowledge of the faith goes hand in hand with formation in the faith: you can’t be well-formed in faithful discipleship and yet not know the Master to whom you are disciple or the ways He has called His followers to live and breathe and have their being. So we must not shy away from the Mysteries of the Faith for fear of putting off the lukewarm.

Allow me to be very direct here. Christianity lite, that inoculating variety of spirituality that reduces our moral life to social justice and ecological moralising, our tradition to founders and charisms, and our identity to being good citizens and workers, offers our secular world little more than echoes.

But Full-cream Catholicism should deeply challenge and convert our culture and ourselves, again and again, always calling us to more and better – to the communion of saints with the Holy Trinity in this life and the next.

I was asked at the time to say a bit more about Christianity lite and full-cream Catholicism, and I have been thinking about it in the weeks since. There is a version of Jesus, for instance, offered not just in some RE but also in some spiritual formation programs, in which Jesus is a special person, an inspiration, a friend, all of which is true; but what they dare not say is that He is the Creator of the Universe made creature, He is the Incarnate Word of God, the mediator of eternal life, the sole Saviour and guide to saving truth, the judge of the living and the dead.

A cosy therapeutic Jesus is an easy sell to those who are not yet much interested in the faith because He makes no demands of us. To meet this Jesus makes us feel warm inside but does not require any deep conversion. But this cosy Jesus is our own invention.

Or think of the way the Eucharist is sometimes portrayed as holy bread in a sacred meal which celebrates the community who attend. Again, that’s true as far as it goes. But why shy away from saying the love of Christ in the Eucharist is so total He willingly gives His all – His Body and Blood, His humanity and divinity, for us – and this is so much more wonderful to be part of than a nostalgia trip with holy bread as a souvenir.

Cosy prayer spaces with nice-smelling candles and gum-nuts may have their place, but they are no substitute for the confronting stone of altar and tomb which speak of the ‘the great mystery’ of innocent suffering and of the self-gift and sacrifice at the core of all real love.

So you might say that there’s a geological formation appropriate to Christological and Eucharistic faith. To be solid formation must not only avoid superficiality and confront the hard bits; it must also be thorough, avoiding a piecemeal approach with a bit of this and a bit of that on each formation day.

I commend your decision to offer something more substantial on a single topic for a block of time, and the focus this year on Jesus Christ. I commend too the practice of conceptualising formation as a regular feature of staff life at the diocesan and school level.

Back to Google and its third kind of formation, the placement of a team of footballers on a pitch. Happily it does not really matter which code! The point is community and I have touched on this already.

Formation is not an individual pursuit. The formation of seminarians and young religious takes place in a seminary or convent community. Your Christian communities are the diocese and parish, the school system and the individual school, and your own families.

Certainly, some reading and reflection has to be done alone but the Holy Spirit most often works through our Christian communities. That’s not just my idea: read any letter of St Paul and you will find it said again and again. Christian formation takes place in the community of Christ’s faithful who are also on the path of formation in holiness.

4. Formation for the New Evangelisation

Catholic Schools at the Crossroads recognises that among our students today are some whose families are regular Mass-goers, involved in parish life and effective transmitters of the faith; but that many students present at our schools with little knowledge of the faith or connection with the life of the Church. Crossroads makes it clear that we welcome such students but with a clear mission of assisting them to develop their faith and practice.

You do not have to be a very astute reader of the signs of the times to realise that many students in our schools need evangelisation more or before or alongside catechesis. At the pastors-principals forum I recalled Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II’s calls to commit the Church’s energies to a new evangelisation in previously Christian societies that are falling away from the Gospel in the face of secularisation and other cultural change.

Pope Benedict has been equally plain: “It’s not difficult to see that what all the Churches living in traditionally Christian territories need is a renewed missionary impulse.” The same might be said for previously Christian institutions, families and individuals. This means that evangelisation can no longer be left to the official missionaries and professionally religious. Everyone connected with Catholic education must, in a sense, be a missionary, a new-evangeliser. And schools and parishes must work together, as seamlessly as possible, in an united evangelical mission to our young people.

I won’t rehearse all I said on those matters in my November address: it’s on the web if you are interested. There I reflected upon whether we need a new evangelisation, new catechesis and a new whole-person education – a new sense of being and doing in our schools.

Today I take it as a given that we do need these things, so the question becomes: how we are to enhance formation for school leaders, teachers and staff, students and their families? This has been named as a strategic priority for our schools this year and each school is drafting an implementation plan.

Today I have suggested that formation of all involved in Catholic education must:

· be oriented towards enabling and sustaining a life-changing encounter with Christ;

· serve their life-long growth in knowledge and understanding of the faith;

· motivate and enable them to live as witnesses to that faith;

· build up the school as a community of faith and help build up the broader Church; and

· lead to an appreciation of the vocation of teaching as a kind of ‘intellectual charity’.

In order to achieve this I have suggested that spiritual formation of educators requires:

· leadership by the system leaders in the CEO and in each school;

· a clear sense of the mission of Catholic education for which they are being readied: the mission of the new evangelisation, catechesis and education;

· openness to the Holy Spirit as the principal formator as Spirit-speaks-to-spirit;

· solid grounding in the Scripture and Tradition of the Church;

· a substantial and challenging version of the faith; and

· recognition of the Holy Spirit working through the diocesan, CEO and school communities.

This invites some discussion here and in our schools:

1. Do we have a clear sense of the mission for which we are being readied by formation? What does it mean for our schools to be centres of the new evangelisation?

2. What elements of formation would be needed for teachers to engage in the new evangelisation?

Bishop Anthony Fisher's Address, Abiding in Him: the New Evangelisation and the Culture of Life in Contemporary Australia, Couples for Christ Australia Evangelisation Rally Abide in me, my beloved, Our Lady Queen of Peace Parish Hall, Greystanes, 23 January 2011

Thank you for your invitation to address this Evangelisation Rally, your first major event in 2011. This week we will celebrate three important days: on Tuesday, the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, Patron of Evangelisation; on Friday, the memory of St Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s greatest theologian who also happened to be a Dominican, and who wrote his famous Summa contra gentiles specifically as a handbook for missionaries; and in between, on Wednesday, Australia Day, the day we commemorate the beginning of European settlement of Australia and pray for this country, which is the mission field for Couples for Christ Australia.

On Australia Day citizenship ceremonies will be held all around the country and people who have settled here from every continent will officially become Australians. What sort of a country are they joining? Here’s a few facts that might interest the Couples for Christ movement.

First, about couples. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently published Australian Households: the Future. It projects trends on households to the year 2031 (www.abs.gov.au/socialtrends). The report distinguishes three types of broad family units: couples with children; couples without children; and one-parent families. The fastest-growing unit is couples without children. This includes couples who have no children, and those whose children have left home. Women are expected to continue to be the parent in most one-parent families but, by 2031, 17% of lone-parents will be men. Lone person households will also increase in number, mainly as a result of the ageing of the population but also because people are coupling later or not at all. Lone person households will grow from 1.9 million now to 3.2 million in 2031. So Singles for Christ should have a growing market-share amongst your organisation’s several branches!

A growing proportion of those who do couple will not be married. Australians are marrying later, if at all; many of those marriages do not survive till death; and most will have one or two children, if any. Like much of the Western world we would be doomed to extinction were it not for immigration, which fuels 57% of our population growth. With migration the resident population of Australia has now passed 22.5 million and our population is growing by about 1.7% (or 377,100 people) per year. Our remaining natural growth is due to someone being born every second minute, while someone dies every fourth minute (abs.gov.au, media release 21.12.10) and an unborn child is aborted every sixth minute.

If people are not coupling in the way they used to, are they at least ‘for Christ’? In the most recent census (2006) two-thirds (64%) of Australian residents claimed adherence to Christianity. Just over one-quarter (26%) said they were Catholics. 18.7% stated that they had no religion and 11.2% did not answer the question, which was optional.

One-quarter of Australians self-identify as Catholic but that does not mean they all practice. Many people connect with the life of the Church only from time to time, for example at Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals, or through a Catholic school, hospital or welfare service. National weekly Mass attendance is currently about 1 in 6 (16.3%) Australian Catholics, and a little higher in Sydney and Parramatta. Confession figures are low. Church weddings and baptisms are declining in many places.

What are they doing instead? The obvious answer in Australia would be: worshipping Nike, the Greek goddess of sporting victories. In fact, despite the prominence of that cult, far more Australians are involved with their Church than any other organisation and far more attend Mass on the weekend than attend the football. Aussie Rules has the largest attendance amongst the sports cults, followed by horse racing, rugby league and motor sports. Just as with Church attendance, only a small proportion of the passive attendees in the sports religions also engage more actively in their faith, with walking being our favourite physical activity followed by the bundle of aerobics, fitness and gym, with swimming coming third (abs.gov.au, media release 21.12.10).

The decline in active participation in the sporting religions is part of the cause of the obesity epidemic in Australia. Most of us go for more sedentary occupations, not just in leisure times but in the workplace. While weekly Sydney Morning Herald reading here in Sydney is now at most 1 in 4 people (SMH website), 4 out of 5 now use the internet regularly (Neilsen).

What do those media teach us? You might well say: there’s everything in the media. Some years ago I heard that the two most common uses of the internet were for religious material and for pornography. That might have changed, but not I suspect because of any decline in the amount of internet porn. Apart from being an over-sexualised and under-chaste culture, we know we face the destructive power of ideologies such as individualism, materialism and secularism, of social trends such as commercialism, family breakdown and widespread values disorientation, and of institutions such as the media, which often serve causes that are far from healthy.

But before we throw stones at the surrounding culture, we might usefully examine the glass house we live in. Aspects of our Church’s internal life can be a ‘turn off’ for people: uninspired and uninspiring liturgies and preaching; the misbehaviour of some clergy and religious; hypocrisy or lukewarmness amongst our laity also; pastors and parents who fail to connect with youth; schools that fail to present the faith fully and attractively; peer groups who make Mass-going a sort of social death for young Catholics.

There are many other aspects of our culture that we must contend with. On the other hand, the traditional core Australian values are quasi-Christian ones – part of the huge Christian social capital upon which we still regularly draw. These include:

• The good life: the ideal of people having a long life in good health, a comfortable home (house, marriage, family), work and leisure, surf and sand, sport and ‘mates’, and the freedom to do their own thing
• Having a go: the ideal of people standing on their own two feet, seeking to do something worthwhile even if difficult, assuming responsibility and a certain independence
• A fair go: the ideal of freedom, justice and opportunities for all, a level playing field, looking after your mates, suspicion of authority and ‘tall poppies’
• Being fair dinkum: pride in being plain-speaking people, down-to-earth, trustworthy, with no pomposity or sham
• She’ll be right: a certain optimism about things and toleration of others, not holding grudges or getting too hot under the collar about ideologies.

You might want to qualify these ‘traditional Aussie values’ or add some others. Some are virtues or excellences of character; some are principles or norms for living by; virtues or principles they are largely from our Christian heritage. Some are, however, more dubious. Not all are especially Australian or held by all Australians; some might be more myth than reality. But thinking about the values of our culture gives us some context for our evangelisation work. This is the soil in which the true vine, Jesus Christ, must be planted afresh.

Evangelisation and New Evangelisation

Now, evangelisation is not a word Catholics are always comfortable with. It can conjure up images of American televangelists and people door-knocking with pamphlets in hand, hoping to liberate you from Babylonian captivity to the Church of Rome and redirect you on the course to salvation. Some years ago, a survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that evangelists were regarded as “better than tax inspectors but worse than prostitutes” (“Bishops ponder how to reach out to a secular society,” The Tablet, 26 Oct 2002, p. 37).

I think evangelisation is a much more noble activity than either of these trades – and I’ve got nothing against tax-collectors! It “means proclaiming the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. Its goal is bringing people to faith through a personal encounter with Him.” (Bishops of NSW-ACT, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads, p. 12) The idea of a new evangelisation comes from Pope Paul VI (in Evangelii Nuntiandi) and especially Pope John Paul II (e.g. Christifideles Laici 44; Redemptoris Missio 3; Ecclesia in Oceania 18 & 13; Novo Millennio Ineunte 40; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 113-114) and was a passion for both popes.

Pope Paul noted three categories of people who, as a result of the de-christianisation of our times, needed re-evangelisation:

•  the many baptised who live quite outside Christian life;
• simple people of faith with a weak knowledge of its content; and
•  others seeking a maturer faith than that they received as children (Evangelii Nuntiandi 52).

John Paul said that the time had come to commit the Church’s energies to a new evangelisation in previously Christian communities that are falling away from the Gospel in the face of secularisation and other cultural change. The same might be said for previously Christian families and previously Christian individuals. This means that evangelisation can no longer be left to the official missionaries and professionally religious. Everyone must, in a sense, be a missionary, a new-evangeliser. Everyone must see their job as planting the vine of Jesus Christ even in soil as alien as contemporary Australia. That is something I know the Couples for Christ movement understands and is passionate about.

Some Benedictine insights

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI established a Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation (Motu proprio, Ubicumque et semper, 21.09.10). He notes that the essential Gospel message remains the same in every generation and place, as is the missionary passion to “share the inestimable gift that God has wished to give us, making us sharers in his own life”. But the Holy Father realises that changed times require fresh approaches. He puts it simply: “It’s not difficult to see that what all the Churches living in traditionally Christian territories need is a renewed missionary impulse.” But no “single formula ... would hold the same for all circumstances”: we must look at each culture, parish, workplace, generation and family, and adopt appropriate language and methods.

The tasks of the new Council are:

• to examine in depth the theological and pastoral meaning of the new evangelisation
• to promote and to foster the idea
•  to publicise and support new evangelisation initiatives in local Churches, religious congregations and movements (like your own)
•  to study and to encourage the use of modern forms of communication as instruments for the new evangelisation and
• to promote the use of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in these tasks.

The aim of the new evangelisation is, above all, the personal encounter with Christ for people who once knew Him, or knew of Him, however vaguely, but have fallen away from His friendship, His wisdom, His sovereignty in their lives. In his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI began by observing that “Being Christian is not the result of ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a Person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, 1). Once people have encountered the Christ it should be life-changing for them: the more they love him the more they will want to get to know Him and about Him, and vice versa; and the more they will give witness to him. So evangelisation is followed by catechesis and other forms of formation and faith enrichment; new evangelisation must be paralleled, too, by faith development.

The best preparation for the ministry of evangelisation is of course being a faithful disciple yourself. Only those who abide in Christ, in his love and wisdom, the sap flowing from his vine, will bear fruit, as the Johannine scriptural theme of this day suggests (Jn 15:5,8). I recommend in particular attention to the Word of God, participation in the Eucharist and Confession, and a deliberate concern to offer Christian witness in all areas of your life as the best ways to abide in Christ. Of course, these areas are intrinsically related to one another.

In his recent Post-Synodal Exhortation on the Word of God, Verbum Domini Pope Benedict said that our discipleship must be supported by daily meditation on the Word of God. He encouraged everyone “to cultivate an intense relationship with the Word”, especially through ‘lectio divina’, in order to “discern the signs of God in our own time, and to proclaim the Gospel effectively”. Prayerful reading of the Word of God can take place during a few quiet moments at home, in a park at lunchtime but, best of all, in the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy. And that means we need to draw people back to Word and Sacrament not merely as a fruit of evangelisation but also as a preparation and context for it.

Building a civilisation of life and love

In his great encyclical on bioethics, Evangelium Vitæ, our soon-to-be Blessed Pope John Paul II sought to offer ‘A precise and vigorous reaffirmation of the value of human life and its inviolability, and at the same time a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person, in the name of God: respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life!’ (EV 5). In the background to his appeal was the 20^th and bloodiest of centuries, in which more people had been killed and more cruelly than in all the previous centuries put together. In the foreground was the alarming prospect of a confluence of new technologies, ideologies and social trends, often with the complicity of ‘the powers of this world’, repeating the violence of the recent past.

The reason I raise this, this afternoon, is that recently a bill to legalise the practice of euthanasia has been introduced into or foreshadowed for the federal parliament and every state and territory parliament in this country. Why is that? An important insight of the first chapter of the encyclical was that violent choices such as euthanasia do not hail from nowhere. Rather, they emerge in communities where violence of many kinds has become commonplace (cf. EV 3 & 10). Unless we understand the causes of violent impulses we will not be able to respond adequately. John Paul thought that crucial today are the under-valuing of human life, a wrong notion of freedom, and the eclipse of the sense of God. A range of factors then conspire to assist the spread of violence: interpersonal difficulties, family crises, widespread ethical confusion, anonymous cities full of marginalised people, new technologies, the complicity of some health professionals, law-makers and journalists, the programs of some national and international bodies, and the rise of powerful anti-life ideologies, such as individualism, pragmatism and scepticism. The result: there has emerged in the West ‘a veritable culture of death’ (EV 12 & 50) which allows the regularisation of practices such as killing the young and elderly, which would previously have been regarded as shameful.

In our current political context here in Australia the push for euthanasia is strong and unrelenting. So must be our push-back. To date the medical and legal professions have mostly been on side, in line with the Hippocratic medical-ethical tradition and the common law tradition. Most Christian Churches and other religious bodies remain firm and clear in their opposition to euthanasia. But even Catholics need to be persuaded and inspired, not merely directed; and the rest of the community will respond much better, as Benedict XVI observes, if the Church is seen to propose rather than impose its ideas and also seen to put its energies into positive alternatives such as hospice care, not just negative prohibitions.

In the broader community there is great confusion about what is euthanasia and why it’s wrong. The culture of death feeds on such confusions as much as on pro-euthanasia ideologies and social trends.

These strands of our culture are the mission-field for the pro-life missionary today, for the Couples for Christ movement as its seeks to build a culture of life and love in Australia.

Fortunately the same community that carries the culture of death allows a counter-culture of life, where there are ‘many different acts of selfless generosity, often humble and hidden, carried out by men and women, children and adults, the young and the old, the healthy and the sick’ that daily testify to enduring respect for the dignity of the human person (EV 86). There are many individuals, families, voluntary groups and institutions who reverence, defend and serve human life. Individuals such as parents, health workers, pro-life activists and others make this central to their whole vocation. Among ordinary people there is a growing sensitivity towards issues of human rights, lifestyle and ecology, and increasing opposition to war and violence of various kinds. So despite the cultural Phylloxera eating away at the vine of faith, there are still those who are fruitful branches of the vine: the growing numbers of people willing to embrace ‘the responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life’. (EV 26-27)

There is no need to rehearse the arguments against euthanasia with this present audience: many of you have been engaged for decades in the struggle to build a civilisation of life and love. Our Catholic tradition has much wisdom to offer on questions such as the sanctity of life, appropriate respect for human freedom, the links between freedom and truth, the nature of suffering and appropriate ways to relieve it, and so on. In the popular debate the challenge is to keep showing that we are not against human dignity, human freedom or comfort in sickness and dying; that we do care and do have compassionate and effective alternatives to offer to suicide and euthanasia; that the community can indeed do more to help those who are suffering or fear a loss of control (e.g. ensuring universal access to good quality palliative care and other support in pain and/or dying); that we do walk our talk in this area, especially through Catholic healthcare, aged care and palliative care services; but that to do so we do not need (and should never embrace) state-sanctioned medical killing because this is not only intrinsically wrong but also deeply corrupting of our professions and would leave the suffering and the vulnerable even more so.

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Address, Our Lady of Guadalupe, The Gospel of Life and the Euthanasia Battle Ahead, iWitness Conference, Stanwell Tops, 12 December 2010

It is a pleasure to join you for this iWitness conference. The witness bit I get: no doubt it is an echo of the World Youth Day 2008 call to be witnesses to Christ in our world today and anything that builds on the energy of WYD08 is to be commended!

The ‘i’ part I’m not so sure about. Several of my friends have been working on me to get an iPad and an iPhone. They are members of a fanatical religious cult, determined to get everyone to join. iWitness sounds suspiciously like another of their apps. Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know that I have my own iGadget: I have a pair of iGlasses.

Were today not a Sunday in Advent it would be the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. When I was your age and a student at the University of Sydney, I went to Canada with the university’s debating team. I then did a trip around North America, including a stop-off at Guadalupe near Mexico City.

It was very moving to see the tilma or mantle of St Juan Diego on which the Blessed Virgin had impressed an image of herself and to see the shrine where it is displayed and where so many people over the past four centuries have experienced cures. She is Patroness of Mexico and all the Americas.

Because it is a rare image of the Virgin pregnant, Pope John Paul II, who visited the shrine four times as pope, entrusted the cause of life to her loving protection, and placed under her motherly care the innocent lives of children, especially those who are in danger of not being born.

1. Why The Gospel of Life?

It is fitting, therefore, that on her feast day we might recall the great encyclical of that great pope on life issues: Evangelium Vitæ – The Gospel of Life. Its teachings built on a long tradition stretching back to Scriptures, the Fathers and the Scholastics, right through to recent popes, many curial statements, and work by bishops’ conferences, individual bishops and theologians.

The Second Vatican Council and the Catechism which followed it also had some important points to make. But when Evangelium Vitæ was published in 1995 it was undoubtedly the most authoritative statement of Catholic bioethics to date and is still so. Its major themes were recently recapitulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his homily for the Vigil for Nascent Life that he proclaimed to be celebrated all over the world on the eve of Advent.

The aim of The Gospel of Life was to be: ‘A precise and vigorous reaffirmation of the value of human life and its inviolability, and at the same time a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person, in the name of God: respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life!’ (EV 5). Given that a bill to legalise euthanasia has recently been foreshadowed or attempted in every parliament in Australia (except Queensland’s), it is timely to re-examine The Gospel of Life 15 years on, and look at what wisdom it might have to offer on this matter. The euthanasia battle will, I think, be one of the defining ones for your generation, a real test of your souls.

The context for Evangelium Vitæ was the 20^th and bloodiest of centuries, in which more people had died and more cruelly than in all the previous centuries together. The contemporary threat to human life is even more alarming because of the confluence of some new technologies, ideologies and social trends, often with the complicity of ‘the powers of this world’.

The Lord’s question: ‘What have you done?’ which Cain cannot escape, is addressed also to the people of today, to make them realise the extent and gravity of the attacks against life which continue to mark human history; to make them discover what causes these attacks and feeds them; and to make them ponder seriously the consequences which derive from these attacks for the existence of individuals and peoples. (EV 10)

As well as the challenges of Western society as it entered the third millennium, John Paul was concerned to address that “secularism, with its ubiquitous tentacles” that he had observed in Veritatis Splendor in 1993 had corrupted some Catholic pulpits, academies, seminaries, homes and individuals. He was keen to rearm the Church with sound moral principles so it could engage with the great life issues at the heart of our ‘culture wars’.

