Archbishop of Sydney

Groundbreaking Ceremony of St. Vincent’s Research & Biotechnology Precinct

Victor Chang Institute

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
2/8/2006

Recently I heard of a senior official from mainland China who was travelling in the Western world and trying to work out what was the principal factor which led to Western supremacy, not just in medicine, science, technology, but also in economics, self-government and even in literature, art and music. Certainly some of our music and art is corrupting and decadent, but there is no art or music in other cultures to match the range of emotion and the depths of spirituality which can be found in some Western music and art.  Why did the scientific revolution begin and develop so spectacularly in the Western world?  Why did Western economies, the free market, first produce such extraordinary wealth; certainly not for everyone, but for many or even most people in a country like Australia?

His answer would surprise and even shock many educated people in our country, because he concluded that the catalyst, not just for the basic decency, but for the spectacular intellectual development which lies behind Western achievement, was to be found in the core of Christian beliefs.

We are not accustomed to think like this. One devout Catholic university student asked me recently why it was that she had been taught to respect every religion but her own, which she had been encouraged to criticise.  This is not a bad question.

We have been taught to recognize and praise the Enlightenment with its rejection of religion and authority.  We have heard how Galileo was put under house arrest by the Catholic Church; of the debate over evolution between T. H. Huxley and “Slippery Sam” Wilberforce the Anglican bishop of Oxford and then Winchester.

And even if we do not know too much of these stories, many Australians are tempted to see scientific research and the Christian religion in a necessary relationship of tension and perhaps even of hostility. Within this mistaken framework Catholic participation in a Research and Biotechnology Precinct would be seen at best as an anachronism and marriage of convenience, if it was not something of a contradiction in terms.

St. Paul writing to the people of Corinth pointed out our debt and his debt to the master builders who went before us and every educated person must be grateful for the traditions of learning and civility we have each inherited.  Paul goes further and names Jesus Christ and his teaching as the central foundation, the indispensable basis.

I happen to believe that Paul was right and that the Chinese official an agnostic contemporary of ours, an outsider to our society, was also correct in recognizing Christianity as the most important catalyst for our achievement.

You will be relieved that I am not going to attempt to explain this claim now, although a politically incorrect American sociologist, an agnostic professor called Rodney Stark has written three interesting books on the theme. The most recent, published in 2005, is entitled “The Victory of Reason. How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success”.  For anyone interested he provides ample food for thought.

Christians believe the one transcendent God is rational not capricious and that his creation does not revolve in an everlasting cycle of return.  Such presuppositions prompted the search to discover the rational laws of physics and mathematics and led to the notion of progress.

Christians do not believe that the universe is a bleak combination of deterministic physical laws and wholly random biological events, where our existence is totally a product of chance and totally without purpose or meaning.

We do not worship nature and do not see natural forces as forms or abodes of divine beings.

We do not see God as a remote, impersonal divinity explained largely by Newtonian mechanics.

Such things as self-replication, cellular development and splitting and the metabolism and striving of organisms are not foreshadowed in this world of the inorganic.

In deed I believe it quite proper for a Christian to claim that the one true God is not revealed “so much in the regularity of the universe as in its irregularities which permit the emergence of new and unsuspected levels of action and reaction” (A. O’Hear. Plato’s Children: The State We Are In. p 199)

Nature sustains us, and as humans we have our rightful and unique place in nature’s creative process.  This is doubly true of a research institute.

All of us and especially institutes of biological research therefore have to practise a genuine respect for nature – or pay the price.  Last night I could not find the origin of the saying that “God always forgives, humans sometimes forgive, but nature never forgives”.

The bit about nature is certainly true because nature remorselessly punishes violations.  We recognize this in thousands of examples ranging from soil degradation, to industrial pollution, to the side effects of drugs such as thalidomide.  Perhaps this principle is also at work in today’s powerful and pervasive myth of global warming.

I wish God speed to the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and the whole St. Vincent’s Research and Biotechnology Precinct.  Your work should be extraordinarily significant in many ways.  I pray that you will always respect what is uniquely human, that research funds will be your servant and not your master, that your work will inspire great generosity in the community to complete the $67 million already donated by State and Federal Governments and private funding and that as God’s co-workers you will only enhance and develop nature as you serve the men, women and children of Australia and beyond.