War and Peace, Youth and Sacred Sites
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| Anzac Cove … a holy place for Australians and New Zealanders. |
From 28 September to 14 October 2012, Bishop Anthony Fisher OP led a group of Principals and Catholic Education leaders on a pilgrimage through Greece and Turkey, retracing the pathways of St Paul.
Homily
For most of us, I guess, today's sites at Gallipoli will long be remembered amongst the most moving and memorable sacred sites on our diocesan pilgrimage. On the face of it that’s rather strange: after all, there were no apostles here, no visitations of the Blessed Virgin Mary, no ancient shrines.
What makes this place holy for Australians and New Zealanders, British or Turkish people is the blood not of martyrs but of very ordinary young men: young men, some very young, no older than some of our secondary school students.
It is estimated that the Allied casualties in the Dardanelles campaign, including deaths from drowning and accident, were 265,000. This included 46,000 who were killed in action or died from wounds. The Turkish casualties were about 218,000 with around 66,000 killed. There were Australian casualties of 26,000, including 8709 killed in action.
We have all seen the scratchy black and white footage of the Gallipoli landing, with young soldiers with packs and rifles and putteed legs pounding up the beach amidst a deadly rain of bullets.
A few years ago I learnt from ABC radio that that famous film, etched on my 'memory', was actually filmed at Tamarama Beach in Sydney. The soldiers were real enough, but from the safety of the army camp at Liverpool in Sydney not the Middle East campaign. It was all carefully choreographed by director Alfred Rolfe.
Historian Daniel Reynaud explained that though it was based on early press reports and made within months of the actual ANZAC Cove landing, there is no authentic moving film of Gallipoli.
This is by no means the only aspect of the ANZAC story that turns out to be legend. It has become increasingly clear that instead of a glorious story of national origins, the Gallipoli campaign was a strategic blunder that cost everyone dearly in young lives.
Yet enthusiasm for this place only grows with historical scrutiny. If we have doubts about the historical authenticity of some Christian holy sites dating back one or two millennia, we might consider how in just a century we’ve idealised and mythologised what happened near here at Gallipoli.
Sacred sites and stories have that power: not just sometimes to exaggerate history in the retelling, but also to heighten our awareness of it, to draw attention to it, to stop us long enough to contemplate it and get a handle on the truth, not just the legend.
I am a fan of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, which starred Mel Gibson as Frank Dunne and Mark Lee as Archie, and had a soundtrack that featured Albioni’s haunting Adagio in G Minor.
That film is also a highly romanticised account; with myths of Aussie sporting prowess, anti-authoritarianism and a mateship that dissolves all classes and social distinctions.
But where the film gets it 100% right is in insisting on the tragedy and futility of war: our two heroes compete as runners and soldiers and men, but in war there are no winners.
The ANZAC myth is right in another way too: that out of the midst of tragedy, of such pointless death, even there, the courage of men under fire, the fidelity of mateship, the hope of youth and love of country can rise from the ashes.
The ANZAC myth is also a parable for the greatest true story: that of the Prince of Peace who brought life out of death, liberty out of captivity, peace out of violence, salvation out of the folly of the cross.
At this place we join the fallen and their families, our countrymen and Turkish hosts, resolving never again to glamorise war and to try to bridge the gulfs of mutual incomprehension that made this region a battlefield for centuries-long clashes of civilisations.
At this site, soaked in the blood of young people of several countries, we who are devoted to the welfare of the young rededicate ourselves to their safety, their intellectual, moral and spiritual development, keenly conscious of the privilege and awesome responsibility that this is.
This place exhorts us to give humanity cause for hope, even amidst the realities of man’s sinful division and God’s saving alternative, a wisdom that speaks directly to what happened here and how to avoid it happening again.
This saving wisdom is sometimes at risk of being blunted in ways that can imperil our mission and message. Let me note four ways this can happen.
First, there is the ever-present tendency to reduce Christianity to mere propositions. Faith can become a series of ideas, of formulas, whereas it is first and foremost about a real, personal relationship with Christ who is the Prince of Peace. We need to know Christ, not just know about Him.
Second is the temptation to reduce faith to morality. Christians are often thought of as moralistic, forever wagging their fingers at various evils. I remember Archbishop Wilton Gregory, when President of the US Bishops Conference, saying that if the Gospel is such good news and Christians are blessed with gifts such as spiritual joy would someone please tell their faces!
Christian faith is about liberation from evils such as hatred, violence and death, and a personal encounter with the One who heals, befriends, directs and delights!
So as well as the commandments, it’s about faith, sacraments, beatitudes, virtues, spiritual graces and so much more than morality, important though that is.
The third danger is reducing morality to one department of morality, such as sexual morality or justice and peace. I think our schools and many other Catholic institutions are good at talking social justice and at concrete projects to bring it about.
Our young people are often marked by a passion for justice and peace. But I wonder sometimes how that fits with the rest of Catholic faith and worship and morals. Do we risk engaging in secular do-gooding with a bit of religious decoration?
The proclamation of Christ's kingdom of justice and peace is a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel. But Catholic morality also includes the ethics of respect for life and health, of business and work life, of scientific research, of sex, marriage and family, of communications and education, of ecology, of worship and much else.
All these are as important as social justice and, indeed, they are all interconnected. We will not respond better to the perennial human tendency to make war unless we build respect for human life, bodies, relationships, families, and cultures. Morality is a seamless garment.
Having reduced faith in Christ to propositions, the propositions of faith to propositions of morality, morality to social justice, the final stage in the reduction of Christianity is often reducing justice and peace to its less demanding requirements.
We can, for instance, wag fingers at governments, international agencies, the Vatican, big business – but what about ourselves?
We can look at ANZAC Cove and say boo to the British Imperial Government and Forces, or to our own weak government and generals, or to the clash of civilisations, but how do these things speak to my own life?
What about my own prejudices, unforgivingness, desire to dominate?
What about those aspects of the human heart that are the origin of wars and the enemies of peace? Where is Jesus in all this? Where is sin, salvation, and reconciliation?
Do we sometimes focus on justice and peace because we can engage in rhetoric and projects that make no real demands on us? Or because social justice is so much easier to sell to our kids than other areas of faith or morality? Or because it allows feel-good projects we can brag of, that prove how socially aware we are, but require no real change in us?
Pope Paul VI said: "No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons" - in all your relationships, all your attitudes, all your character. That's a big ask. That's something we cannot do by ourselves. That's something that needs Christ.
As we look at this giant graveyard for young men, we ask ourselves how can we prevent this ever happening again? Only by God's grace. How do we form young men and women as people of justice and peace, and not of social justice only, but the whole Christian vision, young men and women of faith and prayer and imagination, of passion and compassion?
My thought today for those of you engaged in leadership in Catholic education is this: Catholic schools are part of God's answer to war. By evangelising, catechising and giving the best all-round education, you are producing the future leaders and citizens, generals and soldiers of the world and we look to them to ensure Gallipoli never happens again.
We work so that when the hour comes in the lives of our young people, in which their "soul is troubled" as it was for Christ in the Gospel, when heroism is called for as it is in every life at some stage, they may be glorified as Christ was.
Glorified, not by worldly victory, but by that victory that is standing by your ideals for God and country and all the world, standing by your mates and family and all humanity.
In celebrating the ANZACs at Gallipoli, we celebrate what is best in our history and we commit to trying to be worthy of those young men's deaths, by proclaiming the Gospel of Peace and in forming young minds and hearts for battle, not in some distant land but in the human heart, the spiritual struggle over what is true and good and beautiful.