The Pope addressed his appeal principally to the members of the Church as ‘the people of life and for life’ (EV 6) because he was seeking here to erect guideposts for the 21^st Century Church. So he readily relied on Scripture and the Christian tradition as his sources. Nonetheless, like all Catholic moral teaching, The Gospel of Life appeals to faith and reason, to revelation and natural law, to theology and philosophy. The Pope believed that even non-Christian believers, indeed any reasonable person, can come to recognise the value and inviolability of human life. He argued that Catholic teaching in this area

has a profound and persuasive echo in the heart of every person – believer and non-believer alike – because it marvellously fulfils all the heart’s expectations while infinitely surpassing them. Even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties, every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognise in the natural law written in the heart the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree. Upon the recognition of this right, every human community and the political community itself are founded. (EV 2)

2. What does it say?

So what does The Gospel of Life say? Chapter I addresses present-day threats to human life. Chapter II outlines the Christian message concerning the dignity of human life. Chapter III proclaims the inviolability of that life. And the last chapter exhorts people to build a new pro-life civilisation.

The substance of the letter began with a discerning analysis of the contemporary scene. While the Pope focused particularly on attacks upon life when it is at its most vulnerable, i.e. in its earliest and final stages, he situated these within the broader perspective of ‘the extraordinary increase and gravity of threats to the life of individuals and peoples, especially where life is weak and defenceless’ (EV 3). He had in mind

murder, war, slaughter and genocide ... the violence (of) poverty, malnutrition and hunger because of an unjust distribution of resources ... the violence inherent not only in wars as such but in the scandalous arms trade ... the spreading of death caused by reckless tampering with the world’s ecological balance, by the criminal spread of drugs, or by the promotion of certain kinds of sexual activity ... (EV 10).

The roots of this violence lie in an under-valuing of human life, a wrong notion of freedom, and an ‘eclipse of the sense of God’. A range of factors then conspire to assist its spread: interpersonal difficulties, family crises, widespread ethical confusion, anonymous cities full of marginalised people, new technologies, the complicity of some health professionals, law-makers, health systems, mass media, and national and international bodies, and the rise of powerful anti-life ideologies, such as individualism, materialism, pragmatism, hedonism, ethical scepticism and utilitarianism.

The result: there has emerged in the West ‘a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable culture of death. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents ... a kind of conspiracy against life’ (EV 12). Thus John Paul wrote:

In the early afternoon of Good Friday, ‘there was darkness over the whole land, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two’ (Lk 23:44-5). This is the symbol of a great cosmic disturbance and a massive conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil, between life and death. Today we too find ourselves in the midst of a dramatic conflict between the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life’. (EV 50)

This is, of course, apocalyptic language, an example of John Paul as preacher and dramatist. Whatever else people took away from the encyclical, this picture of the two contending cultures, the forces of life against those of death, has stuck. Nonetheless, as we will see, Pope John Paul saw some reasons to hope and invited a reconsideration of and recommitment to the pro-life Gospel.

Chapter II draws upon natural law philosophy and a broad range of Christian sources in support of the proposition that ‘life is always a good of great and inestimable value’. The theological source of human dignity is the creation, redemption and destiny of the human being; parallel to the philosophical affirmation of the inviolability of life is the theological affirmation that God is the Lord of life and that this God commands reverence for every person, especially the unborn, sick and elderly. This prophetic ‘Gospel of Life’ not only condemns offences against life but awakens ‘hope for a new principle of life’, for renewed relationships of reciprocity and care, and for an understanding of the crucial links between life, freedom and (moral) truth.

The Pope then explored the implications of this doctrine for particular moral issues such as abortion, embryo experimentation, suicide, euthanasia, and the civil law.

In his final chapter, John Paul proposed various positive strategies ‘to ensure that justice and solidarity will increase and that a new culture of human life will be affirmed, for the building of an authentic civilisation of truth and love.’ He exhorted Christians to ‘preach the Gospel of life, to celebrate it in the Liturgy and in your whole existence, and to serve it with the various programmes and structures which support and promote life’ (EV 79).

3. Three Authoritative Pronouncements

Evoking the conditions laid down by the two Vatican Councils for the exercise of papal, episcopal and ecclesial infallibility, the Pope taught:

By the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom. 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium [LG 25]. (EV 57)

After rehearsing the Catholic tradition on abortion he likewise declared:

By the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops – who on various occasions have condemned abortion and who in the aforementioned consultation, albeit dispersed throughout the world, have shown unanimous agreement concerning this doctrine – I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written Word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium [LG 25]. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church. (EV 62)

Thirdly he addressed euthanasia, declaring with barely less authority:

Taking into account these distinctions, in harmony with the Magisterium of my Predecessors and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium [LG 25]. (EV 65)

4. Compassionate and Positive

While frankly identifying evils to be avoided, the Pope was careful to situate this teaching within a broader positive gospel of ‘reverence and love for every person and the life of every person’ and ‘the task of accepting and serving life [which] involves everyone’ (EV 41, 43 cf. 54). John Paul identified signs of hope, even amidst the prevailing culture of death. There are many individuals, families, voluntary groups and institutions who reverence, defend and serve human life. Individuals such as parents, health workers, pro-life activists and others make this central to their whole vocation. Among ordinary people there is a growing sensitivity towards issues of human rights, lifestyle and ecology, and a growing opposition to war, capital punishment and violence of various kinds. Growing numbers of people are willing to embrace ‘the responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life’. And there are ‘all those daily gestures of openness, sacrifice and unselfish care which countless people lovingly make’ EV 26, 27).

John Paul the pastor showed that he was well aware of the pressures which draw or drive people to violent solutions, such as abortion or euthanasia: violence, especially against women, and other pressures from outsiders, dire personal difficulties, isolation and abandonment, fear and loneliness, the struggle to make ends meet, unbearable pain and suffering (EV 11, 18). He had only words of compassion for women who are the second victims of abortion:

I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. (EV 99)

So Evangelium Vitæ was not just about proscribing particular violent acts. It invited reflection upon the ideological and structural background to moral decision-making – the ideas and relationships which most influence how people behave.

Another particular merit of The Gospel of Life was that its final chapter offered a range of positive strategies for building ‘an authentic civilization of truth and love’. The Pope recognised that there are ‘many different acts of selfless generosity, often humble and hidden, carried out by men and women, children and adults, the young and the old, the healthy and the sick’ (EV 86). Nonetheless there must also be specific programs ‘proclaiming, celebrating and serving the Gospel of Life’ (EV 28): Natural Family Planning, marriage and family counselling, and pregnancy help centres; communities and associations for care of drug addicts, minors, the mentally ill, AIDS patients, the disabled and the dying; and adequate responses to the needs of the elderly and the terminally ill, including family support, good palliative care, good hospitals, clinics and convalescent homes (EV 88). Some people will devote themselves specifically to the vocations of parenting and healthcare (EV 87, 89); others will engage in voluntary work and social activism of various kinds (EV 90); legislators and those with economic clout should make laws and policies which support respect for life, the family and the elderly (EV 92-4); teachers, academics and the media can assist in moral education or in shaping a culture and lifestyles which give primacy to being over having, the person over things (EV 96-8); women must articulate a pro-life feminism (EV 99); and all need to develop a deep critical sense and a prayer-life of awe and gratitude before the mystery of life (EV 95 & 100).

5. Wisdom on Euthanasia

Given recent developments in our part of the world, The Gospel of Life’s wisdom on euthanasia is of more than passing interest. I have already noted some of the social and ideological factors identified in Evangelium Vitæ as contributing to a culture inclined to such ‘solutions’. John Paul suggested several further special factors which contribute to the call for euthanasia. There are personal ones:

In the sick person the sense of anguish, of severe discomfort, and even of desperation brought on by intense and prolonged suffering can be a decisive factor. Such a situation can threaten the already fragile equilibrium of an individual’s personal and family life, with the result that, on the one hand, the sick person, despite the help of increasingly effective medical and social assistance, risks feeling overwhelmed by his or her own frailty; and on the other hand, those close to the sick person can be moved by an understandable even if misplaced compassion. (EV 15)

There are also social factors:

All this is aggravated by a cultural climate which fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs .... [There is also] a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands ... As well as for reasons of a misguided pity at the sight of the patient’s suffering, euthanasia is sometimes justified by the utilitarian motive of avoiding costs which bring no return and which weigh heavily on society. Thus it is proposed to eliminate malformed babies, the severely handicapped, the disabled, the elderly, especially when they are not self-sufficient, and the terminally ill. (EV 15; cf. 64)

Euthanasia is any action or calculated omission intended to cause death so as to relieve suffering. Even if motivated by mercy or respect for autonomy, euthanasia is clearly wrong because it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. But John Paul was careful to distinguish this from other actions such as withdrawing over-burdensome treatments or giving appropriate pain relief. Pro-euthanasia campaigners continue to obscure this. So we must be very clear: Catholic teaching has never required the prolongation of life at all costs; ‘heroic’, ‘extraordinary’ or ‘disproportionately burdensome’ treatments may properly be forgone, especially when death is close and unavoidable, ‘so long as the normal care due to the sick person is not interrupted’ (the Pope probably had food and fluids in mind here).

We must give every opportunity for a dying as free as possible from unnecessary suffering, supported and accompanied by others, helping them to fulfil their duties and to prepare to meet God. Thus the Pope emphasised Church support for the use of appropriate palliative care, even if this might diminish clarity, consciousness or life-span; ours is not a ‘grin-and-bear-it’ stoicism. In modern Western societies pain in a dying or chronically sick person generally indicates poor pain management; with good palliative care this should rarely if ever happen.

Evangelium Vitæ recognised that those who seek euthanasia may do so out of anguish, desperation or conditioning, thus lessening or removing their subjective responsibility, and that those who engage in euthanasia may be motivated by (misguided) pity rather than a selfish refusal to be burdened with the life of someone who is suffering (EV 15, 66). It nonetheless argued that euthanasia is ‘false mercy’, indeed ‘a disturbing perversion of mercy’.

True ‘compassion’ leads to sharing another’s pain; it does not kill the person whose suffering we cannot bear. Moreover, the act of euthanasia appears all the more perverse if it is carried out by those, like relatives, who are supposed to treat a family member with patience and love, or by those, such as doctors, who by virtue of their specific profession are supposed to care for the sick person even in the most painful terminal stages ... The height of arbitrariness and injustice is reached when certain people, such as physicians or legislators, arrogate to themselves the power to decide who ought to live and who ought to die ... Thus the life of the person who is weak is put into the hands of the one who is strong; in society the sense of justice is lost, and mutual trust, the basis of every authentic interpersonal relationship, is undermined at its root. (EV 66)

This is contrasted with ‘the way of love and true mercy’ which recognises that ‘the request which arises from the human heart in the supreme confrontation with suffering and death, especially when faced with the temptation to give up in utter desperation, is above all a request for companionship, sympathy and support in the time of trial. It is a plea for help to keep on hoping when all human hopes fail.’ (EV 66)

can never presume to legitimize as a right of individuals – even if they are the majority of the members of society – an offence against other persons ... The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and duty to protect itself against abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom. (EV 71)

In his multi-faceted pro-life program John Paul proposed that special attention must be given to the elderly:

Neglect of the elderly or their outright rejection are intolerable .... It is therefore important to preserve, or to re-establish where it has been lost, a sort of ‘covenant’ between generations. In this way parents, in their later years, can receive from their children the acceptance and solidarity which they themselves gave to their children when they brought them into the world ... The elderly are not only to be considered the object of our concern, closeness and service. They themselves have a valuable contribution to make to the Gospel of Life. Thanks to the rich treasury of experiences they have acquired through the years, the elderly can and must be sources of wisdom and witnesses of hope and love. (EV 94; cf. 46)

6. Conclusion

Diocesan Launch of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Social Justice Statement for 2010, Violence in Australia: A Message of Peace, Address by Bishop Anthony Fisher OP, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Christ the King, 21 November 2010

Scotch Bella is not a well-known figure in Australian history. She barely rates a footnote. A convicted murderer from Queensland, she travelled to Adelaide and dressed as a man to labour along the roads. Given to drink and half-wild, she made a pitiable figure when she wound up in Adelaide gaol.

She would have been forgotten, both then and now, if a local nun with a reputation for large-heartedness hadn’t reached out to her. She took her into a refuge and slowly, with the support of the Temperance Guild, treated her alcoholism. The sister walked with her through the long journey of rehabilitation, once remarking “reject no one: you never know what grace can do.”

Scotch Bella lived to overcome her dependency on alcohol, lived to fall in love and marry, and lived out her life in peace. The large-hearted sister, for her part in that woman’s story and in the stories of so many other people, is now Australia’s first recognised saint, St Mary of the Cross MacKillop.

More than 130 years ago, St Mary was grappling not only with ignorance in Australia and so setting up her schools, but also with the issue of aggression in Australia and so setting up her refuges. This year, for their annual Social Justice Statement, the Australian Catholic Bishops address the intersection of those same issues – ignorance about violence and what to do about it – but in our contemporary context. This document, which we launch in the Diocese of Parramatta today, is entitled: Violence in Australia: A Message of Peace.

We might not like seeing Australia and violence linked in this way. We like to imagine we are free of that sort of thing here. But violence is real in our world, our society, our streets, our workplaces, our families, our wombs, our own hearts.  

The statement does more than document acts of aggression in Australia and raise our consciousness about them. It calls Christians to take up their Christ-given mandate to be ‘peacemakers’ and to inspire all people to work towards a less-violent society.

That is not as easy as it sounds and so this is no simple pastoral statement. It avoids the temptation to reduce violence to something out there, something other people do, something that happens in the dark places of our society at the hands of thugs who bash and gangs that street-fight, or in the dark places of our world where terrorists coerce and our young men fight wars on foreign soil.

If these were the only kinds of aggression the document addressed it might be interesting but it would also be ‘safe’ for us sitting here today, because we could blame it all on people or forces beyond us.

But this document defines violence as something much closer to home. For as the Bishops explain: any unjustified use of physical or psychological force to control someone else is violence. And everyone here is capable of that.

So this year’s social justice statement is meant to probe our own hearts: What is my contribution to violence or response to violence? Do I understand the causes of aggression? What do I do about it? Am I a peacemaker at home, at school or at work?

The reflection questions at the end of the document make this particularly explicit: this is an examination of conscience and a working document for peace. It asks us to recognise our place, our contribution, our response to brutality in our land. And it calls us to take seriously the teachings and example of Jesus about non-violence.

The South African Dominican, Albert Nolan, once noted that “by and large we don’t take Jesus seriously”. His evidence for this claim? That by and large we don’t take seriously Jesus’ teaching to “love our enemies, we don’t turn the other cheek, we don’t forgive 70 times seven times, we don’t bless those who curse us, we don’t share what we have with the poor, and we don’t put all our hope and trust in God.” All this means we don’t take seriously that to be a peacemaker is the way to be or become a child of God. 

St Mary MacKillop did take that seriously. She was persecuted, repeatedly, during her lifetime. She suffered brutality of different kinds personally and she reached out to many who had known cruelty first-hand. But she never responded to violence with more violence. She knew that cycle had to be broken.

She knew Christ breaks that cycle of power-plays, of nursed grudges, of recriminations, frustrations, shame and the rest. In this year of her canonisation our challenge is to do the same.

The country St Mary and her daughters helped to build is, by this world’s standards, remarkably peaceful. We are blessed with a strong participatory democracy, the rule of law, a functioning judiciary and widespread commitment to fairness and equality.

However, aggression has also been part of our story as these institutions and values have developed. This very place in which we gather is at the intersection of two of these violent strands in our history. Across the road is Prince Alfred Park, the site of Australia’s first gaol and a reminder of the inherently cruel convict experience.

Meanwhile, along the Parramatta River, local artwork commemorates the attempted resistance of the Bidjigal warrior, Pemulwuy, to the violent expansion of the European settlements.

We can think also of the unwelcome and hostility sometimes faced by successive generations of newcomers to the West of Sydney, of the institutional violence faced by those in the Female Factory just down the road and by other women, children, orphans, wards of the state and the stolen generation. And as a Church we must recognise the harm inflicted through sexual abuse by clergy and religious, and the failures of Church leaders at times to deal well with this.

There is a danger, however, that we can quarantine brutality not just to faraway countries – when it is also to be found much closer to home – but also to the past – when in fact it is as real in the here and now as ever before.

This Social Justice Statement is relentless in identifying the ways violence manifests itself right here, right now. It refers us to domestic violence, cultures of bullying and intimidation, road rage and alcohol-fuelled assaults, bashings of homeless people and racial violence against Indigenous people, refugees, asylum seekers and international students – among others.

The prevalence of brutality in society does not mean it affects everyone equally or in the same way. As the statement notes: “While violence can be manifested at all levels of society, it is frequently experienced by those who are powerless, excluded and marginalised.”

Homeless people, a good many of whom live in the park next door and are fed by Vinnies and others every day, are particularly exposed. Indigenous Australians, the highest concentration of whom among the Australian urban dioceses live in the Diocese of Parramatta, experience violence at much higher rates than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Women also suffer higher rates of brutality than men.

The causes are numerous and not easily reduced to formulæ. Some are about the individuals concerned: their particular history, temperament, motivations and pressures. As Jesus taught and the Australian Bishops echo: “Violence – and the steeper path to peace making – begins in the individual human heart.”

That said, all human beings have a context. The family, communities, schools, workplaces, friendship groups, culture and society we live in significantly sustain, shape and challenge who we are, what we value, what we do. We know that social factors such as familial, financial, social or educational deprivation contribute to the prevalence of violence. A law and order solution divorced from addressing social disadvantage will have limited results.

However, aggression occurs not only when society breaks down, but even when it is working well but according to skewed values. Our acquisitive, consumerist culture, our work practices or our social lives can breed envy, bitterness and aggression that are corrosive of human relationships and diminish our sense of human dignity, social responsibility, fair play and service.

As the Bishops observe: “An overly competitive culture based on selfish individualism is inevitably an angry culture, because for every winner there will be a loser whose desires and self-respect are frustrated.”

Christ teaches us to give of ourselves rather than always taking from others. In the process we foster community in ways that serve everyone, even the giver(s). Amongst the ways good communities serve us is in making us accountable and helping curb violent tendencies.

The model par excellence of shaping desire and handling anger creatively to promote peace was Christ Himself. On numerous occasions He acted as a circuit breaker in circumstances hurtling towards violence. With one deft phrase He derailed the stoning of a woman caught in adultery. He dowsed His apostles’ desire for vengeance on a Samaritan town with a steely rebuke.

As we heard in today’s Gospel He entered into His triumph, not on a warrior’s stead but a simple donkey, surrounded not by generals and courtiers but a motley crew of would-be disciples. This man we call our king set out not to conquer but to convert; not to rule but to serve; not to amass but to give away.

Everything about this ‘kingdom of God’ subverts, upside-downs our values and expectations about the powers-that-be, and the uses and abuses of power we have come to take for granted. Put away the sword, He says on the night He is betrayed. Forgive them Father, He says from the cross.

“The Son of God did not fight fire with fire,” the Bishops observe, He “did not take control, but went to death for us. God, however, fought death with life, violence with peace.”

This is the Christian response and it can be a costly one. Look at any crucifix in any Catholic home, parish, school or agency to find out how much it costs. But such brutality, Easter tells us, ultimately does not win. Love and life, beauty and goodness, strength and forgiveness, emerge from the tomb of God. These are also the fruits that come from practising non-violence.

So, with my brother Bishops, I thank the drafters and illustrators of this statement, the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council and its collaborators, Evan Ellis, our diocesan Social Justice Coordinator, and all of the groups represented here today for their help in bringing these reflections to the people of our Diocese.

Address by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP, Bishop of Parramatta

Priests and Principals Meeting, Crowne Plaza Hotel
Norwest, Baulkham Hills, 11 November 2010

Bishop Anthony delivers his Priests and Principals Meeting Address.

One of my particular tasks in my first year as Bishop of Parramatta has been that of openings and blessings of school buildings completed under the Australian Government’s Building the Education Revolution grants. That’s where I first met many of you.

I must say I am delighted to see the new facilities that will be enjoyed by many of our students and teachers, and shared by our priests, parishioners and the wider community. It is a far cry from when our new Saint Mary of the Cross rode into town to set up schools in old shearers’ sheds with student-teacher ratios of 1:100 and very few resources.

A little bit about myself and education, I attended four different Sydney Catholic schools as a boy. For some years I taught Catholic school teachers in five different tertiary institutions and still keep my hand in when I can. I’ve chaired the Sydney Catholic Schools Board and still chair the Catholic Education Commission of NSW.

And now I’m Chief Teacher in a Diocese that already has more than 40,000 students and more than 4,000 staff in more than 80 schools. To help me I’ve asked that a specific directorate be established in the Catholic Education Office for evangelisation and religious education and I am trying to beef up our youth ministry in various ways. Education and formation loom large on my horizon, as they do on yours.

The role of our schools so far

The 2007 pastoral letter of the Bishops of NSW and the ACT, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads, was the first such letter on education since that of Archbishop Vaughan and the other NSW Bishops in 1879. It reflected upon the changed context, enrolment patterns, nature and mission of Catholic schools in today’s world.

The organisers of today’s meeting have asked me to unpack one particular theme of that pastoral letter: schools as centres of the new evangelisation. This is not virgin territory for you. Bishop Kevin Manning spoke to various groups on the pastoral letter and you’ve both discussed it and tried to implement it. Later this afternoon you will reflect upon progress to date.

In their letter the Bishops gratefully acknowledged the achievements of Catholic schools in our region and the quality and commitment of our leaders and staff. They invited reflection on our changing educational and cultural context including, among other things, the rising proportion of non-Catholic and what I call nom-Catholic (nominally Catholic) enrolments.

They asked Catholic educationalists and pastors, as well as the broader Catholic community, to join them in recommitting to Catholic schooling in this new context. And they challenged us to ensure that those schools are truly Catholic in their identity and life, are centres of the new evangelisation, enable our students to achieve high levels of Catholic religious literacy and practice, and are led and staffed by people who will contribute to these goals.

The Bishops expressed themselves grateful for the past and optimistic about the future of Catholic schools; yet I hope the document did more than pat people on the back. As well as self-congratulation it was intended to be self-examination and to provoke discussion and change.

While recognising that evangelising, forming and otherwise educating our next generation is a task for the whole Church that cannot be imposed on the schools alone, the Bishops looked confidently to the schools to take the lead in this area and work with their parishes in the preaching-teaching task of the Church.

A new role for our schools?

Catholic identity and mission is a ‘hot topic’ at every meeting on Catholic education these days. In considering the Catholic ‘soul’ of our schools, the Bishops named:

•  a school-wide goal of forming Christian disciples, with appropriate world view, character and behaviour;
• an attractive Religious Education curriculum, methodologies, texts and other resources, professionally taught by teachers with appropriate RE qualifications;
• priority given to RE in the school curriculum, time and space allocation, the choice and recognition of staff, while other disciplines also consider their Catholic dimension;
• schools be places of Catholic imagination and spirituality, centres of prayer, Eucharist and Reconciliation, supported by a Catholic visual culture; and
• schools also seek to involve families, parish and diocese in the process of evangelising and catechising the pupils. (pp. 10 & 14)

In a survey conducted in England last year an alarming number of people had never heard of Moses or the Magi, thought miracles were magic and that the cross was a piece of jewellery. I suspect there was some of that in the MacKillop fever in our media of late.

Things might not yet have slipped as far here in Australia, and especially here in Western Sydney, but many in our general population (and their main theological source, the popular media) are quite ignorant about matters religious.

In one of my blogs during the canonisation week I noted numerous errors in the unusually friendly and informative reports of the Sydney Morning Herald alone. So we know that many of our students and their parents do not possess high levels of subjective faith and objective religious literacy on entry to our system; the question is, how much ‘value added’ has there been in this area by the time they leave.

The Bishops ask that at the very least, by the end of their schooling, students know core Catholic teachings, Scriptures, history and tradition, and how these are to be lived in the world; and they hope that some at least will have been fired up to do just that in their lives beyond school.

Is this so strange an expectation? I remember a conversation with a prominent, non-believing academic friend of mine, whose wife is Jewish and whose daughters attended a Jewish school. At the time we were both teaching future Catholic school teachers, including RE teachers, at the Australian Catholic University. He told me he was mystified that children at Jewish schools emerged well-versed in the theology and traditions, customs and heroes of the Jewish religion – whether or not they believed or practised Judaism – but that Catholic school students so often did not and Catholic leaders and systems seemed resigned to that. We must aspire to better.

Yet we know that even those places offering the highest standards of catechesis and religious instruction face a student and parent population often with little faith and/or disengaged from and ill-informed about their faith tradition.

Schools today are often forced to pick up the pieces from society-wide trends such as secularisation, consumerism, family dysfunction and values disorientation. These cultural failures can be real obstacles to the school’s efforts to educate and to transmit the Gospel.

But before we throw stones at the surrounding culture we might usefully examine the glass house we live in. Aspects of our Church’s internal life can be a ‘turn off’ for some young people: uninspired and uninspiring liturgies and preaching; the misbehaviour of some clergy and religious; pastors who fail to connect with youth; schools that fail to present the faith fully or attractively.

We might dare to ask: do our schools sometimes serve to inoculate our young people to the faith rather than pass it on to them? Vaccination works by giving people small doses of dead or impotent examples of that to which they build up immunity. Do we build up resistance to the faith in our young people by feeding them on a banal, half-serious ‘Christianity lite’, unlikely to inspire them to give their life to Christ? In the process are we undermining their hunger for ‘full cream Catholicism’ as some have called it?

Some of our young people who are serious about their faith and practice, or at least open to it, report that their own peers and even sometimes their elders and betters, are unsupportive, even hostile, to their idealism. To go to Mass on Sunday can be social death for a teenaged Catholic school student. This is not good enough.

Uncomfortable for some, a passion for others

So at the heart of Crossroads is the idea of the school today as an agent of the new evangelisation. Now, evangelisation is not a word Catholics are always comfortable with. It can conjure up images of American televangelists and people door-knocking with pamphlets in hand, hoping to liberate you from Babylonian captivity to the Church of Rome and redirect you on the course to salvation.

Some years ago, a survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that evangelists were regarded as “better than tax inspectors but worse than prostitutes” (“Bishops ponder how to reach out to a secular society,” The Tablet, 26 Oct 2002, p. 37).

Perhaps out of fear of seeming to be proselytisers some Catholics reduce the Gospel to a kind of social justice and ecological moralising, without any goal of bringing about a deep conversion of heart, a new relationship with God, a coming to the fullness of Catholic faith and a change of life.

The Edinburgh philosopher, John Haldane, put his finger on the pulse when he wrote that all too often “those who celebrate and explore the Catholic cultural tradition seem more concerned with ethical, social and political issues. These are certainly important, but the difficulty seems to me that these Catholic contributions are mere echoes of notions acceptable to the secular world, and familiar because of it.” (“The Waiting Game,” The Tablet, 5 Feb 2005, p. 9)

Christianity lite, that inoculating variety of spirituality that reduces our moral life to social justice, our tradition to founders and charisms, and our identity to good citizenship, offers our secular world little more than echoes. But full cream Catholicism should challenge and convert our culture and ourselves, again and again, always calling us to more and better – to the communion of saints with the Holy Trinity in this life and the next.

Evangelisation “means proclaiming the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. Its goal is bringing people to faith through a personal encounter with Him.” (Crossroads, p. 12) The idea of a new evangelisation comes from Pope Paul VI (in Evangelii Nuntiandi) and especially Pope John Paul II (e.g. Christifideles Laici 44; Redemptoris Missio 3; Ecclesia in Oceania 18 & 13; Novo Millennio Ineunte 40; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp. 113-114) and was a passion for both popes.

Pope Paul noted three categories of people who, as a result of the dechristianisation of our times, needed re-evangelisation:

• the many baptised but who live quite outside Christian life;
• simple people of faith with a weak knowledge of its content; and
• others seeking a maturer faith than that they received as children (Evangelii Nuntiandi 52).

John Paul said that the time had come to commit the Church’s energies to a new evangelisation in previously Christian communities that are falling away from the Gospel in the face of secularisation and other cultural change.

The same might be said for previously Christian families and previously Christian individuals. This means that evangelisation can no longer be left to the official missionaries and professionally religious. Everyone connected with Catholic education must, in a sense, be a missionary, a new-evangeliser, an RE teacher. And schools and parishes must work together, as seamlessly as possible, in a united evangelical mission to our young people.

Some Benedictine insights

Recently, Pope Benedict XVI established a Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation (Motu proprio, Ubicumque et semper, 21.09.10). Rehearsing Pope Paul and Pope John Paul’s call for a re-evangelisation of formerly Christian places and people, he noted that the essential Gospel message remains the same in every generation and place, as is the missionary passion to “share the inestimable gift that God has wished to give us, making us sharers in his own life”.

But times have changed since the days when the NSW Bishops were first directing the establishment of our great network of schools and Mary MacKillop was doing so. Pope Benedict puts it simply: “It’s not difficult to see that what all the Churches living in traditionally Christian territories need is a renewed missionary impulse.” But no “single formula ... would hold the same for all circumstances”: we must look at each culture, school, student and adopt appropriate language and methods.

The tasks of the new Council are:

• to examine in depth the theological and pastoral meaning of the new evangelisation;
• to promote and to foster the idea;
• to publicise and support new evangelisation initiatives in local Churches, religious congregations and movements;
• to study and to encourage the use of modern forms of communication as instruments for the new evangelisation; and
• to promote the use of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in these tasks.

Now, if Catholic schools are to be the centres of this new evangelisation, the NSW Bishops observe that:

• the life and activity of the school would be the context for a personal encounter with Christ and would promote, and never contradict, the teachings of the Church;
• all those involved in our schools would appreciate their roles in receiving and proclaiming the Good News by word, deed and example;
• students would participate in RE classes, liturgies, retreats and prayers ... tailored to their place in the journey of faith, addressing the core of our faith and inviting a response …;
• schools would work with their local parishes to establish programs for initiating children and young adults into the Church ... establishing Catholic pre-schools ... (and) participating in World Youth Days …; and
• other efforts would be pursued to integrate the activity of our schools with the life of the surrounding parishes and diocese … (Crossroads, p. 13)

What the Popes and the Bishops want from the new evangelisation is, above all, the personal encounter with Christ. In his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI began by observing that “Being Christian is not the result of ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, 1).

I conclude by recalling the NSW Bishops’ declaration of confidence in our young people as future leaders and disciples in our land and in all of you, charged with their evangelisation, education and formation (Crossroads, p. 20).

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Address for the Launch of Bishop Julian Porteous’ A New Wine and Fresh Skins: Ecclesial Movements in the Church (Melbourne: Modotti/Connor Court, 2010), Catholic Adult Education Centre, Lidcombe, 14 September 2010

My Lord Bishop, Reverend Fathers, Religious, Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

The Founder of the movement is a charismatic fellow, in both senses of the word. He’s drawn lots of people, especially lay people, to himself and they are establishing communities inspired by his apostolic way of life and spirituality. He has a strong sense of providence and so does not wait until they have sufficient resources to back them. He splits them up and sends them to all corners of the world to found new clusters when all human wisdom would say to wait until they are more settled in their identity and mission.

His own charismatic gifts include the gifts of tears and perhaps tongues. He has founded lay communities, first of women trapped in new age religion and lifestyles; then of men he wants to be a kind of therapy for a corrupt culture including, dare I say, a somnolent ecclesial culture.

Their form of life is too new to yet fit into established ecclesiastical patterns. Some people think they are a secretive sect, their spirituality strange, their passion alarming, their liturgical practices unseemly. They don’t fit neatly into diocesan structures, nor into religious life, nor into the traditional roles for the laity. Some say they have no mandate to do what they do; others think their papal favour rewards disloyalty in the local Church. The Pope and many of his allies clearly look to them to be a Gospel cure in a sick world, but the critics are far from convinced.

The huge growth of this movement in a relatively short time since the Council also causes some alarm. They are stealing worshippers, benefactors and seminarians from the dioceses. Some call them divisive. There are suspicions, rumours, tensions – some fair enough, but some fuelled by jealousy and fear. As so often, this movement is big in the Mediterranean countries and especially in Paris, but has spread to several cultures. Some are determined to exclude this virus from their dioceses and are even trying to have them closed down. Their name is ... the Dominicans and it’s the 13th Century.

Eight hundred years ago they were a new ecclesial movement. Nowadays they are very much part of the ecclesial furniture, ye olde and ye mouldy. It is striking that many of the characteristics of what were new ecclesial movements back in the 13th Century are characteristics of the modern ones too. Interestingly, too, they provoke a similar reaction.

In this his latest book, A New Wine and Fresh Skins, Bishop Julian Porteous has helpfully mapped the new ecclesial movements in the Church today and situated them within the broad sweep of renewal movements in the Church’s 2000-year history. So new are they that before reading the book I had never heard of some of them! Like some good food guides, he gives us not just the spiritual recipes but also some of the history, geography and overall flavour of these different movements.

On its own, this mapping of the movements is a significant achievement. But there is more. Our author identifies some of their common characteristics, such as:

• a particular charism, usually given to the founder;
• emergence from amongst the laity and retaining a lay character, even if clerics and religious are involved;
• once proven to be stable, receiving some form of recognition by a bishop or the Vatican;
• emerging in one culture but often spreading to others;
• offering members a path to holiness through inner renewal of Christian faith and life;
• uniting them in a common life;
• moving them to some apostolic activity of evangelisation and personal witness;
• keeping them faithful to the papacy and the Catholic tradition; and
• fruitful in ways only attributable to divine grace – the working of the Holy Spirit for the building up of the Church.

Though several were founded before the Second Vatican Council or are in important ways continuous with the lay movements of the 1930s, Bishop Julian demonstrates that they are (also) a faithful response to the ecclesiology and missionary call of the Second Vatican Council and the post-Conciliar popes. They are a fruit, then of the Spirit working in our particular spiritual age.

Drawing especially on the Council’s theology of the laity and papal teaching on evangelisation and new evangelisation the movements are now a distinctive element of contemporary Catholicism and one of the principal loci of its energy and renewal.

France is a country of elaborate and distinctive cuisines, involving truffles, wines, exotic fowl, diverse vegetables, cream and butter, and many spices. It is also the country that has produced the most original spiritual cuisines: the Dominicans were first in Prouille, Toulouse and Paris, and before them Bruno’s Cathusians in the Grande Chartreuse and Bernard’s Cistercians in Cîteaux.

Every time the French Church seems moribund it springs back to life with some new spirituality or movement. In recent centuries they’ve had the devotion to the Sacred Heart, the renewal of the priesthood modelled by the Curé of Ars, Frederic Ozanam’s St Vincent de Paul Society and the extraordinary impact of Térèse of Lisieux.

Today France is more than ever a country of ecclesial movements. There are groups for city slickers and country bumpkins, for young and old, for artists, workers and students, for married and single people, for people with a disability, contemplatives, actives ... you name it.

When the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of Paris visited the Diocese of Parramatta, he held a lively question and answer session with the clergy. He was asked how he squared the fact that in France there is a movement for everybody yet few seem interested in parish life. With a typical Gallic shrug he said ‘Yes, you are right, but that is no problem: we are united around the Word.’

That cuts to the heart of the issue. While the new ecclesial movements are diverse in their founders, charisms, spiritualities and apostolates, no movement exists for itself. A genuine ecclesial movement is not there to enlarge the movement but to proclaim the faith in response to the promptings of the Spirit in a particular time and place. This is a central point of A New Wine and Fresh Skins.

Just as not all movements are equally new – some are 800 years old – so not all are equally ecclesial. The Dominicans were founded as an antidote to a movement which had gone off the rails. Increasingly radical in their dualism, the Albigensians were so sure of themselves that they refused to yield to structure or tradition and ultimately placed themselves outside the Church, its teaching tradition and its sacramental discipline.

They were also increasingly Gnostic, it that they believed they had special gifts and knew crucial things about the faith that ordinary Christians didn’t. Their members, or at least their inner core of members, were self-styled ‘the perfect’ and everyone else was spiritually inferior and, indeed, doomed.

In due course the Dominicans succeeded in converting many of them back to the faith. But the rise of that movement, to which the friars were a countermovement, is instructive of the dangers of new ecclesial movements ever forgetting they are ecclesial.

One thing I really like about this book, as I do about its author, is its honesty about such dangers. Although the Bishop is an unashamed enthusiast for the new ecclesial movements and has spent many years personally and actively engaged with some of them, he has resisted any temptation to make them the whole of the Church or to glamorise them.

He has his misgivings, for instance, about the way some movements have related, or failed to relate, to parishes and local churches. He acknowledges honestly where a founder’s failures have tainted a movement in the eyes of outsiders and led some insiders to leave.

He does not shy away from mentioning the secretiveness, inappropriate recruiting methods, over-controlling practices, divisiveness, even sectishness with which some movements have been charged – though often unjustly. And he identifies, in the last chapter, some issues of governance that are a work in progress. I admire this open approach to difficulties, difficulties which go hand in hand with newness and growth.

Yet for all the difficulties the Church has benefited enormously from the presence and fruitfulness of these groups in recent decades. So clear was this that Pope John Paul II called them a gift of the Spirit and a hope for mankind today (p. 7). They are made to measure for our times, responding to secularism and indifferentism with a new zeal for and joy in the faith, offering instead of the anonymity and loneliness of contemporary individualism a recovery of community life and genuine communion, praying amongst the bustle of modernity and living an antidote to the relativism of consumer culture that has the guts to sacrifice personal preferences, indeed all, for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Twenty years after John Paul’s seminal Christifideles Laici – to which the movements owe so much – Pope Benedict asked the bishops and the Pontifical Council of the Laity to give “profound pastoral attention [to] the formation, witness and collaboration of the lay faithful” (Address on the 20th Anniversary Christifideles laici, 30 December 2008).

Bishop Porteous pays special attention to the question of formation in the movements. He notes the various forms it takes and the ways it fits people, supports their married and family lives, and shapes young and old for apostolate. It is a crucial need for the children of this age, so often deprived of the catechesis and formation they should have received at home, school and parish.

The tasks of formation and evangelisation that go to the heart of the new ecclesial movements were never more evident than in the lead up to, throughout and soon after the World Youth Day here in Sydney. There was an invasion of members of movements. They contributed their charisms, passion and experience to the events in many ways.

The Bishop recalls in his book a rally of one of these movements with 10,000s of attendees and at which hundreds of young people came forward to declare themselves for priesthood or religious life. It was an extraordinary thing to behold.

It is a privilege to launch this book for my episcopal twin and dear brother. He has known the power of the Holy Spirit first-hand in his life and has witnessed the sovereign action of that Spirit in the lives of ordinary lay people and in their generous response.

He is a man of deep faith, with a true pastor’s heart; he has been a parish priest, a missionary to the secular city, a seminary Rector, Episcopal Vicar for Evangelisation, author and, in his spare time, an auxiliary bishop. It demonstrates great ecumenical spirit that he chose a member of an old ecclesial movement to launch this book on the new.

With the members of today’s movements and the others yet to learn what they are about, I thank him for the assistance of this book. I congratulate the Bishop and commend to all A New Wine and Fresh Skins.

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s address to Theology on Tap, PJ Gallagher’s Irish Pub, Parramatta, 6 September 2010

My conversion story

1. Anthony before his conversion: the old man

Some people think it’s very important to be able to identify exactly when they were converted. I remember when I was first at university being approached by evangelicals who asked if and when I had accepted Jesus as my personal Saviour.

I was a bit nonplussed by this talk as I couldn’t then identify a moment in my life when everything had changed for me. I had known I was a Christian for as long as I had known anything and I tended to think of Christ as everyone’s Saviour rather than my personal property.

In any case I found that sort of internal spiritual probing a bit creepy when done to you, let alone when done by aliens complete with spiritual grins on their faces.

Nonetheless, I admired the zeal of those evangelical unionists, their desire to bring others to Christ. If only Western Catholics weren’t so diffident about trying to convert people, I remember thinking. I still think we have a lot to learn from other Christians. I also envied adult converts to the Faith, because they had made a conscious decision for Christ and His Church, often at great personal cost, and they were amongst our most eloquent apologists.

In time I realised the limitations of the momentary model of conversion. I suppose it comes from the image of Saul of Tarsus, the anti-Christ (Acts 8:1-3; 9:5; Gal 1:13-14; 1 Tim 1:12), who was struck blind and horseless on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:1-31; 22:1-22; 26:9-24).

When his sight returned he had become St Paul, the pre-eminent missionary preacher of Christian history. Some conversions, like his, are all-of-a-sudden. But even Paul spent years being catechised and trained before he was set free on the world for his apostolic mission (Gal 1:17-18; 2:1).

Perhaps the next most famous conversion story is told in The Confessions of St Augustine. Unlike Saul’s, young Gus’s conversion was gradual, almost imperceptible, taking a lifetime, with progress and backsliding, but he got there eventually, as God softly, softly, catchee monkey.

‘Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new. Late have I loved You,’ wrote Bishop Augustine as he reflected on his faith journey so far. By then he was in his early 40s and his journey was still far from complete.

Tonight I’ll tell you the story of Bishop Anthony’s conversion. It’s not a story I’ve told before. But I thought that in this intimate environment, surrounded by just a few confidants and after a few drinks, I could take the chance of telling it.

First, the story of me before my conversion. Time was, you see, when I was a proper little pagan. I lived for my next drink or other sensory experience, for the satisfaction of my passions. I cared nothing for other people’s needs and never gave a thought to worshipping God or serving humanity. I didn’t turn my mind to the great mysteries: of God, creation and ourselves. I just wanted pleasant experiences and a quick fix to anything that wasn’t.

2. My conversion: putting on Christ

But something happened so that I didn’t continue indefinitely down that trajectory. Did God throw me from my horse or at least my BMW? Did I hear His voice calling in a garden or at least from my iPod? When and why did I accept Jesus as my personal saviour?

It happened in a moment. At St Thérèse Church, Lakemba, late in the morning on 3 April 1960, Fr Cyril Hatton poured water over my head and said “Anthony Colin Joseph, ego te Baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti”.

In a flash I was washed clean of original sin and entered into Christ: His life, death and resurrection, His identity, mission and destiny. I was made part of His body the Church, the communion of saints on earth destined for the communion of saints in heaven.

Anthony the little pagan was totally transformed, by water and words, into a child of God the Father, a brother of God the Son, a temple of God the Holy Spirit.

That was the moment of my conversion. I was three weeks old, wearing the christening gown of my great-grandfather, grandfather and father, and now sharing in the Faith of my fathers.

It was much more dramatic than being thrown from a horse or deciding at a rally that I wanted Jesus. I was drowned, dead and buried in a watery tomb, and rose to new life with Christ.

Earlier this year at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne some people tried to cancel their Baptisms with a hair-dryer. Quaint, but quite useless: for Baptism brings about an ontological change – that is, a radical, uncancellable, unrepeatable transformation, one that goes to the core of our being.

I was a ‘pagan’ with no faith in Jesus Christ, an unrepaired victim of original sin and suddenly, by a stroke of that divine pen we call amazing grace, I was a Christian, a saint, full of faith, hope and love. The old man-child was cast aside; I put on Christ. On that foundation my family, friends, teachers and parishes were to build in the years that followed.

Don’t imagine that was the end of my conversion. No, from that point forward the battle for my soul was on. I had been a pagan for only nine months and three weeks before I was redeemed and yet the damage was done. Echoes of the old me survived, so that the self-indulgent baby still whispers in my ear at times.

The world, the flesh and the devil were determined to reclaim me. And the charms of Sydney (such as surf and sun and the good life), the powerful organs of our culture (such as the old and new media, pop culture, the academy and law-makers) and the equally powerful ideologies (such as secularism and consumerism) all sought to make me their own.

Sometimes, to be frank, I gave in: like anyone else I wanted the comforts and sensory experiences, the variety and even the dangers. I wanted to get along with my peer group, especially my friends, and not to appear a kill-joy or holier-than-thou.

We’ve all got our ambitions and fantasies about ourselves and, in my case, battles with intellectual vanity and other vices. I’m not saying I was a serial killer or a pack rapist: just that I was fairly typical for my age and time, at least in many respects, and that there were forces at play that could have taken me down a much worse path.

At the same time the grace of Baptism, of God-given faith, was also at work in me. It was strengthened enormously by the sacraments of Penance, Eucharist and Confirmation – God’s ordinary means of ongoing conversion after Baptism.

In due course I received the graces that flow from making religious vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and that attend Holy marching Orders. I’m such a glutton for sacraments that I went back three times for Ordination! Each of those points was a major conversion moment, that is, a U-turn in my life. And they marked me forever.

You see, each of us has a lifetime in which to make himself an icon of Christ or else of something less worthy. Life is no rehearsal. We have just one life that restarts at Baptism for most of us and then extends into eternity. There are pressures in various directions and we need divine grace if we are to make progress, even the three-steps-forward-two-steps-backward kind of progress.

3. My regular reconversion program

As I look back on my first quarter-century as a young person like your, and my second as a youngish religious, priest and auxiliary bishop, and as I now look forward to the next quarter-century as Bishop of the Diocese of Theology on Tap, I can see other moments where by divine grace and my cooperation, I moved forward in Christ.

The background was a loving home, the domestic Church, who got me into the habit of Mass and taught me God comes first. I had a great-aunt who was a nun, I went to Catholic schools and was an altar boy, so serving Christ was not unthinkable. From about age 15 it was in the back of my head.

I remember how confronting I found my first year at university. I had been at a posh school, in suit and tie and straw boater. But at my very first lecture at the University of Sydney, one of the students wore only ‘budgie smugglers’. It was as if I’d moved from a convent to a bordello!

Then the lecturer proceeded to say that anyone in the hall who believed in ‘the soul’ should leave the course now, as there was no place for superstition in sciences like Psych. Adolescent defiance kept me there. But from day one I was in a world that did not necessarily share my Catholic worldview.

During those university years I gradually decided that I should learn more about my faith and stick up for it more too. Not that I was a Holy Joe. My conversion story includes many doubts and questions, temptations and falls, plenty of lukewarmness. Read St Augustine’s story and you’ll find that’s normal.

But it’s also possible to choose the good and to spend time and brain-power working out what’s best. There wasn’t ToT in those days, but there were cafes and bars where my friends and I could puzzle philosophically, if not yet theologically, over the three great mysteries of life and how to respond.

Part of that puzzling through things was to decide what sort of Christianity was best. An Anglican-agnostic friend at uni told me that if he ever got around to taking his Christianity seriously he thought he would probably have to go all the way and become a Catholic; but in the meantime he was going to live it up for a while.

That sort of full-on or what I call full-cream Catholicism is a real alternative to what some have called ‘Christianity Lite’ (see e.g. Mary Eberstadt in First Things, January 2010). Christianity Lite makes optional or even tosses out the inconvenient or unpopular parts of the Catholic faith. Instead of the Creed you follow the latest opinion poll or synod. Conscience becomes a name for always following personal taste or convenience.

Full-cream Catholicism is not blind or uncritical, but it does start with a basic trust in Christ and His promises to be with His Church till the end of time (Mt 28:20) and to guard it with the Holy Spirit of Truth (Jn 14:16-17; 15:26; 16:13; 1 Jn 5:7) and Petrine or papal solidity (Mt 16:17-19). It means being open to teachings that are hard to understand or to live. For a time I was a bit of a Cafeteria Catholic, a picker and chooser. But at university I decided it was all or nothing Catholicism for me.

Now, we’ve all got shameful things in our past and one of mine is that I was a lawyer! In fact I loved the law. My big city firm donated me for some weeks to the Legal Aid office in Kings Cross, where I helped some disadvantaged people, often with mental health or drug issues.

It was a clash of cultures with the firm’s International Corporate Finance section to which I was attached. We were big boys – even the girls – working for the bigger boys, and we billed out our time at fabulous rates in five-minute blocks.

I enjoyed the intellectual puzzles, the self-confidence and energy, and occasional sense of getting someone justice. Even lawyers discuss the meaning of life, professionally if not theologically.

Then one night we worked through the night on a big corporate contract. The others on my team were really ‘pumped’ the next day when we’d done it in the nick of time and were rewarded with the rest of the morning off. I remember thinking: hold on, what if you had a family, or a prayer life, or any other life?

This profession demands your soul, all of you, ontologically, as it were. But my soul was already promised to someone else, back on 3 April 1960. That was another moment of appropriating and deepening my baptismal commitment, renewing God’s sovereignty over my life.

Soon after that I took leave and went backpacking around Europe to make up my mind about my vocation. I did a lot of praying, thinking, imagining, feeling and weighing up, as I suppose I’d done on and off for years, and finally decided I must take the plunge.

When I came back I tried postulancy in the Dominican Order. I loved singing my prayers in choir with the brothers, hearing them preach, studying with them, nutting out the three great mysteries of God, creation and ourselves, and at last I could do that fully, that is, theologically.

Within a week I knew it was the place for me. It took the Order a little longer – six years in fact – to be sure about me, but eventually we agreed I should make solemn profession.

At times I lived the Dominican thing quite well; at other times less so. There are conversions and reversions even within such a school of perfection. But at least I now knew I would eek out the rest of my earthly existence in a Dominican community – or so I thought ...

In due course I found that every time I think I’ve got God’s plan for me figured out, He delights in upsetting it ... A perfect sense of humour is amongst the divine perfections, along with omnipotence, omniscience and infinity. He is, as they say, a God of surprises.

I could tell you lots more, but this is starting to sound a bit like a reading from my diary and is making me a bit self-conscious, even if I’m confiding in a small group of close friends.

What I hope it has helped you see is that in the battle for a soul God triumphs when we let Him, but the pagan in us is always ready to take back the reins too.

Happily, my Baptism keeps working out its original redeeming grace in me, which conquers original sin and my own actual sin – most recently, through my last Confession, for Confession is Christ’s regular reconversion program for us.

4. Your Conversion Story: when all the saints come marching in

Which brings me to your conversion story. All Christians are converts; no one is born Catholic. Our baptismal conversion continues through life: despite indifference, backsliding, sin, ignoring God.

A gradual process of sanctification through Word and sacrament, as well as occasional shocks to the system or more gentle nudges, continues until death, and even a little beyond, in the mercy of Purgatory.

Don’t ever imagine you or someone you know is beyond making the U-turn back to the God for whom they were made. Every day can be a conversion day for us, which is why we examine our consciences and resolve to be better.

We are all a work in progress; but from the moment we come to faith, we are called to be saints. When I was Master of Students for the Australian Dominicans, I used to begin each year by asking the new students: do you want to be a Dominican saint?

Usually they stared at me like stunned mullets, as new students do when facing an obviously demented Formator whom they know they’ll suffer for years to come. After an uncomfortable silence I would continue: if you don’t want to be a Dominican saint, I suggest you leave now and find some other place to be a saint.

Of course I was being provocative, but I wonder: do any of us really want to be saints? If 1.166 billion Catholics were really trying to be saints, wouldn’t the world be a rather different place? Baptismal conversion is for one purpose only: to make us and our fellows saints. So the question for anyone who understands what it is to be a Christian is not whether I am going to be a saint but rather: what kind of saint am I going to be?

In the lead up to World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne I took some young Aussie pilgrims to visit the relics of the Three Holy Kings in Cologne Cathedral; to pray in the priory crypt at the sepulchre of Albert the Great, Dominican bishop and Patron Saint of Scientists; and to honour St Edith Stein the great philosopher, Jewish convert, Carmelite nun and martyr of the Nazi holocaust.

In one church we found the relics of St Ursula and her 11,000 companions, their skulls and bones neatly laid out in rows all up the walls and ceiling of her chapel!

There are, you see, a lot of saints, each one with a story as individual as yours and mine. I was asked at the time whether Sydney’s World Youth Day would likewise be surrounded by a great company of saints and I had to confess that we had only one, nearly-saint, to offer. The task for our young people, I said, was to be that great cloud of witnesses themselves.

There are many stories of conversions at WYD08 in Sydney. But I’m trying to keep off my usual hobby horses of WYD and bioethics tonight. Partly as a result of WYD the Church will soon recognise an Aussie girl as a saint and we are all very proud of her.

But why is Australia the last continent to boast a saint? There are many places where Christianity is as young and many more that’ve had saints in the past two centuries.

One reason might be that we Australian Catholics have had it too good: we’ve never had a good persecution to bring out the spiritual superheroes. Our affluence, secularism, indifference, and easy scepticism are not natural seedbeds for sanctity.

God makes the saints; the Church highlights some for imitation; but it’s our job to actually be them. Resolve tonight to keep company with the saints, by praying to them, emulating them but above all, by becoming one of them yourself.

Here in the Diocese of Parramatta there are about 340,000 Catholics. My goal for Parramatta is to have 340,000 saints: ‘Bishop Anthony and his 340,000 companions’, with your skulls and bones one day lining the cathedral walls! Those of you unfortunate enough to live across the border in some other diocese are welcome to join us too, here in this epicentre of youthful holiness in contemporary Australia!

Only one in six Aussie Catholics presently goes regularly to Mass; only one in six regularly hears the Word of God proclaimed or receives the Body of Christ. Hundreds of thousands more have no spiritual home even to be neglecting.

They all need us to be not plaster cast saints, but flesh-and-blood men and women, with the guts to make a difference, with the will to build a culture of life and love, with the generosity of heart to make commitments to God and sacrifices for His people, with the good sense to know this is the way to the really good life, life to the full.

The people of our times need real-life saints to inspire them. Some of you here tonight are called to be a religious as I am, a priest as I am, maybe even a bishop as I am. Don’t keep putting it off. Speak to Fr Paul Roberts, our Diocesan Vocation Director (www.parra.catholic.org.au/vocations)

Conference Celebrating the Sesquicentenary of Catholic Education in the Diocese of Lismore Grafton Community and Function Centre, 26 August 2010

1. Changing context

I thank the Bishop of Lismore, His Lordship Bishop Geoffrey Jarrettt, and the Executive Director of Catholic Education, Dr Anne Wenham, for inviting me to share with you in the commemoration of the Sesquicentenary of Catholic Education in the Diocese of Lismore.  I am delighted to be with you and I hope that this Conference will help you to celebrate your history with grateful hearts, to examine your present with appreciative minds, and to look to the future with hopeful spirits.

The relationship between Parramatta and Lismore began with Michael Hayes of Wexford who was sentenced to transportation for life to the Colony of New South Wales for taking part in the Rebellion of 1798.  After receiving a conditional pardon in Sydney he got into more trouble for keeping an illegal still at home.  So he was a fairly typical Catholic for his time: a drinker, with a good big Catholic family, an activist and a member of the Building Committee for the St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney.  His eldest daughter Mary married Francois Girard and in 1863 Mary and her sons, Francois Napoleon and Alfred Michele Girard took on the Lismore run.  Her younger brother, Pat, was district surveyor to Parramatta, lived and died there, and is buried in the old Catholic cemetery in North Parramatta.  We can presume that Mary and Pat knew the rudiments of the Faith because their father, Michael, as well as pleading for priests to be sent to New South Wales, asked his family in Wexford to send catechisms for his children.

Around the time the widow Girard was acquiring the Lismore station, Fr Timothy M^cCarthy was serving as first parish priest of the district and Mr Edward Tracey was establishing the first Catholic school on the North Coast.  In 1860, on the corner of Skinner and Ryan Streets here in Grafton, he opened his little school in a weatherboard church with a few children and himself as the teacher.  Had he been able to look ahead to 2010, he would have been agog at the changes in Church and society, and especially in Catholic education.  From a time of a few one-man or one-woman schools we have evolved to the stage where our school system is now “one of the jewels in the crown of the Catholic community in our region, with few parallels overseas.  It has provided high-quality education to generations of young Australians and has been a major arm of the Church’s engagement with youth.” (Bishops of NSW-ACT, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads (2007), p.  6)  This diocese alone boasts a network of 47 parish primary and secondary schools and colleges educating some 17,000 children and young people.  Catholic schools like these have contributed to the Australian community through educating around a quarter of its young people with a distinctive vision and values.  In the meantime pedagogy has been turned on its head – several times over – and our schools are resourced now to an extent unimaginable for Catholics fifty years ago, much less 150 years ago!

Three features in particular that would have surprised Tracey are: who we teach, who does the teaching, and for whom.  Interestingly, all three features are about people, not processes, buildings, technologies, accountabilities, curricula or assessments, but people, because it is the communion of people that it is at the heart of Catholic education.  But let’s drill a little deeper.

2. Who we teach

One of the features of contemporary education that would amaze Edward Tracey would be the clientele of the Catholic school.  There weren’t many children of the professional classes in the Grafton school in 1860s.  Most were the sons and daughters of poor Catholic families.

Today our whole nation is more affluent, our Church more middle class, and our student body no longer disproportionately poor.  The Catholic school system has succeeded in its goal of attaining opportunity and upward social mobility for Catholics in this country.  But it is also the victim of its own success: children of poorer families are now underrepresented in our schools.  Systems, principals and priests must work to attract poorer families to our schools and facilitate their attendance by means of reduced or waived fees, assistance with other expenses and efforts to break down cultural or other barriers (Crossroads, p.  8).  I know that the Diocese of Lismore has one of the largest representations of indigenous students, that many of your rural families are struggling, and that some of your urban areas have growing populations of unemployed, migrant and refugee families.  We still have more to do as a Catholic community to make these people feel welcome.

If our students today are less financially needy, on average, I would suggest they are more spiritually needy than ever before.  It is a tribute to Catholic education that an ever-increasing number of other-than-Catholic parents want to entrust their children to us.  But this means that the proportion of students who are non-Catholic in our schools is growing.  Even larger is the proportion of students who might be called nom-Catholics, that is, from families which are nominally Catholic but have little or no connection with the Church outside their school.  This means the specifically religious mission of the school is often unsupported at home – at the very time when it is being undermined by some powerful agents (such as the old and new media) and ideologies (such as secularism and materialism) in the surrounding culture.  This raises questions for enrolment policy, and in particular what critical mass of Catholic students is required if the school is to maintain its identity and mission.

3. What we offer

It is something of a cliché to say that every Catholic teacher is an RE teacher.  Strictly speaking there are those who formally teach RE and others who don’t.  But I think it is still a handy slogan to say that every one of our leaders, staff and collaborators is an RE teacher because this is a signpost to something profound which touches the very core of our humanity, and that is the formation of the whole human person.

Good Catholic schools, the old adage goes, must first be good schools.  Excellence in the all-round education of our students must be our goal.  Today our schools are funded at a level unimaginable in the days of Edward Tracey, and four-fifths of that funding comes from government.  In the post-BER era our facilities are better than ever.  There are all sorts of national partnerships and other programmes to help improve our performance.  And there is MySchool and a range of other new accountabilities.  Our schools have, as I’ve indicated, achieved great things.  Yet our students are underrepresented in various areas such as languages and extension levels of various subjects.  I remember a board member from a posh Catholic school telling me that the school did not do as well as expected in academic terms but that she thought this proved how pastoral the school was.  Now, I’m all for being pastoral, indeed I think it should be a real mark of our approach to education.  But surely there need be no rivalry between the aspirations to care for our students and to maximize their learning gains across a range of disciplines.  In the future most parents will entrust their children to us, not on the basis of a tribal commitment to the Catholic system or their own old school, but on the basis of educational outcomes, real or imagined.

Not that our concern for excellence in education is market driven.  Rather, it is driven by our passion for our students, for the sorts of young men and women we want them to be by the time they emerge from our institutions and in their life beyond.  In his great encyclical Fides et ratio (On Faith and Reason (1998)), Pope John Paul II defined the human person as one who seeks and lives by the truth (16, 25, 28-31).  In wanting a full education for our young people, we are wanting them to be all they can be as human persons.  Of course that will require more than information and skills: it is also about character and relationships.  But in the very process of teaching and learning, of coming to know truths acquired and passed on to us by others we entrust ourselves to them, we form a community or communion with them and so are already being formed in certain virtues.  (32)

What’s more, the truth that all men seek, is the truth about three great mysteries: the mystery of God, the mystery of creation and the mystery of ourselves.  “Men and women are on a journey of discovery which is humanly unstoppable,” the Pope suggests.  “Christian faith comes to meet them, offering the concrete possibility of the goal which they seek.” (33) Faith and reason are collaborators rather than competitors in this journey of discovery (1, 34, 73).  We need reason in order to understand not only our natural world but our faith (42, 65-68, 77), but we need faith to extend us beyond the bounds of natural reason to a supernatural wisdom about the great mysteries (12-13, 48, 76).

John Paul once boldly challenged Western societies: “Why be afraid of opening learning to faith?” (L’Osservatore Romano, 7-13 Feb 2002, p.  4).  This question is encouraging and confidence building.  It rehabilitates religious education from the Cinderella position it occupies among some parents, staff and students.  The reason we are not afraid to open our learning to faith is that we are not afraid of human persons; indeed we are deeply respectful of human persons.  And because human persons crave to know what is true and good and beautiful we cannot deny them one of the paths to that truth which fulfils them.  Every member of our Catholic education system – and here I include system leaders, principals, teachers, general staff, bishop, priests, parents and parishioners is charged with Catholic education in this rich sense; every one of them is, you might say, an RE teacher.

4. New Evangelization for New Communion

In 2007 the Bishops of New South Wales and the ACT published their pastoral letter, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads - the first such letter on education since that of Archbishop Vaughan and the other NSW Bishops in 1879.  In it the Bishops expressed themselves grateful for the past and optimistic about the future of Catholic schools; yet they sought to incite some discussion and provoke some change.  So let me follow their lead and be a little provocative...

Schools today are often forced to pick up the pieces from “society-wide trends such as secularisation, consumerism, family dysfunction and values disorientation” (Crossroads, pp.  6 and 8).  These cultural failures can be real obstacles to the school’s efforts to educate and to transmit the Gospel.  But before we throw stones we might usefully examine the glass house we live in.  Aspects of our Church’s internal life can be a ‘turn off’ for some young people: uninspired and uninspiring liturgies and preaching; the misbehaviour of some clergy and religious; pastors who fail to connect with youth; schools that fail to present the Faith fully or attractively.  We might dare to ask: do our schools sometimes serve to inoculate our young people to the Faith? Vaccination works by giving people small doses of dead or impotent examples of that to which they build up immunity.  Do we build up resistance to the Faith in our young people by feeding them on a banal, half-serious ‘Christianity lite’, unlikely to inspire them to give their life to Christ? In the process are we undermining their hunger for ‘full cream Catholicism’? Some of our young people who are serious about their faith and practice, or at least open to it, report that their own peers and even sometimes their olders and betters, are unsupportive, even hostile, to their idealism.  To go to Mass on Sunday can be social death for a teenaged Catholic school student.  This is not good enough.

In their pastoral letter the Bishops set as goals for our times that our schools be not only good schools but truly Catholic in their identity and life; that they not only be up with the new teaching and learning but also centres of the ‘new evangelization’; that they ensure our students not only achieve excellence in the range of secular disciplines but also high levels of ‘religious literacy’ and practice; and that they be led and staffed by people who are not only professionally competent educators but also willing contributors to those spiritual goals (Crossroads, p.  5).

At the heart of Crossroads is the idea of the school today as an agent of the new evangelization.  Now, evangelization is not a word Catholics are always comfortable with.  It can conjure up images of American televangelists and people door-knocking with pamphlets in hand, hoping to liberate you from Babylonian captivity to the Church of Rome and redirect you on the course to salvation.  Some years ago, a survey conducted in the United Kingdom found that evangelists were regarded as “better than tax inspectors but worse than prostitutes” (“Bishops ponder how to reach out to a secular society,” The Tablet, 26 Oct 2002, p.  37).

Perhaps out of fear of seeming to be proselytizers some Catholics reduce the Gospel to a kind of social justice and ecological moralising, without any goal of bringing about a deep conversion of heart, a new relationship with God, and a coming to the fullness of Catholic faith.  The Edinburgh philosopher, John Haldane, put his finger on the pulse when he wrote that all too often “those who celebrate and explore the Catholic cultural tradition seem more concerned with ethical, social and political issues.  These are certainly important, but the difficulty seems to me that these Catholic contributions are mere echoes of notions acceptable to the secular world, and familiar because of it.” (“The Waiting Game,” The Tablet, 5 Feb 2005, p.  9).  Christianity lite, that inoculating variety of spirituality that reduces our moral life to social justice, our tradition to founders and charisms, and our identity to good citizenship, offers our secular world little more than echoes.  But full cream Catholicism should challenge and convert our culture and ourselves, again and again, always calling us to more and to better – to the communion of saints with the Holy Trinity in this life and the next.

Evangelization “means proclaiming the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ.  Its goal is bringing people to faith through a personal encounter with Him.” (Crossroads, p.  12).  The idea of a new evangelization comes from Pope Paul VI (in Evangelii Nuntiandi) and especially Pope John Paul II (e.g.  Christifideles Laici 44; Redemptoris Missio 3; Ecclesia in Oceania 18 & 13; Novo Millennio Ineunte 40; Crossing the Threshold of Hope, pp.  113-114).  John Paul said that the time had come to commit the Church’s energies to a new evangelization in previously Christian communities that are falling away from the Gospel in the face of secularisation and other cultural change.  The same might be said for previously Christian families and previously Christian individuals.  The NSW Bishops observe that:

• the life and activity of the school would be the context for a personal encounter with Christ and would promote, and never contradict, the teachings of the Church
• all those involved in our schools would appreciate their roles in receiving and proclaiming the Good News by word, deed and example
• students would participate in RE classes, liturgies, retreats and prayers...  tailored to their place in the journey of faith, addressing the core of our faith and inviting a response...
• schools would work with their local parishes to establish programs for initiating children and young adults into the Church...  establishing Catholic pre-schools...  (and) participating in World Youth Days...
• other efforts would be pursued to integrate the activity of our schools with the life of the surrounding parishes and diocese...  (Crossroads, p.  13)

Evangelisation is a task we can no longer afford to leave to our missionaries, priests, RECs and a few Catholic ‘fanatics’.  If everyone connected with Catholic education is, as I have suggested, an RE teacher, then they are also a Missionary, a new-evangelizer.

5. New Evangelization or Old Indoctrination?

enlarge people’s rationality, reopen it to the larger questions of the true and the good, to link theology, philosophy and science between them in full respect for the methods proper to each and for their reciprocal autonomy... (and) intrinsic unity… The religious dimension is in fact intrinsic to culture.  It contributes to the overall formation of the person and makes it possible to transform knowledge into wisdom of life.

There is no narrowness about that approach; on the contrary the Pope offers a wonderfully broad vision which should excite everyone involved in Catholic education.

Far from being an example of forcing all children to pass through some spiritual cookie-cutter, talk of evangelization and new evangelization before and alongside catechesis and religious education is a recognition that our students are at many different levels from on fire with faith to completely indifferent to it or even hostile to it; that they may be actively Catholic, non-Catholic, or nom-Catholic; and that if non-Catholic they may again be serious about some alternative faith, luke-warm or ignorant of their own faith tradition, let alone the Catholic one.  Unlike in Mr Tracey’s day, today we cannot presume they all belong to the Catholic tribe, that there are high rates of practice amongst their families, that the surrounding culture and peer group are Christian and largely supportive of their faith journey, and that much of the Faith will be transmitted outside the school.  Talk of new evangelisation is a recognition of the real challenge today.

Nor is it a matter of proselytising or force-feeding young people beliefs that are not their own.  Genuine faith cannot be imposed, but only proposed: it is freely given and freely received – or rejected.  But, “if we are upfront about our educational and catechetical goals with any prospective student, teacher or parent, while encouraging students to engage with open hearts and reasoning minds, then we are fully justified in engaging in activities of witness, formation and service.” (Crossroads, p.  12)

The Bishops’ Pastoral Letter emphasized not only new evangelisation but also Catholic religious literacy, also establishing the goal that by the end of their schooling students know core Catholic teachings, Scriptures, history and tradition, and how these are to be lived in the world.

Is this so strange an expectation? I remember a prominent, non-believing academic friend of mine, whose wife is Jewish and whose daughters attended a Jewish school, telling me he was mystified that children at Jewish schools emerged well-versed in the theology and traditions, customs and heroes of the Jewish religion – whether or not they believed or practised Judaism – but that Catholic school students so often did not and Catholic leaders and systems seemed resigned to that.  We must aspire to better.

6. Schools and teachers with a ‘Catholic soul’

In Crossroads the Bishops suggested the following are essential if our schools are to maintain their Catholic ‘soul’ in our contemporary cultural and enrolment context:

• a school-wide goal of forming Christian disciples, with appropriate world view, character and behaviour
• an attractive RE curriculum, methodologies, texts and other resources, professionally taught by teachers with appropriate RE qualifications
• priority given to RE in the school curriculum, time and space allocation, the choice and recognition of staff, while other disciplines also consider their Catholic dimension
• schools be places of Catholic imagination and spirituality, centres of prayer, Eucharist and Reconciliation, supported by a Catholic visual culture
• schools also seek to involve families, parish and diocese in the process of evangelizing and catechizing the pupils.  (pp.  10 & 14)

But who is to make all this happen? When Edward Tracey established his school it was not unusual for a sole operator, with no formal qualifications, little or no accountability and resources no better than a roof and a blackboard, to set up a shingle as a school.  Today that is unthinkable: our educational leaders and staff are expected to be highly professional and pastoral, better qualified and resourced than ever before.

Few of them today will be consecrated religious.  In the past the Church entrusted to religious orders the founding, leading and sheer hard work of Catholic schooling, as well as the guardianship of the ‘soul’ of the Catholic school.  The Church will soon canonize one such educationalist nun, Mother Mary MacKillop.  In this diocese it was the Grafton Mercies who from 1884 and the Lismore Presentations who from 1886 were the stars of selfless service and many other congregations joined them in the adventure of Catholic schooling.

Today its lay people who largely run and staff our schools and systems.  Although they may in some sense inherit a particular ethos, charism or story from the founding or sponsoring religious institute(s) and, commendably, memorialize it in the life of the school, lay staff are not consecrated to that story.  Rather, it is by their Baptism and formation that they are immersed in the story of Jesus Christ and the tradition of his Church.

This means the personal commitment, education, selection, induction, ongoing spiritual formation, support and incentives for our teachers, to make them really good Catholic teachers, missionaries and new evangelizers is absolutely crucial.

7. Conclusion

Address by Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP for the Catholic Education Office Ceremony of Appreciation for 25 Years+ Service and 10 Years Leadership, St Patrick’s Church, Blacktown, 19 August 2010

I welcome you, principals, teachers, families and friends of our award recipients, CEO leadership and staff to this award ceremony at which we will honour those who have completed significant milestones in the service of Catholic education.

As an amateur cook myself I was delighted to find this year that a cooking program – admittedly a rather contrived one – out-rated even the national religion football and even forced our political leaders to stage their equally contrived debate at a different time.

Those of you who watched MasterChef or who like cooking will know that fashions come and go in the culinary world and, for a few years now, slow cooking has been back in fashion. I already have several recipes for slow cooked lamb shanks.

I believe teaching is analogous to slow cooking! One does not see immediate results; some experimentation is worthwhile; the flavours need time to ‘come together’; and the result can be unpredictable!

Of course, one can press any analogy too far. But those among you who are teachers have experienced the ‘wow’ moments in teaching, which are rather like the look on people’s faces when they see, smell and taste some culinary triumph.

You know the enormous satisfaction of seeing students master some previously unconquerable skill; in observing shy children becoming more confident in social interaction; in midwifing young people as they mature from stage to stage towards adulthood; and, occasionally, receiving the thanks of those who appreciate your efforts.

These are exceptional moments which undoubtedly provide encouragement but something more than the “wow” moment is needed to clock up 25 years of service or 10 years of leadership in school communities. I think we could call that ‘something more’: the spirituality of the hope.

Spirituality of hope

This spirituality of hope is grounded in the passage we heard today from the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians (3:14-19) is a prayer I would encourage you to pray regularly for your students and all those you serve in Catholic education:

Out of His infinite glory may God the Father give you the power through His Holy Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith until, knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.

This is the hope that sustains you as teachers, staff members and leaders: that your students might be filled not just with knowledge, though that is important, but also with those things which are ‘beyond knowledge’, with excellences of character, with values and beliefs, with that encounter with God that is pure grace, ‘the utter fullness of God’.

That’s what makes Catholic education distinctive and why you have chosen to make it your vocation: that we want all that good teaching and learning will mean for our students, and more: and that ‘more’ is to provide opportunities for encounter with Christ in the formal and informal curriculum so that our young ones might know, love and serve God in this life and be with Him forever in the next.

That spirituality of hope clearly motivated Mary MacKillop whom we will soon celebrate as the first Australian saint and the patron saint of Catholic education. Amidst many trials – trials that make many of the difficulties of our own daily grind seem trivial – she held on to the hope that her children might be well-educated and be saints.

St John Eudes

Today we celebrate the feast day of another saint, St John Eudes. You could be forgiven for thinking St John who? John Eudes was born in Normandy and was a contemporary of St Vincent de Paul. He gathered around him a group of priests intent on raising the standard of education, particularly for boys and youths thinking of the priesthood.

Today, in France, north and south America and the Philippines, the Eudists (not nudists! They are a Society of Apostolic Life) continue this work of formation as lecturers, teachers and chaplains. They teach in diocesan seminaries and houses of formation, operate hostels for students and, in the university holidays, tourists may avail of the accommodation – and one is located right in the centre of Paris!

So it is a happy coincidence that we remember today John Eudes, one who went before us in the profession of teaching, one who is celebrated by Pope Benedict for his “steadfast trust in the love that God had revealed to humanity in the priestly Heart of Christ and the maternal Heart of Mary” (General Audience, Wednesday 19 August 2009).

The heart of Christ, symbol of God’s love, is described by Jesus Himself in our Gospel passage (Mt 11:25-30) as a gentle and humble heart, a place of rest for our weary souls, and a place, too, where we may find God revealed. This is the God to whom you bring your young people through your teaching and leading; this is the God to whom you turn yourself for refreshment and hope.

In congratulating all the award recipients this evening, I commend you for your perseverance in those times, in Jesus’ words, when you “labour and are overburdened”. I thank you for your dedication to Catholic education, to joining Christ in revealing His truth to “mere children”. I pray that you, too, will know the breadth and length, the height and depth of God’s love for you.

Congratulations to the slow-cookers, the Education MasterChefs Parramatta 2010.

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Address, Brother John Taylor Award to Trish Maidens, Xavier College Llandillo, 29 July 2010

Bishops are big on hats and today I wear two: one as Chairman of the Catholic Education Commission of NSW and the other as Bishop of Parramatta. In the latter role I am delighted that this year’s Brother John Taylor Award winner, Trish Maidens, has spent most of her professional life in the Diocese of Parramatta and, most recently, as foundation and current Principal of Xavier College Llandillo.

Lest there be any fear of bias, you should know I was not Bishop of Parramatta when Trish was chosen! Wearing my other mitre, I am also delighted to be awarding this ‘Brownlow Medal’ or ‘Best and Fairest’ award in education to this particular candidate.

What do we expect of an educator who is to receive the ‘Best and Fairest’ or Brother John Taylor Award? The 16^th Century French essayist, Michel de Montaigne, a contemporary of St Francis Xavier, gives us a guide – even in pedagogy, there are few really new ideas!

In his essay On Educating Children, written for a friend of his who was about to engage a tutor for his son, he talks about staff selection, child-centred curriculum, and assessable outcomes – although he does not use those terms!

It is more important that teachers have a “well-formed” brain than a “well-filled” one Montaigne wrote. This goal should, of course, inform staff selection, professional development, curriculum planning and teaching methods in the 21^st Century even more than in the 16^th Century.

That is why the Bishops of NSW and the ACT in their Pastoral Letter, Catholic Schools at a Crossroads, set as a goal for our times that our schools be led and staffed by people who will contribute to the Catholic life and identity of their schools as much as to the educational goals of those schools; people who will play a role also in the ‘new evangelisation’, paralleling ‘the new teaching and learning’ in those schools; and people who will help ensure our students achieve high levels of ‘religious literacy’ to match high levels of achievement in other disciplines. That requires a lifelong formation of our teachers and staff, not just our students. It requires well-formed minds as much as well-informed ones.

In discussing the benefits of the study of history – and I note that Trish majored in and taught history – Montaigne hoped students would learn not only what happened but also what its significance was: “let the student not so much learn what happened as judge what happened”.

Again, such goals for student learning are really goals of educators’ teaching. It is clear from the testimonies of those who wrote in support of Trish’s nomination that she has realised such expectations. She is noted for her careful selection and mentoring of staff in order to build a team who demonstrate her own warmth, respect and enthusiasm; her pedagogical leadership is outstanding; and as a result her collaborators – staff and students – aim for rigorous educational standards, the best in ‘best and fairest’.

Students must learn to judge what happened said Montaigne. What criteria are students to apply to judgments in learning and life? The ultimate criterion for the Catholic school – and the one which Trish adopts – is the person of Jesus Christ.

It is that focus on the person of Jesus that enables Trish to strengthen relationships in the service of a community of learning and love. Clergy, parents, staff, students of all intellectual abilities, are welcomed to her Xavier College.

I used the term ‘best and fairest’ earlier to highlight that this prize honours excellence in teaching in the Catholic school. But the Catholic school aims for more than the best of learning: it also wants the fairest of learners.  We call such excellence of character ‘virtue’.

Australians translate the virtue of justice as ‘fairness’ or ‘a fair go’. Trish’s commitment to social justice characterises her personal and professional life. She says she learnt this in a Jesuit school – which is nearly as good as being at a Dominican school – and so in these ecumenical times we must give credit to the Jesuits for their infectious passion for justice!

All of this is captured in the testimony of a parent writing about her daughter, “She has returned many times to visit her teachers and chat with Ms Maidens. Her strong community values, acceptance of diversity and belief that she can do more” inspire her daughter now as she begins her adult life.

Not that social justice is the only virtue. There are other important values, such as faith and hope, courage and constraint, and Trish has emphasised these too.

“Leadership,” she has said, “is about hope and forgiveness. It is about touching the future.” Everyone in Catholic education and everyone in ministry in the Church could meditate and act upon that sentiment. Trish, I congratulate you on an award richly deserved!

Sacraments of Initiation: sequence, age and other issues

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Address to Clergy, St Patrick’s Cathedral Hall, Parramatta, 22 July 2010

1. Background

In May 2009 the Council of Priests of the Diocese of Parramatta appointed a Committee to review the policy and practice of the Sacraments of Initiation (‘SOI’) and First Penance for children who have been baptised (‘the Review’). The Committee engaged clergy, pastoral associates and sacramental teams in identifying the range of interpretations of the existing Diocesan Policy, the actual practices on the ground, formation opportunities and some other matters.

In September 2009 it presented a draft report to the Bishop.

In view of the diversity of interpretation and practice found by the Committee it recommended:

• that the diocesan policy either be recommitted to or revised to ensure greater consistency across the diocese
• that the sequence, age and preparatory process for SOI (and First Penance) be clarified
• that a formation plan for clergy, sacramental coordinators and their teams be developed addressing liturgical, theological and pastoral dimensions
•  that a clear protocol be established for liturgical celebrations and
• that parishes be appropriately supported in this area.

In visiting all the deaneries and about half the parishes so far, several of these questions have recurred. It is a tribute to how seriously people take the sacramental life in general, and SOI in particular, that these matters have been drawn to my attention so early and often, and that many of you have expressed a passion for their resolution.

This morning I would like first to address the issue of the chronology (that is, sequence and age) of receiving SOI – Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist – as well as First Penance. Other matters such as appropriate models and programs of preparation will follow after the resolution of this matter. I will note some other outstanding questions that arose in the Review or my meetings with you. I will welcome your comments and suggestions.

2. Five distinct chronologies

There have been at least five distinct chronologies of SOI so far. It would be interesting to tease out, had we the time, what worldviews, anthropologies and sacramental theologies underpinned these particular pastoral practices in each period, what great figures, forces and ideas led to their being embraced, what effects they had and so on. But let me start with my five models.

2.1 Patristic SOI

The Church teaches that the 7 sacraments were instituted by Christ (Council of Trent DS 1600-1; CCC 1084, 1114, 1117, 1131, 1210).

The three SOI lay the foundations of Christian life and to some degree match the stages of birth, feeding, growth and passing (Paul VI, Divinæ consortium naturæ; CCC 1210 & 1212; RCIA Introduction 1-2). The spiritual birth of Baptism comes first, of course: it is the gateway to life in the Spirit and the door to the other sacraments; it frees from sin, makes us children of God, members of Christ and His Church (CCC 1213). Yet passing through the doorway is not the end of Christian initiation.

“The apostles, in fulfilment of Christ's will, imparted to the newly baptised by the laying on of hands the gift of the Spirit that completes the grace of Baptism. For this reason in the Letter to the Hebrews the doctrine concerning Baptism and the laying on of hands is listed among the first elements of Christian instruction. The imposition of hands is rightly recognised by the Catholic tradition as the origin of the sacrament of Confirmation, which in a certain way perpetuates the grace of Pentecost in the Church.” (Paul VI, Divinæ consortium naturæ; CCC 1288; cf. Acts 8:15-17; 19:5-6; Heb 6:2)

While there is some uncertainty and ongoing debate about the theologies and practices underpinning the evolving practice of SOI in the early Church, it seems that Baptism-Confirmation was seen as a ‘double sacrament’ (St Cyprian; cf. CCC 1290), celebrated as a continuous rite. The newly initiated were then brought from the baptistry (if there was one) into the Church and received their First Eucharist at the Mass which followed; First Eucharist could then be said to “complete Christian initiation” (CCC 1322). Ideally all this occurred in the Cathedral at Easter at the hands of the bishop. Adults, children and babes were all initiated according to this sequence. This ancient chronology has been recovered, more or less, in the post-Vatican II Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. It has also survived in the Oriental Rites of the Catholic Church, which complicates matters when Maronite or other Eastern Catholics in our parishes and schools are already fully initiated but want to take some part in our sacramental celebrations.

This ancient chronology emphasised the unity of SOI. There was no expectation that candidates would know everything about the sacraments before receiving them. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out, “Although Confirmation is sometimes called the sacrament of Christian maturity, we must not confuse adult faith with the adult age of natural growth, nor forget that the baptismal grace is a grace of free, unmerited election and does not need ratification to become effective.” (CCC 1308) Thus in the ancient Church even newborns were Confirmed.

For those of catechetical age, however, evangelisation and a process of catechesis was required before reception of the sacraments and mystagogia or further catechesis after initiation. The chrismation after Baptism, which survives to this day in the Latin West, hints at this formerly seamless celebration of the double sacrament. In the early centuries initiation was a single process even if extended over several months (or in some cases years) from when the catechumens were first admitted until their post-sacramental catechesis was completed.

2.2 Romanesque SOI

In the late Patristic Latin West and beyond it proved increasingly difficult for the bishop to initiate all those who were ready and so Baptism was increasingly performed locally by priests on behalf of their more distant bishops. The renewal of baptismal promises and the sealing at Baptism recalled the original connection between the two sacraments; the anointing with chrism blessed by the bishop emphasised the connection with him and so the wider church. As Confirmation continued its evolution as a distinct sacramental act in the West it was normally reserved to the bishop. Thus Confirmation was postponed until the bishop was next in town and then it was conferred upon those of any age, from babies to the elderly, who had been baptised since the bishop was last around. First Holy Communion normally followed immediately upon Confirmation.

This was not merely a matter of convenience. As Christians looked back to the Scriptures for the origins of their sacraments they read of a laying on of hands by which the Holy Spirit was sent distinct from and subsequent to Baptism, e.g.

Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit; for it had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. (Acts 8:14-17)

This second ancient chronology of the sacraments enabled the development of a distinct theology and practice of the sacrament of Confirmation, which otherwise appeared as a sort of glorious appendix to Baptism, shining and scented but rather unnecessary. Now the sacrament could speak of the unity of the wider Church around and through its bishop and his role in ‘confirming’ that which the priest had done in the local parish at Baptism. It was now the bishop who normally mediated the Pentecost outpouring of the Holy Spirit, while the priests first united the candidates to Christ in Baptism. In the process something of the original unity of the process of initiation was lost; but maintaining the connection of Confirmation with the bishop while allowing priests to do the Baptisms was a useful compromise.

2.3 Pre-modern SOI

By the gothic or medieval period the number of adult candidates for initiation had declined as ‘Christendom’ ensured that, wherever the Church was, most people were initiated as babies. Baptism was now normally received in infancy, First Confession at the age of discretion or reason (presumed to be 7) or in the years thereafter, and Confirmation and Eucharist increasingly postponed till puberty or adolescence (age 12 to 18) but before marriage or vows of religion (D437). Theologians such as Aquinas pointed out that to receive the sacraments of Confirmation and Eucharist before the age of reason would be otiose, as the grace of Baptism is fully operative until a person is old enough to sin and fall from grace (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, qq. 66-72).

The medieval requirement that candidates for Confirmation, unless in danger of death, must have attained the use of reason (or be even older if this is the local custom) was entrenched by the Council of Trent as ‘more fitting’ and survives to this day in Western law and practice (CCC 1307; CIC 889.2, 891). In many countries today Confirmation is postponed to the mid-teens (in the US up to 16). (However, parents may choose to have their child confirmed earlier than the local custom or legislation, if the child is at least of the age of reason and properly disposed and instructed: Congregation of Divine Worship, 18 December 1999).

This practice has allowed the development of the idea that Confirmation is a sacrament of Christian adulthood, indeed for ‘soldiers for Christ’ or willing-to-be martyrs for the faith, which suited an age of courtly love and crusading and was emphasised by the bishop slapping the candidate’s cheek as in the knightly custom of accolade. This idea had precedent in the ancient Liturgy of Antioch (see CCC 1297). Vatican II and its subsequent canon law and catechism maintained something of the spiritual adulthood or warfare idea when it declared that “the sacrament of Confirmation confers a character … (by which the candidates) are made strong and more firmly obliged by word and deed to witness to Christ and spread and defend the faith” (LG 11, CCC 1285 & 1303, CIC 879). The contemporary Rite of Confirmation no longer includes such obvious military imagery, but continues the language of witness and strengthening and, in many places, the gesture of a tap on the cheek.

By the Reformation period some saw the sacrament as a chance for the candidate freely to choose or ‘confirm’ what had been done by his parents and the Church in bringing him to Baptism as an infant. This also aligned the sacraments more closely with the rites of passage that anthropologists note are commonplace in most cultures and religions, including Judaism. The idea that Confirmation marks the onset of spiritual adulthood also had some precedent in the writings of the Fathers, e.g. St Cyril of Jerusalem. Nonetheless, art and other records of the pre-modern period suggest that some candidates were (still or again) being confirmed and communicated before puberty.

Throughout the medieval and pre-modern period the diocesan bishop was the ordinary minister of Confirmation in the Latin Rite. This was eventually defined by the Councils of Florence (D573 and 697) and of Trent (Sess. VII, De Conf., canon 3).

2.4 Pio9 SOI

In the Counter-Reformation and early modern period the practice of Baptism in infancy, Confirmation in adolescence and First Holy Communion immediately or soon thereafter continued in most places until the 19^th Century, though in some places Confirmation and First Holy Communion were held earlier. It is commonly thought that it was Pope Pius X who upset the traditional sequence. In fact, however, a series of synods in France and elsewhere during the post-Napoleonic recovery of the Church in Europe proposed lowering the age of First Holy Communion in order to counter Jansenism, to promote greater Eucharistic devotion and especially to encourage more frequent reception of the Sacrament. It was argued in these Synods and by various scholars that delaying Confirmation was less serious than delaying Eucharist, which should be the daily bread of Christians, and that this would allow appropriate catechesis at least for Confirmation. Those who favoured this ‘new’ sequence of SOI pointed to the apostolic precedent of the Last Supper preceding Pentecost. The practice of First Holy Communion before Confirmation became widespread in Europe during the reign of Pope Pius IX. It was sometimes resisted by Rome and there were even moves at the First Vatican Council to ban it and assert the ancient sequence was unchangeable. (See Turner on these Synods and the responses of Pope Leo XIII and the Roman congregations.)

Despite curial resistance St Pius X famously lowered the age of First Holy Communion to the age of discretion (age 7) and confirmed the already growing practice of the ‘First Holy Communion’ celebration for children [Quam singulari (1910)]. Though the sequence of SOI was not treated in the decree the effect was to change the order of the sacraments in most of the Western Church to Baptism-First Penance-First Communion-Confirmation, and the age of reception to 0+ for Baptisms, soon after 7 for First Confession, soon after First Confession for First Holy Communion, and adolescence (anywhere from 8 to 16) for Confirmation.

the practice in the Latin West has not been uniform. In many Spanish-speaking countries, it was customary for the bishop to confirm two- and three-year-olds presented for Confirmation in the cathedral. In Italy, Confirmation was often received on the same day as First Communion, but not at the same ceremony; First Communion was received at the morning parish Mass, Confirmation in an afternoon ceremony concluding with Benediction. In the countries of northern Europe and English-speaking countries generally, Confirmation was received after a separate catechesis during the last years of elementary school; more recently, under the influence of the catechetical movement, this age was sometimes deferred into mid-adolescence or later.

The Pio9 chronology, which endured throughout the West until Vatican II and survives in many places to this day, allowed preparation for First Confession and First Holy Communion to take place in a different year(s) to preparation for Confirmation. It also allowed a particular, dare I say, sentimental style of celebration of First Holy Communion for children, perhaps best recalled by the hymn On My First Communion Day. Many priests, teachers and catechists attested that this separation was pastorally useful and that younger children seemed readier for catechesis on the Eucharist than for catechesis on Confirmation. They regarded the Pio9 chronology as a useful pastoral innovation and a development of practice, if not of doctrine.

However, the previous order of SOI – Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist – had been upset and liturgists thought the new order lacked the warrant of tradition and theology. The Catechism of the Catholic Church presumes the pre-Pio9 sequence in some paragraphs (eg 1212) but the Pio9 sequence in others, e.g. 1285.

2.5 Post-modern SOI

In the post-Vatican II period several dioceses around the world determined to return to the pre-Pio9 order of SOI – Baptism-Confirmation-Eucharist – but influenced by a desire to move Confirmation as close in time as possible to Baptism (and perhaps by the desire to maintain special children’s ceremonies) another novel chronology appeared. Now Confirmation took place much earlier than in the pre-Pio9 period, around the age of reason (age 6, 7, 8 or 9), and commonly outside of Mass. Then, in the same ceremony or later in the same year, First Holy Communion was celebrated. First Penance normally took place before Confirmation, as is required (CCC 1310), but in a few places it took place after Confirmation.

Though some characterise this as a ‘return to the ancient order’ and rationale for SOI, it is in fact a fifth and previously unprecedented chronology: until the 1980s there was no precedent for confirming 8-year-olds. Advocates of a return to the pre-Pio9 sequence point out that “sacraments are a divine gift, not a graduation present”.

Reflecting the question of sequence of SOI raised at the Synod on the Eucharist, Pope Benedict noted that “Different traditions exist within the Church. There is a clear variation between, on the one hand, the ecclesial customs of the East and the practice of the West regarding the initiation of adults, and, on the other hand, the procedure adopted for children. Yet these variations are not properly of the dogmatic order, but are pastoral in character.” (Sacramentum caritatis 18) He hinted at his own preference when he said “we need to ask ourselves whether in our Christian communities the close link between Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist is sufficiently recognised. It must never be forgotten that our reception of Baptism and Confirmation is ordered to the Eucharist. Accordingly, our pastoral practice should reflect a more unitary understanding of the process of Christian initiation ... The Holy Eucharist, then, brings Christian initiation to completion and represents the centre and goal of all sacramental life.” (Sacramentum caritatis 17) Rather than resolving the matter, however, the Pope directed that “In close collaboration with the competent offices of the Roman Curia, Bishops’ Conferences should examine the effectiveness of current approaches to Christian initiation, so that the faithful can be helped both to mature through the formation received in our communities and to give their lives an authentically eucharistic direction, so that they can offer a reason for the hope within them in a way suited to our times (cf. 1 Pet 3:15).”

The Diocese of Parramatta policy states that “It is appropriate that this be a single process involving renewal of Baptismal promises, sealing with the gift of the Spirit (Confirmation) and introduction to the Eucharistic table.” In fact, most Parramatta parishes have Confirmation and First Holy Communion on separate occasions.

No consistent policy has been followed in the US and Australia, with each diocese going its own way. In our ecclesial province, for instance, most dioceses have First Holy Communion before Confirmation (Armidale, Bathurst, Canberra & Goulburn, Lismore, Sydney, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong) but four dioceses have it after Confirmation (Broken Bay, Maitland-Newcastle, Parramatta, Wilcannia-Forbes).

2.6 Conclusions re chronology

There is no one chronology for SOI in the Latin Church. ‘Initiation-Tridentinists’ assert that one time in history, e.g. AD500 or AD1950 or AD 1990, was when we got it right and that all other periods have got it wrong. In fact, there are multiple traditions, each with a particular chronology reflecting a particular anthropology, sacramental theology, and pastoral pros and cons.

After reviewing the history and theology, Karl Rahner’s Encyclopedia of Theology suggested – and I agree – that:

The whole question is simply a pastoral one. It is important, no doubt, to restore the old order of initiation and, above all, to make the Eucharist the climax of initiation, with the People of God united around their Lord. But it is equally certain that there are grave pastoral reasons in some countries for confirming children only when they are about to become adults. Vatican II wisely refused to impose a uniform rule upon all. (p281)

3. Parramatta initiation

3.1 Current practice

In the Diocese of Parramatta the Review found that

• most parishes follow the sequence Baptism, Confirmation, First Holy Communion; but some parishes follow the sequence Baptism, First Holy Communion, Confirmation
• most parishes have First Confession before Confirmation; but some parishes have First Confession after Confirmation but before First Communion
• most parishes have Confirmation around age 8/9/10; but some parishes have Confirmation around age 11/12
• most parishes have First Communion around age 8/9/10; but some have First Communion around age 7
• most parishes have Confirmation and First Communion in separate ceremonies; but some parishes have Confirmation and First Communion in the same ceremony
•  of those parishes that separate Confirmation and First Communion, some have interstices as short as 2 days, others as long as a year or more, most a month or 2 or 3.

3.2 Strengths of the current policy and practice

The Review found that some thought the restoration of the more ancient sequence of SOI was theologically-liturgically preferable and had been pastorally effective.

Some liked the flexibility in Parramatta for each parish to go its own way on the chronology of SOI.

There was widespread praise for the family and parish-based preparation for the SOI.

3.3 Weaknesses of the current policy and practice

In our Review some thought the return to the pre-Pio9 sequence in recent times had been catechetically and pastorally disadvantageous. Levada notes the reports of pastors “who often find that the meaning and significance of Confirmation is overwhelmed in practice by combining it with first Communion.” He argues for the postponement of Confirmation to allow an extended catechesis along the lines of the RCIA and the experience of the neocatechumenate movement.

The Review reported that most thought that whichever chronology is preferred, it should be consistent throughout the Diocese, rather than the ‘free for all’ that has developed. This will help ensure that children who move around the Diocese do not ‘fall between the cracks’ and that parents are less confused about what is expected of them.

Most thought there should be a consistent policy on whether Confirmation and First Holy Communion are celebrated in the same ceremony or separate ceremonies.

The Review identified a range of ways in which parishes might be better assisted with preparation for SOI.

3.4 Proposed changes to Parramatta practice

The Review proposed that the policy be tightened or revised to ensure greater consistency across the Diocese.

Most would seem to agree that it should be Diocesan policy that Confirmation and First Holy Communion should be celebrated in separate ceremonies.

Some prefer the sequence Baptism at age 0+, with First Confession, Confirmation and First Communion all around age 8 and in that order. Others prefer the sequence Baptism at age 0+, First Confession around age 7-8, First Communion around age 8-9 and Confirmation around age 10-11.

4. Further questions

4.1 Minister of the Sacrament of Confirmation

Several priests have expressed a preference that the Bishop(s) as far as possible confer the sacrament of Confirmation rather than Episcopal Vicars; some have suggested that where the Bishop(s) cannot do so, the Parish Priest should be delegated. In the Western Church the bishop is the ordinary minister of Confirmation and normally administers that sacrament; certain specified priests may be granted the faculty in cases of necessity (CCC 1312 & 1313; CIC 882 & 884). The Catechism of the Catholic Church observes that:

In the Latin Rite, the ordinary minister of Confirmation is the bishop. If the need arises, the bishop may grant the faculty of administering Confirmation to priests, although it is fitting that he confer it himself, mindful that the celebration of Confirmation has been temporally separated from Baptism for this reason. Bishops are the successors of the apostles. They have received the fullness of the sacrament of Holy Orders. The administration of this sacrament by them demonstrates clearly that its effect is to unite those who receive it more closely to the Church, to her apostolic origins, and to her mission of bearing witness to Christ. (CCC 1313)

4.2 Who should be initiated?

Some would exclude children from Baptism, First Penance, Confirmation and/or First Holy Communion if their family does not regularly attend Mass or are in irregular situations or fail to contribute in some other way to the life of the parish, e.g. through planned giving.

The Church’s pastoral practice throughout history has always been to err in favour of giving the sacraments when there was a doubt, e.g. about the person’s disposition, likelihood of seeing through the commitment or even whether they were still alive. The canon law provides that parents should bring their infants for Baptism within the first few weeks of life (CIC 867.1). So important is Baptism to salvation that the law even condones Baptism of a child in danger of death against the parents’ wishes (CIC 868.2). No parents seeking Baptism for their child should be denied it if there is a ‘founded hope’ (spes habeatur fundata), that is, some reason to believe that the child will be brought up in the Catholic religion (CIC 868.1.2). The sacraments are not magic, and cannot substitute for evangelisation, sound catechesis and other aspects of a good Christian upbringing. But it is our Catholic faith that they have a profound ontological effect, bring with them the gifts of faith, hope and love, membership of God’s family the Church and the passport to eternal life; SOI are therefore not to be denied to any child unless for very grave reason, e.g. where a couple has made it clear they intend to bring the child up as an atheist or devil-worshipper and are only getting the child baptised in order to get him or her into a cheap private school.

Likewise, the Church teaches that “Every baptised person not yet confirmed can and should receive the sacrament of Confirmation.” (CCC 1306) The canon law requires the diocesan bishop to ensure that the sacrament of Confirmation is conferred “upon his subjects who duly and reasonably request it” (CIC 885.1). To duly and reasonably request it, candidates must have the use of reason, be suitably instructed, properly disposed and able to renew the baptismal promises (CIC 889.2; Rite of Confirmation 12). The faithful, for their part, are bound to receive it “at the proper time” and parish priests are bound to see to it that they are properly instructed and do receive it at the proper time (CIC 889).

4.3 Preparation for SOI

Most favour a continuation of family and parish-based preparation for SOI, with assistance from the Catholic school RE classes and the state school catechist classes. Several suggested that the present preparation is too short/rushed. The Review suggested various improvements to current family and parish-based preparation for SOI.

4.4 Formation of Sacramental Coordinators and their teams

The Review suggested various improvements to be made in formation of Sacramental Coordinators and their teams.

4.5 Older candidates

Another question raised was how best to deal with older candidates for SOI for whom the preparation with younger children and even the ceremony with younger children may not be appropriate.

4.6 Children of Oriental rites

Another question raised was how best to provide pastorally for already fully initiated children of Oriental Rite who want to be part of the preparations and celebrations with their classmates of Latin Rite.

4.7 Connecting with parents

Several questions were raised about how better to connect with parents and to maximise the faith enrichment for them.

4.8 Should babies and children in danger of death be Confirmed?

The teaching of the Church is that they should.

If a Christian is in danger of death, any priest can give him Confirmation. Indeed the Church desires that none of her children, even the youngest, should depart this world without having been perfected by the Holy Spirit with the gift of Christ's fullness. (CCC 1314)

4.9 Confirmation within Mass or outside Mass?

The canon law and the Rite of Confirmation require or presume that Confirmation is normally celebrated during Mass, e.g. CIC 881. In the Diocese of Parramatta where children who have not made and are not in that celebration making their First Holy Communion, Confirmation is commonly celebrated outside of Mass.

5. Some questions for discussion

There are many more questions we might discuss about SOI but that should be more than enough to get us talking! I would invite you now to consider these questions for discussion:

Theologically and pastorally, do you think Confirmation should precede First Holy Communion and at what ages should these sacraments take place?

In what circumstances, if any, should we refuse someone admission to one of the SOI?

What support is needed to encourage and develop the sacramental teams in our parishes?

How else can we as a Diocese encourage, develop and assist in the sacramental life of our people?

6. Some further reading

Austin, Gerard. Anointing with the Spirit (New York: Pueblo, 1985).

Caldecott, Stratford. The 7 Sacraments: Entering the Mysteries of God (New York: Crossroad, 2006).

Fransen, Piet “Confirmation,” in Karl Rahner sj, Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi. (Continuum, 1975), 276-283.

Holohan, Gerard. “At what age confirmation?” November 2008 www.bunburycatholic.org.au/pastoral-statements/at-what-age-confirmation.html 

Kavanagh, Aidan. The Shape of Baptism: The Rite of Christian Initiation (New York: Pueblo, 1978).

Kavanagh, Aidan. Confirmation: Origins and Reform (New York: Pueblo, 1988).

Levada, William. “Reflections on the age of confirmation.” Theological Studies 57 (1996), 302-313.

Levering, Matthew and Michael Dauphinais (eds). Rediscovering Aquinas and the Sacraments: Studies in Sacramental Theology (Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2009).

Marsh, Thomas. Gift of Community: Baptism and Confirmation. Wilmington: Glazier, 1984).

Marsh, Thomas. “Confirmation,” New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship (ed. Peter Fink, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1990).

McKenna, Briege. The Power of the Sacraments. (Cincinnati OH: Servant Books, 2010).

Mick, Lawrence. Understanding the Sacraments Today. (Rev. ed., Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2006).

Sargent, Robert. Walking in Newness of Life: The Sacraments of Initiation (New York: Paulist Press, 2007).

Scannell, T. “Confirmation,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908) www.newadvent.org/cathen/04215b.htm 

Searle, Mark. Christening: The Making of Christians (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1980).

Turner, Paul. Ages of Initiation (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000).

Turner, Paul. Sources of Confirmation: From the Fathers through the Reformers (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993).

Turner, Paul. “Benedict XVI and the sequence of the sacraments of initiation,” Worship 82(2) (March 2008), 132-140.

Wilde, James. When Should We Confirm (Chicago: LTP, 1989).

Woestman, William. Initiation, Penance, Anointing of the Sick: Commentary on canons 840-1007 (3rd ed, Ottawa: St Paul University Press, 2004).

Bishop Anthony’s Fisher address to the National Council of Priests 2010 Convention, Sebel Hotel, Parramatta, 12 July 2010

I thank Aunty Janice and all the women of Aboriginal Catholic Social Services for their welcome to country and their dance. I thank the ancient elders of the Darug people whom they represent, as well as Governor King, his soldiers and convicts whom our young people here tonight represent, and their successors, for the privilege of gathering on this land.

I am especially grateful to stand in place of Fr Dixon and today receive a conditional emancipation and permission to exercise the priesthood, including to celebrate Mass for the Catholic people of the colony.

Given that the celebration of Mass is still illegal at this time elsewhere in the British empire, including in our countries of origin, this example of religious toleration is something to be very proud of.

I understand that Governor King was moved by the express desire of the Catholics of the colony to have access to the sacraments and his belief that this might help to keep order amongst them.

I am also grateful that though I have been required to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, I am not required to deny the reality of transubstantiation as was Governor King and his predecessors on assuming office as Governor of this colony.

The first public Masses under the new regulations were celebrated in Sydney, Parramatta and the Hawkesbury in 1803 – long before Catholic emancipation in England – and the Governor was so pleased at the salutary effect on the Irish Catholics that he decided to pay Fr Dixon a grand salary of £60.

But this was short-lived.

The Vinegar Hill Rebellion, which the Governor believed had been plotted by Catholics as they met for Mass, only proved how useless Catholic Masses and priests were at securing public order.

Thereafter, Catholics were once again required to attend Anglican services. In fact, these also proved ineffective at making Catholic priests and people biddable, at least to the colonial authorities!

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to the Diocese of Parramatta for the convention of the National Council of Priests, and especially to welcome my brother priests and bishops.

In the face of many challenges but also the joy and inspiration celebrated in the recently concluded “Year for Priests” you will be reflecting together on the changing face of the priesthood and the presence of Christ the Priest in the midst of this change.

This Diocese is just about the youngest in the country, in terms of canonical age but also the average age of its 340,000 or so members. There is significant growth, with new parishes, churches and schools being built all the time.

We have 49 parishes at present and 77 diocesan Catholic schools and six congregational schools. With most of our children in state schools we must reach out to them also and two of my parishes have 18 schools each to serve. We have a significant social services and some healthcare.

This is also the most Catholic part of the country and the most multi-ethnic, multicultural diocese. It has the highest concentration of Indigenous Australians of any Australian diocese.

Due to the demographics of migration to Australia and cheaper housing for those building families, Parramatta is expected to outgrow its parent Archdiocese of Sydney during my time as bishop. I have advised the Cardinal that at that point I expect Sydney will be demoted to a diocese and Parramatta raised to an Archdiocese!

Parramatta was chosen as the seat of this new Diocese because of its historical role in the early European settlement of Australia, its size as a commercial and administrative centre and its pivotal position in the communications that link the West with other parts of Sydney.

You might say it is contemporary urban Australia in miniature. It has ancient parishes by Australian standards, as well burgeoning suburbs, and there is a lot of energy, which is very exciting for a new bishop.

Of course such growth and diversity presents a range of challenges for our priests here as for those in other parts of Australia: how do we connect better with our young families and young adults, with diverse ethnic groups and with the relatively absent ‘blue-eyes’.

We share with other parts of the Church in Australia and overseas challenges such as the increasing secularisation of society, how to respond to rapid change in economy, ecology, technology and culture, the ageing and declining numbers of people in priestly, religious and married life, the effects of more than a decade of battering in the media on our credibility and morale, and the need to ensure that all people, and especially young people, are welcomed, safe and genuinely built up in our Church. Every part of this country has particular challenges, related to size, distance, personalities, economy, history and so on.

I am told that more than 250 clergy are at this convention and that you represent a good mix of young and old, diocesan and religious, city and country priests, old timers and newcomers to this country, as well as the broad range of priestly ministries of proclamation, sanctification and shepherding in which we are engaged.

We are blessed to have eminent speakers from around this country and from the US to lead the reflections on these topics and I welcome each of you to the Diocese as well.

The program includes group discussion, tours, some fine dining and plenty of opportunity for fraternity. There will also be periods of reflection, prayer and worship, a literary celebration of the history of the organisation.

In the context of current controversy about physical and sexual abuse by clergy and religious and the sometimes grave mishandling of these matters by Church leaders, it is appropriate that there will be a reconciliation liturgy acknowledging our personal and ecclesial responsibility and praying for healing and conversion.

The Chairman of the NCP, Fr Ian M^cGinnity, is a priest of this Diocese, and I know that he has worked doggedly for a long period on bringing this conference to fruition – while faithfully fulfilling his duties as Parish Priest of Mary Immaculate, Quakers Hill.

Bringing priests together has been compared to herding cats, but Ian and the others have succeeded admirably! On your behalf I thank him and his several collaborators for their work.

I pray this will be a time of fraternal encouragement and spiritual refreshment for you. With all the priests and people of the Diocese of Parramatta I welcome you all.

Reception to welcome the new Bishop of Parramatta, Most Rev Anthony Fisher OP, and to acknowledge the long-serving contribution of Most Rev Kevin Manning, Bishop Emeritus, Granville Town Hall, 2 July 2010.

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s Address to Civic Leaders:

I am very grateful for this kind civic reception on the occasion of my installation as the third Bishop of Parramatta. In fact, I have been at it now for more than three months, and my staff have recently exchanged my L-plates for Ps.

People have been most welcoming and gracious. Many of you have accompanied me from the day my appointment was announced, supported me at my installation in March, and been by collaborators ever since. In turn, I undertake to pray for you and work with you as best I can for the good of the people of Western Sydney in the years ahead.

I am also grateful that you are honouring my predecessor, Bishop Kevin Manning. History will remember him as one of the great leaders and ‘characters’ of area. He led this Diocese through a period of rapid growth, so that it is now the fifth biggest in this country – bigger than several archdioceses.

He raised up the new St Patrick’s Cathedral from the ashes of its predecessor. He welcomed to the Diocese Pope Benedict XVI, the World Youth Day Cross & Icon, and the young people of the world in 2008.

He built bridges to other faiths, especially the Muslim community in Western Sydney. He campaigned for justice for workers, Aborigines, refugees, women and families.

He built up and diversified the body of clergy, religious and lay ministers in the Diocese. For 12 years he was the Good Shepherd of Western Sydney. We pray for a happy (semi) retirement for him.

Recently, I have been reading a book by Tom Holland about the world around the year 1,000 ad. The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West (New York: Anchor Books, 2008) opens with a description of the fateful meeting between Pope Gregory VII and the Emperor Henry IV, which inaugurated the clearer separation of Church and state in the West.

It goes on to describe an age of caliphs and Viking raiders, of knights and their castles, bishops and their cathedrals, feudal vendettas, kidnappings, tumult and slaughter. It was one of the most significant departure points in history, as Western Europe emerged as a distinctive culture and expansionist power.

And at the heart of this, Holland argues, was the disappointment of millennial hopes and the settling of a new relationship between ecclesial and civil authority that gave Christendom its particular energy and focus.

There are many views of the proper relationship between civil government and its various departments, and various faiths and their agencies, as well as unions, NGOs and other associations. Secularism, laïcité or the separation of Church and state has many forms. What was essentially a millennial Christian contribution to our civilisation has mutated in various ways and places.

Increasingly, in West Europe, for instance, as in the communist East of old, the tendency is to say with respect to Church and state that ne’er the twain shall meet. Governments and courts increasingly exclude churches (and some other NGOs) from decision-making and service delivery.

Dogmatic secularists would ban Christmas decorations from public places, church bells from their towers, crucifixes from schools or nurses, veils from women’s faces, and so on.

Some seek to eliminate any residual religious values from public law and policy, for example with respect to marriage, the protection of human life, justice for workers, newcomers and the poor.

Some want believers to renounce their most deeply held beliefs, stay silent about them in the public square, or else adopt a kind of dual personality, saving their faith for church or home, and adopting someone else’s values when they are ‘out in public’.

No matter that religious believers are the majority of our community and democracies are supposed to take majorities seriously. No matter that freedom of religious belief and expression is a fundamental human right and democracies are supposed to take rights seriously.

Religion is thought by some to be so violent, intolerant or benighted that they would be horrified at civic officials interfacing with Church leaders even in a cordial way such as today’s reception.

If there are countries in which state or culture-imposed atheism is dominant, there are others in which religion seeks to dictate terms to government and society, including to people who do not share that faith, and to control every aspect of life.

While on Tom Holland’s view it was Christendom that insisted on a proper distinction between the spheres of God and Cæsar, Pope and emperor, Church and state, the fact is that there have been plenty of individual Christian leaders down through the centuries, as well as other believers, who have sought to blur those lines for their own interests.

Some countries, such as the US, seem to be a strange mixture of these two extremes, with lots of public religious rhetoric as if religion was more or less compulsory and lots of bans on things like prayers and cribs in public spaces as if irreligion was.

Here in Australia we have a unique take on these things: we distinguish between Church and state, and recognise that each has its own sphere of activity, while both seek to collaborate for the common good. That was demonstrated at World Youth Day.

It was the biggest youth event in the history of our country and it brought together the biggest crowds in the history of the Pacific. Many of them lived, learnt and celebrated those joy-filled days right here in the Parramatta area. It was an extraordinary time for our city and country, for young people and for an old pope.

We did Australia proud. One of things that made me proudest was the way every sector of our community cooperated in the planning and delivery. Not Catholics only, not Christians only, not the private or the non-profit sector only, but everyone. That said something very powerful to our world which many of our visitors commented upon. It demonstrated a model of the relationship between Church and state, and between people of various religions and none, which can teach the world something very important.

In Australia we like to ‘live and let live’, to co-exist and cooperate with our neighbours, to give them ‘a fair go’, to honour diversity and seek our common ground. And that means bishops and mayors can both claim Parramatta as their own, as can people of all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs.

It means we are willing to work together for the common good, for justice for the most disadvantaged, for freedom of religion and other proper liberties, for a recognition of our country’s constitutive values and traditions, and for a better Western Sydney in a better world. I am grateful to you all for today’s reception which I take as a pledge of our willingness to cooperate long into the future.

Gratitude for the fidelity of those who have gone before us

150th Jubilee Dinner for the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia of Nashville Sheraton Music City Hotel, Nashville, 25 June 2010

Your Excellencies, Most Reverend David Choby, Bishop of Nashville, Archbishop Raymond Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, Archbishops Chaput, Kurtz and O’Brien, Bishops Baker, Coakley, Conley, Foley, Johnston, Kmiec, Loverde, Sartain, Steib and Stika, and Reverend Fathers, Your Paternity, Fr Carlos Azpiroz Costa op, Master of the Order of Preachers, with his Reverend brother friars, Your Maternity, Mother Ann Marie Karlovic op, Mother General of the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia of Nashville (and Sydney!), with her Revered sisters, Religious superiors, brothers and sisters, relatives, friends and benefactors of the Nashville Dominicans:

I.

There is no truth to the rumor that today is Mother Ann Marie’s 150^th birthday. But she is our Jubilee Mother, and it was she who suggested my theme when she prayed in this Jubilee year: “May we grow in gratitude for the fidelity of those who have gone before us and in understanding of the responsibility to preserve and deepen so holy an enterprise.”

May we grow in gratitude for the fidelity of those who have gone before us. The protomartyrs of North America were three Dominicans, led by Luis Cancer op, an associate of Bartolome de Las Casas op. Like Las Casas, Cancer was a forceful preacher of justice for the American Indians. Passion for the Gospel and the people carried them across the world and this points to two qualities that endure in Dominicans to this day: a kind of spiritual loquaciousness that in saints we call a passion to share Catholic truth; and a gadabout tendency that in religious we call apostolic itinerancy; put together this means we willingly take that Truth to the most unlikely places. Cancer and his brothers translated the Gospel into rhyming couplets in the Guatemalan language and set them to music so the Gospel might be learnt by heart. Music was to be a third secret of the Dominican contribution to this hemisphere. But in 1549 Cancer and his two companions were martyred in Florida: apparently the locals did not much like their songs – Country and Western music had not yet been invented!

Forty years later the first bishop to visit this country was another Dominican, Juan de las Cabezas op, the Bishop of Havana, and fortunately his songs were no hanging offence. But after this early contribution as martyrs and missionaries, the Dominicans left it to the Jesuits and Franciscans for the next two centuries, returning to the North American mission scene once things had settled down. When James Whelan op succeeded his Dominican brother Richard Pius Miles op as bishop of these parts, his immediate instinct was: call the sisters. He hoped they might “conduct an academy for the higher education of girls and young ladies” with an emphasis on music and the fine arts. Gospel passion, itinerancy and music would be united once more. He asked the Somerset sisters to send him four harp-playing evangelical adventuresses. Fortunately, his mysterious resignation four years later was no obstacle. History would discover that nothing could stop cyclone Cecilia: not plague of cholera or of damned Yankees, not civil war or bankruptcy, not humiliation or plain hard work. Once set in motion, St Cecilia’s Dominican daughters were a force to be reckoned with.

Now, while Mother Ann Marie could not remember much from 1860, she did refer me to the account of her predecessor, Mother Mary Frances Walsh op, who was there at the time. She recounted the story of Sr Philomena M^cDonough op, one of her three co-foundresses. Orphaned at an early age she was a good student with “uncommon skill on harp and piano” and an ardent love of the habit. The habit, like the music, was destined to become a powerful evangelical device in the hands of these women, a fourth secret to their success.

Frequently as a child she begged that she might be permitted to become a little child of St Dominic. On her fourteenth birthday she pleaded most earnestly to be admitted. Again she was refused on account of her tender age. After repeated refusals she contrived to enter the sisters’ wardrobe where she clothed herself with the complete outfit of a child of St Dominic. Then she presented herself in the Community room at recreation time, receiving a gentle reprimand from the Superior with an order to put the habit back where she found it. She fell on her knees and begged for the habit, and with some of the sisters interceding for her, she was allowed to wear the habit as one of the Community. Two years later she received it solemnly and with burning ardor commenced to live the life she loved so well. [1]

The new foundation with its idyllic setting and excellent nuns was to offer an all-round education in the liberal arts, faith and virtue. Bankruptcy led twice to the auction of the sisters’ property on the steps of the Nashville courthouse, but each time it was bought back by friends and returned to the sisters’ use. The list of the convent’s goods and chattels tells of their priorities: these included two horses and wagons, two milking cows, two large stoves, 130 beds, 35 oil paintings, 700 books, two large harps, three guitars and nine pianos. That their repeated removal left the sisters undaunted tells of a fifth secret to your success, stubbornness, that in such religious women we call perseverance in a holy cause.

The subsequent history is one of survival, sometimes of growth, but always of fidelity to Christ and his Church, to our Holy Father Dominic and his Order. It’s the story of holy perseverance through times of difficulty, such as the civil wars that rent the nation so soon after your foundation and that rent the Church so soon after Vatican II. It’s the story of loving service of that Church and nation, particularly of the young, especially through teaching the truth, worshipping Him who is the Truth incarnate, and living a rule of life that enables those things. Much of that story was invisible to the world, but occasionally it has been publicly recognised, as it was by Bld Hyacinth-Marie Cormier op in 1913 and now by the presence of his successor Fr Carlos, and at different times by many bishops, the Catholic University and the Holy See. It’s the story of steadying leadership in the post-Conciliar period and recommitment to community, contemplation and your munus proprium – the task given you – teaching.

A recent edition of Veritas sported a photo of row upon row of sisters in formation at the St Cecilia Novitiate. Yours is now the fastest growing congregation in the United States and I predict it will soon be the fastest growing in Australia also. That does not happen by accident. Young women are drawn to your school in holiness and want to become part of your story. They come from all over America and beyond and are formed for mission again all over America. A new chapter of that history is now being written on distant shores, as brave sisters leave behind the genteel accents of the Motherhouse to hear classrooms full of little Crocodile Dundees, to continue that New Evangelization in which they played such a crucial role at World Youth Day 2008, and so convert to Christ a people who walk upside down and eat kangaroo rather than ribs, emu rather than buzzard, and drink Fosters lager rather than iced tea laced with Tennessee whiskey.

Some time back I had the privilege of preaching a retreat to more than two hundred happy and holy, bright and articulate, funny and fun-loving Nashville Dominicans. Mother Rose Marie and her then-new successor had both generously acquiesced in my threat to mention Australia in every conference and the many benefits that could be predicted from having Nashvillains down under. Tennessee was, I noticed then, the ideal preparation for a land of possums, snakes and spiders, where 100°F is ‘a little warm’ and the only seasons are summer and nearly summer. If my theme tonight is Dominican gratitude, let this Dominican, on behalf of the Church in Sydney, in Australia, and in the many other places you serve throughout this great land – as indicated by the presence of their several Excellencies – give thanks to Almighty God, to your predecessors and to the present sisters for a sesquicentury of Godly service in our various dioceses. I would like to mention with particular appreciation Sr Mary Madeline op who assisted me with World Youth Day and went on to be the first superior of the mission to Sydney; with Sr Mary Sarah op she has now returned from that adventure but I have absolute confidence the sisters will continue to have a disproportionately large impact for good on the Australian scene as they do here in the States.

II.

May we grow in gratitude for the fidelity of those who have gone before us. While much of his tract on justice was drawn from Aristotle and the Stoics, our Dominican brother Dumb-Ox Tommy enriched that pagan heritage with the specifically Christian – especially St Paul’s call to thanksgiving. [2] Mary Keys has pointed out that without this Pauline-Thomist addition to the classical virtues and so to the culture of Christendom, we might never have had things like the Thanksgiving holiday, established by President Lincoln in 1863 as “a day of thanksgiving and prayer to our beneficent Father” in order to inculcate piety and gratitude to God for America’s blessings, as well as repentance for national sins and mercy for war victims. [3] Most people today think piety means walking on your knees while telling your beads. But piety as Aquinas expounded it is that virtuous recognition of indebtedness, that grateful reverence and homage we properly pay to God, to our ancestors (especially our parents) and to our country. By extension for religious, this patriotic piety is also owed to our congregation, and this filial piety owed to its founders and past members. They are, in St Thomas’ words, “the source of our existence and progress through life”. [4] They are due our piety.

What’s more, since our predecessors bequeathed to us an inheritance with many benefits, not only piety but also thanks are due to them, as to “any benefactor from whom we have received some special, personal kindness that puts us under a particular obligation”. [5] Our congregation and all those who assist it are benefactors worthy of our gratitude. G.K. Chesterton thought the Catholic Church the most democratic of all institutions because it gave the franchise not only to present believers but to Christians of all time: all have their vote, their sway, their due. The project of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI might be said to be that of recalling autonomy to theonomy and freedom to truth. Part of this must be a recovery of memory and of that gratitude deserved by the past, the proper love due our predecessors, history, tradition. At issue here is not only thanks and piety but the next gift of the Holy Spirit, that fear, awe and wonder that makes us shudder at the grandeur of God, of His time and space, of the mystery of our world and ourselves, including all that’s gone before us.

Consecrated religious express that gratitude, piety and awe through prayer and sacrifice for their relatives and benefactors, especially the deceased, through observance of their traditions and obedience to its custodians, as well as through the ordinary human forms of loyalty and courtesy. Our religious ancestors are always due our piety and our religious benefactors our gratitude. St Thomas teaches that we render gratitude ‘of the first degree’, immediately upon receiving our very being or other benefits, simply by recognizing the gift(s) received and receiving them graciously. [6] To thank and to think are from the same root in English: for thanking is first comprehending something received, contemplating it, understanding it, appreciating it and its giver. She is thankful who ponders the generosity of her benefactor – as did the Mother of God. [7] The grasp of veritas, our first Dominican motto, the truth of everything given and received and so of the Giver and of the receiver, is the premise of that simple, grateful assent to receiving.

We render ‘second degree’ gratitude, according to St Thomas, by duly expressing our appreciation and thanks. The ingrate fails in the laudare and benedicere, the praise and blessing, of our second Dominican motto. St Dominic, on the other hand, used to spend his nights praising God in the church. Our sister St Catherine of Siena, in her letters, exhorted her readers to expressions of gratitude and in her prayers she made thanksgiving her the first act. [8] Dominic, Thomas and Catherine are examples to us of truly pious and grateful people: they thought and expressed their gratitude.

Finally, Aquinas suggests, if we are truly thankful we will render gratitude ‘of the third degree’ by repaying the favor received at an appropriate time and place and according to our means. The offering of ourselves in profession, and of all our contemplation and teaching thereafter – of the contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere of the third Dominican motto – is, of course, just such repayment to God. But especially at this moment, 150 years after the foundation of this congregation, what could be more appropriate as forms of thanksgiving than today’s Holy Mass, this dinner and tomorrow’s family day and concert?

Some might think feasting an inappropriate commemoration for such holy women. But recall the story told in her Miracula by Blessed Cecilia, the 13^th Century Dominican nun whose convent Pope Benedict visited only this week. Dominic arrived late one night at a convent of the sisters with some of his brethren in tow. It was after Compline and the nuns had gone to bed. But when his arrival was signaled they got up at once and went down to the church. There Dominic, father of Dominican spiritual loquaciousness, delivered what Cecilia politely called ‘a longish conference’ – rather like some longish after-dinner speeches – though she quickly added that it ‘brought them great consolation’.

When he had finished speaking, he said, ‘It would be good, my daughters, to have something to drink.’ He called brother Roger, the cellarer, to bring some wine and a cup … Then he blessed it and drank from it himself … After the brethren had all had a drink, St Dominic said: ‘I want all my daughters to have a drink too’ … Then all the sisters drank … as much as they wanted, encouraged by St Dominic, who kept on saying, ‘Drink up, my daughters!’ At that time there were 104 sisters there, and they all drank as much wine as they wanted. [9] 

III.

Gratitude, then, is an historical virtue, a virtue of the memory as well as the will. [10] In Christ the Lord - Out of Egypt Anne Rice, who till then had written novels about blood-sucking vampires, described in her postscript her conversion to history and reversion to Catholicism. She had read liberal theologians and scripture scholars and found their arguments for a non-divine Jesus wanting. [11] What’s more, she sensed between the lines of their books that many of these scholars actually “disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt outright contempt.” [12] She was puzzled, for she had never encountered this attitude in other fields of historical research. “People who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool … They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation,” Rice observed. Good biographers, while never uncritical, are always at least sympathetic towards their subjects. They find redeeming qualities even in villains. Without interest, empathy, appreciation, gratitude we cannot hope to understand and communicate the past. So why, Rice wondered, is there so little friendship with the past, with Jesus, in liberal Jesus scholarship?

There are many answers we might give, but an after-dinner speech that has already dragged you through the protomartyrs of America, the protovirgins of St Cecilia, the quasi-integral parts of justice, the dietary habits of Nashville sisters both up-over and down-under, the drinks of ancient Dominicans and modern vampiric theologians, should probably finish before we all suffer convulsive indigestion. So let me end by saying that it seems to me that those who have forgotten or despise their history, whether it is the story of Christ and His Church or of their own Order, lack essential virtues, both intellectual and moral. They lack historical sense, gratitude, piety, awe. And that means they lack what is needed to have a future.

Only those who know what good they have received can pass it on. What I have received, I pass on to you said St Paul (1 Cor 11:23), said St Thomas, said Mother Mary Frances Walsh, said Mother Ann Marie. Only by thoughtfully receiving, by gratefully honoring, by piously repaying, by exalting Our Lord and our religious ancestors and the inheritance they have bequeathed us, will we have anything in turn to give. Those who forget these things are doomed. Having forgotten the past, having set themselves up in opposition to its wisdom, they deny themselves its shoulders to stand upon, its heritage to develop. At the heart of the failure in some places to pass on faith, morals and vocation is a failure to appreciate what has been received. Deliberately or not, some have dropped the baton.

But there are those who relay the baton, the tradition, the identity, with the grace and determination of Southern belles, holy vagabonds with a passion for God and His veritas, for music and good habits. May we grow in gratitude for the fidelity of those who have gone before us, Mother said, in launching this sesquicentenary year. And may we grow in understanding of the responsibility to preserve and deepen so holy an enterprise. Hear, hear, I say! Drink up, my daughters!

Priesthood in the Dominican Order

Colloquium for the ‘Year for Priests’ of the Irish Province of the Order of Preachers, St Mary’s Priory, Tallaght, Dublin, 14 June 2010

Some years ago I was speaking to a candidate in the RCIA program who thought, like many already-Catholics think, that all priests are in vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. I explained that most priests were not, in fact, religious. She responded: “So you don’t need to be particularly religious to be a priest?” What to say ... [1] 

The Dominican Constitutions provide that novices are to be instructed about priesthood (LCO 187.1) while students are to prepare for their priestly ministry by integrating it with their religious life (LCO 223). Novices and students often debate which comes first: religious life or ministerial priesthood? Often this is in reaction to an older notion of religious priests as diocesan priests in habit – or at least with a habit in the closet. Also in the background may have been a Thomist metaphysic, according to which episcopacy and religious life were not ontological states, were not inscribed upon one’s soul the way sacramental characters are, could presumably be dispensed, and would not carry forward into the afterlife. But priesthood, like baptism and confirmation, brought about an ontological change: priests are priests forever. Also in the background was the idea that formation was a thing to be endured patiently for a few years only – however much Regents, chapters and documents might pay lip-service to ongoing formation. Clothing in the habit, simple profession and solemn profession were stages along the way to the great liberation: priestly ordination. Dominican priests, especially if appointed to a parish as many of them were in my province, were largely free of their community and superiors – except when it was convenient to plead the Dominican thing against bishops and diocesan clergy. A symbol of all this that my own Australian province inherited from its Irish founders was the progression from white socks to black trousers under the habit and the raising of the habitual hemline to ensure the presbyteral pantaloons were on display. In the United States I also met friars rarely if ever seen in the habit who sported the most elegant of diocesan clerical attire. Presbytery trumped priory.

In the post-Conciliar Dominican Order, as elsewhere in the Church and culture, there was a desire for a less authoritarian, flatter, more egalitarian approach – to live out what the Order’s Constitutions called being ‘equal in profession’ and what the Council called the ‘common priesthood of all the baptised’. [2] No longer afraid of Protestantism’s emphasis on Word over Sacrament, the Council recovered the centrality of proclamation in the lives of priests and laity – a matter to which I will return. Many felt this freed up Dominicans to be more truly themselves, preachers rather than ‘sacrament factories’. Some now dispensed themselves from all the trappings of the clerical life. Ironically, as the number of co-operator brothers declined to near-zero in many parts of the Order, everyone started using the title and the few remaining brothers were press-ganged into higher education or leadership. (In my view the demise of the brother’s vocation partly reflects the increasing middle-classification of the Order, Church and society.) In various post-conciliar Acta of general and provincial chapters, in letters from the Masters of the Order and in books on Dominican spirituality, priesthood rarely rated a mention. In the rivalry between presbytery and priory, many proudly proclaimed that they were Dominican first and priests only incidentally.

As the pendulum swings again we can expect the next generation of Dominicans to re-emphasise the priestly and hierarchical aspects of our lives. Presbyteral pantaloons may yet make a comeback ...

Strange Dichotomy

Whether they thought of themselves as religious clerics or clerical religious, many have presumed that rivalry between these two aspects of Dominican priesthood is unavoidable and that you must, from time to time or perhaps for life, pick your sides. [3] Yet this is a strange thing, historically speaking. From very early in the Church some priests were religious as were some lay people. St Jerome was a priest who went off to live as a hermit in a cave with a lion and a bible. Monasteries ordained some of their own to serve their communities as priests and few thought this opposed to the ‘project’ of the monastery. St Dominic served as a Cathedral canon in Osma, exercising the priesthood in the life of the Cathedral, whilst living under a religious rule; he went on to found a new order that he insisted was both religious and clerical. No-one thought he was suffering from a multiple personality disorder.

Reflecting that ancient reality the present-day Fundamental Constitution of the Order provides that “The Order’s nature as a religious society derives from its mission and its fraternal communion. Since the ministry of the word and of the sacraments of faith is a priestly function, ours is a clerical Order, in whose mission the co-operator brothers too share in many ways, exercising the common priesthood in a manner specific to them.” (LCO 1.VI). Again, in this ancient and modern view, priesthood and religious life are comfortably integrated in a friar.

The new congregations of the Counter-Reformation saw a change, however, in the way religious who were priests lived out that reality. It was, due to circumstance and planning, a more individualistic undertaking where a man was equipped precisely to go out and work on his own, for extended periods, all the time exercising his ministerial priesthood while the religious life was, to a certain extent, pushed to the background. St Ignatius famously forbade his troops to pray the Divine Office in common: their charism included spiritual self-sufficiency. In the centuries that followed, especially the nineteenth, this model of clerical religious life predominated. In my own province and its mission territory many small houses were established with no likelihood of ever having a genuine conventual life but from which many good priestly works would be done.

Vatican II

In Lumen Gentium the Fathers of Vatican II distinguished between the common priesthood of the baptised and the ministerial priesthood, but only after insisting on the prior dignity of the baptismal vocation. Christians share in Christ’s one priesthood in two interdependent ways. Religious Life was placed at the end of the document with Mary. No Council can cover everything, and clearly Vatican II wanted to balance and complete the work of Vatican I by articulating a much fuller theology of the episcopacy, and respond to the spirit of the age by promoting the vocation of the laity in the world. With the focus on those two classes of the Church’s members, it was unsurprising that clergy and religious were slotted in mostly in terms of their relationships to bishops and lay people. Paul McPartlan argues that the Council’s preference for the word ‘presbyter’ over ‘priest’ reflected not only the recovery of the priestly aspect of the baptismal vocation but also of a notion of priests not as cultic figures but more as members of the bishop’s council of elders. [4] 

Few would deny that the conciliar documents on the priesthood [5] and on religious life [6] were thinner and less inspiring than the ‘hinge’ documents of the Council with their rich teaching on bishops and laity. This left the Church ill-armed for the vocational apocalypse after the Council. A related deficiency in those two documents was that Presbyterorum ordinis proceeds as if all priests were diocesan clergy [7] and Perfectæ caritatis almost as if all religious were consecrated laity. When clerical religious sought to rediscover their charisms and reinvent their Constitutions in response to such documents it is unsurprising that this renewal often downplayed the sacerdotal aspect of their vocation.

An order of bishops?

St Thomas and his followers thought episcopacy or religious life (especially Dominican religious life) were not ontological states, but rather the two ‘states of perfection’. [8] Thomas did not say what happened if you were both Dominican and bishop, as was his mentor Albert: do these two states add, subtract, multiply or divide each other’s perfection? But he successfully evaded all attempts to episcopate him and may well have been in agreement with Blessed Humbert of Romans’ declaration on hearing of Albert’s nomination: “I would rather you were dead than a bishop … Why ruin your reputation and that of the Order by letting yourself be taken away from poverty and preaching? However troublesome you find the brethren, don’t imagine things will be better once you have secular clergy and powers to deal with … Better to lie in a coffin than sit in a bishop’s chair!” Clearly Humbert thought the episcopal state of perfection would subtract from the religious – with no remainder!

It took quite a while for us to settle into our identity as Dominicans and for others to accept and appreciate it. By 1255 Paris was in uproar. The friars had been too successful, not just in converting big crowds by their preaching, but also in ‘poaching’ the laity – and their collections – from the parishes, vocations from the dioceses, and students and professors from the universities. They had been too successful, also, in gaining various privileges, such as the general preaching mission granted by Honorius III in 1217 and the general mission to hear confessions extended in 1221. Trouble had been brewing for a long time. Some scoffed at the very notion of an order of preachers: after all, everyone knew that bishops were the only ordinary preachers in the Church; priests, when they preached, were to the Word what extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion are today to the Eucharist. [9] 

If the friars would be preachers within and without the Liturgy, Dominic thought they would need the best of educations. They soon infiltrated the universities, helping them develop, but creating new tensions with the local clergy who had been the intellectuals to date. The preaching and the studies meant a radically new form of religious life that included the old monastic practices but also provision for compressing or even dispensing from them. Penances, liturgical hours, charitable works, administration of the sacraments, presence in community: all could be waived for a just cause. To many that seemed altogether too secular, as if religious were aping the diocesan clergy. Matthew of Paris wrote that the Cistercians were the real religious: they lived decent, orderly lives, pleasing to God and the Church; they stayed in their cloisters, worked hard, prayed hard and obeyed their superiors. The friars, on the other hand, wandered about the countryside, getting up to who knows what, their superiors not even knowing where they were – little has changed!

To many this seemed triply absurd: priests who preach, religious who are learned and monks who leave their monasteries. The friars were not backward in defending their new form of life. Stephen of Bourbon records that a Dominican novice was being taunted by some monks. He responded by asking them whether Our Lord’s was not the most excellent pattern of life. When they said it was, he retorted that “when I read that the Lord Jesus Christ was not white monk nor black monk, but a poor preacher, I know I’ve joined the right bunch!” [10] But such witty reposts rarely convert people: the monks, I guess, just thought the novice a ‘smart-arse’.

Now William of St-Armour and his allies wanted all the friars’ privileges and ministries removed, including their rights to preach, teach and absolve. He wrote furious pamphlets against the friars as ‘spawn of the Anti-Christ’. At first the popes defended the Orders, but in November 1254 Innocent IV revoked the friars’ privileges, took them out of the universities and subjected them to the local clergy. By the autumn of 1255 feeling against the friars was at fever-pitch: St Jacques was virtually under siege; mud and stones, garbage and insults were rained upon any friar who dared venture outside; and the university would not give its star pupil, Tommy Aquinas, his Masters degree.

Nothing serves better to unite and energise the friars than a common foe. St Thomas and the blackfriars joined St Bonaventure and the greys in tag-team wrestling with the secular clergy. The Master of the Order directed that litanies be recited day and night, and within two weeks the pope was dead. His successor, Alexander IV, as much influenced by fear of the friars’ prayers as by the arguments for their privileges, revoked Innocent’s bulls, banished St-Armour and his lieutenants and, as a final humiliation of the seculars, required the university not only to graduate the friars but to give chairs to the under-aged Aquinas and Bonaventure!

Things took a while to settle down, but despite periodic hostilities the friars were eventually regarded by most as a benefit or at least no threat. Nowadays similar suspicions and energies are directed in some places to the new ecclesial movements, who are, I would suggest, at a similar stage of settling their identity, finding their place in the Church’s ordinary life and being appreciated for the gifts they bring. Back then we were seen as neo-Cats and Oppies and met similar resentment: we did not fit the established patterns for priests and religious.

All priests are preachers

One way the seculars had of getting their own back on the friars for stealing the best of the seminarians, priests and academics, was to appoint them as bishops and thereby effectively draw them back into the diocesan ambit. When Albert the Great came to Rome to argue the case for the friars he was Provincial of Germany; when he left he was Bishop of Ratisbon, a diocese requiring a major clean up! Three years were enough for him before he quit and returned to priory and laboratory. But this new-fangled Dominican ‘order of bishops’ had to learn, one way or another, to relate to the diocesan clergy and to integrate their own priesthood into their identity and life as friars. In the process they helped change the Church’s understanding of priesthood, so that preaching came to be seen as an ordinary part of priestly work.

Few, however, embraced Humbert of Romans’ somewhat extreme position, repeated by Stephen’s novice, that Christ was a friar preacher rather than a praying monk or a sacrament-dispensing diocesan priest. [11] Along came the Reformation and some took fright of the Protestant concern for preaching. The Council of Trent, following Aquinas here as elsewhere, defined priesthood in terms of that which only priests could do, and so seemed to reduce priesthood to confecting the Eucharist and absolving the penitent. [12] This suited well the Counter-Reformation determination to distinguish a Catholic sacerdotal priesthood from the ‘Bible-bashers’ across the road.

Vatican II reasserted the centrality of the kerygmatic role for all priests, not just Dominicans. Thus Presbyterorum Ordinis describes Christ first as Prophet, then as Priest and then King, [13] teaches that priests share in this three-fold office in which preaching has a certain priority over sanctifying and leading, and describes priests first as ‘apostolic heralds’ [14] and ‘Ministers of the Word’:

The People of God is formed into one in the first place by the Word of the living God (1 Pet 1:23; Acts 6:7; 12:24), which is quite rightly sought from the mouth of priests (Mal 2:7; 1 Tim 4:11-13; 2 Tim 4:5; Tit 1:9). For since nobody can be saved who has not first believed (Mk 16:16), it is the first task of priests as co-workers of the bishops to preach the Gospel of God to all men (2 Cor 11:7). In this way they carry out the Lord’s command “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mk 16:15) and thus set up and increase the People of God ... Priests owe it to everybody to share with them the truth of the Gospel (Gal 2:5) …[15] 

Charles Connor, in his recent meditations on the Catholic priesthood, traces this recovery of the preaching side of priesthood through the writings of Benedict XV, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, Paul VI and his successors. [16] Paul VI’s Evangelii nuntiandi and John Paul II’s oft-repeated call to a new evangelization marked a new realization that formerly Christian but increasingly secularised countries were the new mission field. [17] This new-found emphasis on the Word, rebalancing rather than displacing Trent’s emphasis on the sacramental role of the priest, should be very comfortable for Dominican priests and we can expect more such encouragement from the apostolic exhortation soon to be published in response to the 2008 Synod of Bishops On the Word of God.

Where to with the question of Dominican priesthood?

If the documents of the Church are short on teaching on the ‘mixed’ vocation of priest and religious, they are positively extravagant on that subject compared to the quantity of teaching on the ‘mixed-up’ vocation of bishop and religious! But there is enough common ground between these vocations to be able to map a life of both without having to sunder ourselves into two rival identities or suppress one for the sake of the other. Here I would suggest six points of convergence.

1. Dominican priesthood is Christological

First, the clerical, religious and lay vocations are fundamentally Christological vocations: they are similar but different ways of participation in, imitation of, and identification with Jesus Christ. Baptism has a certain chronological, logical and ontological priority: it is the sine qua non of faith, membership of the Church, all other sacraments and professions, and the promise of eternal life. [18] To the extent that our religious profession is simply a reflection and magnification of our baptismal equality, fraternity and apostolic calling, you might say that Dominicans are friars before they are priests. [19] On the other hand, as Lumen Gentium makes clear, both the common and ministerial priesthoods are ordered to each other: the baptised exercise their royal priesthood above all by participating in that Eucharistic sacrifice which can only be effected by a ministerial priest. [20] To the extent that being a baptised Christian, being a professed Dominican and being an ordained priest draw me closer to Christ, and give me specifically Christic inspirations and arenas of activity, they will be integrated in Him.

2. Dominican priesthood is Eucharistic

Some commentators have, in my view, overdrawn the rivalry between the cultic and prophetic aspects of priesthood or between cultic priesthood and prophetic religious life. We might ask whether Christ was most truly Himself when he was out teaching, or when he was breaking bread with his intimates; when he was proclaiming the kingdom of God or dying upon the altar of the cross? Despite Humbert’s polemic it would be absurd to choose either, for both are essential to Christ as we know Him. McPartlan points out that: “Everything that Christ did, all of his teaching and service included, was done out of love for his Father and was taken up into the priestly offering of himself that was made to his Father on our behalf.” [21] For priests, religious and laity, all our evangelisation, catechesis, prayer, witness, penance, charity, and pastoral guidance “flow into and out of what happens at the altar; we offer it in the sacrifice of Christ himself and pray that the Lord will make it fruitful.” If it is in Christ that we find the integration of the various facets of our vocation, it is in His Eucharistic body that we feed that unity and direction. [22] 

3. Dominican priesthood is Ecclesial

Thirdly, the clergy live and serve in medio ecclesiæ. The lay vocation, on the other hand, is principally lived out ‘in the world’. This is not to say that the laity are excluded from the sanctuary or the clergy properly quarantined within it: all are, in Pope Benedict’s word, ‘co-responsible’ for the apostolic mission of the Church to the world. Friars, you might say, are bridges between both worlds. When Dominicans are ‘in church’ it is to prepare them to take the Church to the world; and when they are ‘in the world’ it is always with a view to bringing the world into the Church. St Dominic’s weeping over heresy and schism and zeal to bring people back to the Church was borne of his passion to bring God to men and men to God and the only sure meeting place he knew of was the Church.

4. Dominican priesthood is Kerygmatic

Fourthly, if I might be permitted a little Dominican chauvinism, Vatican II might be said to have allowed the Church to adopt a more Dominican paradigm of priesthood. By this, I mean, one in which the preaching role of priests is given its rightful prominence. I have said enough about how that was lost and found in the wider Church. But if that proclamation is to be truly apostolic, it too must be rooted in Christ, in His Body that is the Eucharist, and so especially in liturgical preaching, and in His body that is the Church, and so in sacred teaching informed by the magisterium. For all the talk of a gratia prædicationis, [23] the fact is that Dominicans get their authority to preach (and hear the confessions of those whom their preaching has converted) from the Church and this was why Dominic, unlike Francis, chose to make his Order a clerical one. Thus the Fundamental Constitution provides that “Having been made co-operators with the episcopal order by priestly ordination, we have as our special function a prophetic task, which is to proclaim everywhere by word and example the Gospel of Jesus Christ ...” (LCO 1.V).

St Thomas taught that Christian priests are only trustees or stewards: [24] they hold the faith and sacraments on trust, not for their own aggrandisement, but from and on behalf of Christ to be dispensed to the People of God. They are conduits, mediators, telephone wires. Aliis tradere: we pass God and the things of God on to others. And if we are called to be conduits of the mysteries, we must be careful not to allow blockages in that pipe: blockages like pride and self-glorification, possessiveness and exclusivism, using and abusing. If we are called to be conduits of the mysteries, we must not adulterate them for the sake of popularity or the delight in hearing our own opinions.

Too often when people juxtapose the prophetic or charismatic with the cultic or hierarchical, what they mean is that they want to do their own thing free of interference from the tradition and its institutional guardians. I recently heard a (non-Dominican) Provincial declare that her institute’s constitutions situated them at the heart of the Church but that these days they didn’t much like the way the heart was beating. So they’d become prophetesses instead, preaching from and to the margins. Her congregation is dying. Dominicans, even when they preach on the frontiers, speak from the heart of the Church, where the Gospel is, where the living tradition is. No ecclesial heart transplants for us. We are the Church’s preachers.

5. Dominican priesthood is Learned

In his Letter to the Order of 1260 Blessed Humbert of Romans bragged shamelessly that “We [Dominican friars] teach the people, we teach the prelates, we teach the wise and the unwise, religious and seculars, clerics and laymen, nobles and peasants, lowly and great.” [25] The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) rightly identified the catechetical poverty of the people, the educational deficiencies of their clergy and the lack of apostolic zeal amongst religious as principal causes of the dualist crisis. The Council’s proposed solutions, however – such as requiring that a master of theology be appointed to each metropolitan church and cathedral school so as to educate the diocesan clergy – proved illusory. But God in His providence placed Dominic de Guzman at the Council as peritus to the Bishop of Toulouse, and it was there that he conceived the goal and features of his priest friars. Only such creatures could answer the needs identified by the Council. And study would be essential to this new form of life and mission.

Some clergy talk of seminary studies as something they endured so as to get to do what really matters: pastoral work. I have heard seminarians brag proudly that they’ll never again open a book after their ordination day, let alone undertake a course of study. Hopefully, they speak in jest or eventually discover their mind needs feeding. But no true Dominican could say such a thing. Dominican priesthood is a scholarly priesthood, centred on the Gospel and the received tradition of Catholic truth, contemplated in the company of other life-long students and teachers, cultivated with the aid of faith and reason and articulated with the best of rhetoric and piety. Dominican learning, rather than being worn on sleeves or being the subject of vainglory, should be at the heart of our distinctive way of being priests. Unlike the post-Lateran cathedrals, the Dominicans did manage to insist, for a very long time, on a doctor of theology in every convent. As well they had such peculiar creatures as Regents and studia generalia, high quality initial and ongoing academic formation, loads of scholars and summæ, and, as their only permitted vice, the accumulation of many books.

6. Dominican priesthood is Creative

Against the view that the part-contemplative, part-active religious life was impossible or at best inferior to a pure, unadulterated, contemplative life, Thomas dared propose that his Order had the best of both worlds. [26] This ‘mixed’ life is sometimes a hard balance to strike. Individuals commonly favour one or the other ingredient, or oscillate between the two. Different balances have sometimes threatened to tear the Order apart, as when the ‘Observants’ and ‘Conventuals’ each insisted theirs was the only acceptable cocktail. But somehow we managed to stay united in the struggle to unite contemplare and aliis tradere.

By analogy I have suggested today that we can be and often have been a uniquely successful cocktail of priesthood and religious life. A Dominican worships God in his cell with his beads as much as in the celebration of a High Mass at the altar. He studies both at his desk chair and in his choir stall. He evangelises the gentiles and then baptises the converts. He exhorts sinners and then absolves them. He preaches in the sacred Liturgy and then offers the Eucharistic sacrifice. Being friar and priest are genuinely complementary in him.

[1]       My thanks to Fr Anthony Walsh op and Br Paul Rowse op for their help with this talk. The writings of Simon Tugwell op, Benedict Ashley op and Paul Murray op have been especially formative of my views here. Also useful are: Thomas Acklin, The Unchanging Heart of the Priesthood (Emmaus Publishing, 2006); Charles Connor, Meditations on the Catholic Priesthood (New York: St Pauls); Avery Dulles, The Priestly Office: A Theological Reflection (New York: Paulist, 1997); Donald Goergen and Ann Garrido (eds), The Theology of Priesthood (Liturgical Press, 2000).

[2]          Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (1964) 10, after 1 Pet 2:9.

[3]          Examples of writers on the rivalry between ‘cultic’ and ‘prophetic’ models of priesthood, or between ‘cultic priesthood’ and ‘prophetic religious life’, see: Michael Buckley sj, “Jesuit Priesthood: Its Meaning and Commitments,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 8 (1976), 150-182 and Thomas Rausch sj, “What is Dominican priesthood?” Spirituality Today 42(4) (1990), 323-339.

[4]          Paul McPartlan, “Priesthood, Priestliness and Priests,” in Ronald Witherup et al, Ministerial Priesthood in the Third Millennium: Faithfulness of Christ, Faithfulness of Priests (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2009), ch 4.

[5]          Vatican Council II, Presbyterorum Ordinis: Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests (1965). A recent study is Maryanne Confoy, Religious Life and Priesthood: Perfectæ Caritatis, Optatam Totius, Presbyterorum Ordinis (Paulist Press, 2008).

[6]          Vatican Council II, Perfectæ caritatis: Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life (1965).

[7]           John O’Malley, “Priesthood, Ministry, and Religious Life: Some Historical and Historiographical Considerations,” Theological Studies 49 (1988), 223-257 pointed out that Presbyterorum Ordinis assumes that all priests are presiding over local communities of the faithful and exercising a primarily sacramental ministry, in hierarchical union with the bishops; the model chosen as paradigmatic of priesthood is that of the diocesan clergy. Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit, (art. cit.) suggested that Dominican priesthood can offer a different paradigm also rooted in the tradition but also, as I will suggest below, supported by Presbyterorum Ordinis.

[8]          St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ IIa IIæ, 184, 5.

[9]          Simon Tugwell op in his Introduction to Early Dominicans (New York: Paulist, 1982), 14, relays a story told in the Order of Pope Innocent III wondering to himself why Dominic wanted to found an order consisting entirely of bishops. The pope was confused because it was still assumed that bishops were the only official preachers.

[10]        ‘Miscellaneous stories,’ in Tugwell, Early Dominicans, 139.

[11]        Bld Humbert of Romans op, Treatise on Formation of Preachers III, 21: “When Christ was in this world, he celebrated Mass only once, on Mandy Thursday. We do not read of him ever hearing confessions. He administered few sacraments and those infrequently. He did not often assist at any canonical divine worship… Once he started preaching… he devoted his whole life to preaching, even more than to prayer.” On and around this theme see Simon Tugwell op, “To be called and to be an Order of Preachers,” in The Way of the Preacher (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), ch 3 and Paul Murray op, “What is Dominican spirituality?” in The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness (London: Burns & Oates, 2006), ch 1.

[12]        St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV 74 & 75; Trent, Session XXIII, Decree on the Institution of the Priesthood of the New Law, ch I and Canons on the Sacrament of Order can I.

[13]        Presbyterorum Ordinis 1.

[14]        Presbyterorum Ordinis 2.

[15]        Presbyterorum Ordinis 4.

[16]        Connor, Meditations, ch 8.

[17]        Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi: Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization in the Modern World (1975) and John Paul II,  in many places, e.g. Redemptoris Missio: Encyclical Letter on the Church's Missionary Mandate (1990) and Novo Millennio Ineunte: Apostolic Letter at the Close of the Great Jubilee (2000).

[18]        I here leave aside the question of if and how the unbaptised can receive these benefits too.

[19]        Once again, secular priests such as Gustavo Guiterrez can become friars, so there are exceptions.

[20]        Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium 10.

[21]        McPartlan, art.cit., 83.

[22]        Of many good treatments of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, I recommend Connor, Meditations, ch 6.

[23]        E.g. in Tugwell, The Way of the Preacher, ch 5.

[24]        Summa theologiæ IIaIIæ 86, 2; IIIa 22, 1; 63,6.

[25]        Monum. Ord. Præd. Historia, V, 53.

[26]        Summa theologiæ IIa IIæ, 182.

Wellbeing for Learning

Bishop Anthony Fisher’s address to the Colloquium of the Parramatta Catholic Education Office Penrith, 24 May 2010

Catholic schools have a long and proud tradition of providing pastoral care to their children. The images of Christ – as a Good Shepherd tending His flock and searching out the lost sheep, as a physician for sick bodies and souls, as someone who loved the little ones and called them to Himself, as light for a dark world, bread for hungry hearts, drink for thirsty souls, wisdom for the ignorant, the way for the lost, the truth for the confused, the life for the dead ... – these images help us grasp not only His mission but that of His disciples.

Jesus summed it up thus: “I have come that they may have life and have it to the full” (John 10:10). And He summed up our job in bringing that full life to others: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will do the works that I do and even greater works than these because I go to the Father.” (John 14:12)

Now that might seem to you a big ask! All educators have to do is make our students knowledgeable, skilled, wise, secure, respectful and kind, and keep them permanently safe, happy and holy, as well as get all the reports and accountabilities in, keep up their own prayer life, professional development and excellence in practice, progress towards being saints and perhaps have a little life outside the school. Easy!

But before you think this is God and His Church setting the bar so high that you are being set up for failure, hear how secular organisations define their task.

The World Health Organisation defines health – its job – as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” (Preamble to the Constitution of WHO 1946)

So if that’s what even entirely secular organisations set themselves as goals, it’s not surprising that those of us who believe we also have God’s power to work with will be setting our goals high too.

The risk is, of course, that it’s all hype, jargon, whitewash, spin. No one really believes health organisations and health professionals can achieve a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing for all those in their ambit.

In fact, a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing is not health at all, it is heaven.

It’s not up to health professionals to get people there. It is enough for them to try to get us some reasonable measure of physical and mental health; further improvements might or might not be desirable and reasonably achievable.

Humility is important too. We are in a wonderful but fallen world, sometimes “a vale of tears”, with limited personal and institutional resources. God can do in us and through us things that are impossible for us alone, but that’s up to Him to do in His own way and His good time.

We must beware a messianism in which we think it’s our job or that we have the power to save the world: it’s not and we can’t. We set our aspirations high, we rely on God’s power and our own best efforts, but we are realistic about what is achievable.

A bride-to-be once said to me that she planned to rewrite her wedding vows to include a promise to make her husband happy every day of his life. I suggested that she set more realistic goals.

So what does it mean to be seeking student wellbeing in our Catholic school system? Obviously, it is not about keeping our students on a constant high. Even drugging them to the eyeballs wouldn’t achieve that!

Nor can we be satisfied with the mere absence of bullying and abuse, major behavioural problems or test failures: we surely want more for them than that.

One way we commonly put it is that we want them to be all that they can be, to maximise their potential. My Catholic secondary school motto was “Quantum potes, tantum aude” – as much as you can do, that much dare to do – and it was a pretty good aspiration.

Within the limitations of individual human persons under grace we want them to flourish. And clearly that’s about more than just NAPLAN test results, important as excellence in all academic fields is.

Wellbeing has physical, mental and social aspects, as WHO observes; and ‘mental’ wellbeing includes intellectual, emotional and spiritual elements.

What, then, is the connection between learning and wellbeing? In the Christian vision of all life and action there are three foci: (1) the individual, (2) the community (whether that community is the family, the school or the People of God) and (3) God Himself. All three must be at the centre of the learning process.

1) The Catholic Education Office Parramatta’s Statement on Learning focuses on the individual student who is well served by our schools to the extent that they assist in developing the whole person – body, mind and spirit – to their full potential.

We have big if humble, real, practical hopes for those students. We aspire to:

• learning that prepares them to be contributing members of their family, school, parish, society in this life and saints in the next;
• learning that values what is really significant and has genuine moral and spiritual purpose; and
• learning that involves the search for wisdom and truth and is not simply utilitarian, not simply about being good producers and consumers.

2) The same Statement on Learning recognises that this is a common endeavour: the Church is the agent of learning; the synthesis of faith and culture drawn from her tradition and human experience is the vehicle of that learning; and the common good or wellbeing of the whole community is sought as well as that of each member.

Catholic schooling is about quality relationships – between teacher and student, student and student, student and God, principal and staff, staff and Church, parents and staff, parents and pupils, school and parish, Church and society, and so on. We care about each other and each other’s wellbeing and we make the wellbeing of others part of our own.

3) Above all, God must be at the centre of things, as the source of learning and wellbeing, the humbling limit of our own aspirations and the ennobling grace to stretch beyond what we could ever achieve on our own.

So our Statement on Learning emphasises “learning the Faith, responding to the invitation to Faith within a relationship with Jesus Christ, learning to know themselves and the persons they are created to be, learning the formal curriculum, and learning the interpersonal, intrapersonal and other skills that are necessary to be a contributing member of society and a faithful disciple of Christ.”

The Statement goes on to identify five essential marks of a Catholic school, which might be boiled down to:

1. The search for truth and wisdom in response to the love of the Risen Christ and enlivened by the Spirit.

2. Respect for the dignity of each student demonstrated by ‘rich, real and relevant’ offerings.

3. A sense of communion which acknowledges and builds on the qualities of each learner.

4. A Catholic worldview and imagination permeating the curriculum.

5. Witness to the Gospel sustaining all our efforts.

So much more might be said about all these things. We will hear today from some expert researchers and practitioners on what schools can really do about student wellbeing, enhancing motivation and engagement, building resilience, practical strategies for learning and wellbeing, working through the tough stuff and learning in action.

These are worthy goals. They suggest the NSW-ACT bishops were not naive when in Catholic Schools at a Crossroads they said they had confidence in you and all those involved in the adventure of Catholic education – confidence that you would work to ensure that our schools:

• are truly Catholic in their identity and life – which includes that pastoral focus on the wellbeing of students and on all our relationships to which I referred above;
•  are centres of ‘the new evangelisation’ – so that we reach out beyond our ‘in-group’ to care for wider and wider circles of people and bring them to the greatest source of wellbeing, Jesus Christ;
• enable our students to achieve high levels of ‘Catholic religious literacy’ – as in all other disciplines at the school and all other aspects of personal development, and
• are led and staffed by people who will contribute to these goals – and today’s colloquium is part of our continuing effort to ensure this is the case.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first World Youth Day held in Rome and thus World Youth Day is 25 years old today – older than many of you! For this special anniversary Pope Benedict XVI has written a WYD 2010 message to you, which is available on the web, and which I encourage you to read. In it you will find that the Pope has enormous confidence in you – a confidence I share – because God has enormous confidence in you!

The Holy Father takes as his text one of my favourite passages in the New Testament: the story of the young man who came to Jesus with a typical young man’s desire: I want to live forever! And, so he asks the Prof: Hey Good Teacher, what must I do to get eternal life?

The story highlights how much Jesus wants to meet each of you personally and to engage with you in conversation. We see Christ has important business but he interrupts His journey to hear, and answer, the young man’s questions. So Pope Benedict XVI exhorts you to develop your own conversation with Christ.

What’s more, St Mark tells us that during that conversation, when the youth told Jesus how hard he was trying to discern and live God’s will, Jesus looked at him and loved him. Christianity is that experience: the experience of Jesus Christ Who loves each of us personally, even when we fail Him. You must know the truth that Christ looks upon you, personally, with love; a love, revealed especially in Holy Week, on the Cross. He loved me and gave Himself up for me.

The theme of our WYD08 here in Sydney was the power the Holy Spirit gives us to be witnesses to Christ; and as the Pope suggests today, if we have really encountered Jesus, we cannot help but bear witness to Him before those who have not yet met His gaze!

Think of the people you know who do not really know Christ. Think what a gift to them it would be if they did. If you were involved in WYD08 you have a special duty to help get the class of 2010 ready for WYD11. If you missed WYD08 – because you were in a coma or trapped by ice in Antarctica, I can’t think why else you’d have missed it – then you’ve got to get to next one.

The Gospel tells us this was a rich young man: you might think you don’t have his resources. But as the Pope points out, you are rich: rich in talents, energy, dreams and hopes.

• Am I satisfied with my life?
• Is there something missing?
• What must I do for my life to have full value and meaning?

The question of ‘eternal life’ comes to us not just at the end, but at certain crisis points in our lives, e.g. when we suffer the loss of someone close to us or experience failure. Eternal life is the exciting possibility of unending happiness, the joy of seeing God face-to-face, of knowing all that you can know, of being surrounded by God’s love for ever, of being for the first time everything you can be. Wondering about the future awaiting us gives full meaning to our existence. Far horizons give us context and aspiration.

Madrid is one of those horizons and I want each of you to resolve to get yourselves there and to help get others there. Spain is one of the great Christian cultures, planted and built up in a hot and hard land very like Australia. There are brothers and sisters waiting there to meet you and work with you for the Gospel of Eternal Life.

So, set yourself great goals, like joining with two million or more youth of the world in Madrid in August 2011. Don’t settle for less than greatness. As Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, our WYD08 patron whose earthly remains visited us at the time, said: “I want to live, not simply exist!”

We are called to eternity; to really live, now and always. God didn’t create us just to exist, to survive. He wants us to live, to flourish, to thrive.

And we can start living eternity right now. Don’t put it off like the young man in the Gospel did. Don’t run away from its demands. Eternal life lived right now is the life of the commandments and beatitudes. They show us how to distinguish clearly between the way of life (= good) and the way of death (= evil).

God’s commandments are not a cage for our imagination, a restriction on our desires, so much as a road-map that frees us to love authentically. God puts no limits on our happiness, but rather shows us how to find it.