Archbishop of Sydney

You Will Be Witnesses

Pentecost Sunday

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
11/5/2008

Introduction
This is the last feast of Pentecost before we celebrate World Youth Day in Sydney, a final opportunity to call on the Spirit for help.

Therefore this year we shall consider what it is to be a Christian and Catholic witness.

Two years ago at Pentecost I wrote about the nature of power for good or ill.  Last year we meditated on the reality of the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit of love working in our lives.

All three topics are taken from the passage in the Acts of the Apostles (1:8) chosen to provide the central theme for our World Youth Day, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be witnesses”.

AN ACTIVIST PRIEST
The leaders from our schools and parishes who gathered to provide input for this message began, as usual, by listening to a talk on the theme.

This year the speaker was Father Chris Riley, a Salesian priest who has worked for 34 years with the disadvantaged and is Director of “Youth Off the Streets”.

He explained that Christian faith calls us into the light of creative altruism, not into the darkness of destructive selfishness.   We must regularly think of others.  Christ calls us to repair the world by responding to tragedy and calls us to a faith which bridges, not divides; accepts, not judges; nourishes and does not crush.

Father Chris followed Christ in rejecting a God of hatred for the oppressors and evildoers and adapted Socrates’ teaching on the unexamined life by claiming that a life without commitment is not worth much at all.

He didn’t romanticise his work, explaining how he had to struggle against his revulsion at fixing the cut and dirty feet of one sufferer and that he was regularly pricked by the thorns on the end of Christ’s crown as he leant over to help the battlers.

He explained the intrinsic link between prayer and action, his conviction that prayer needs to be expressed in action not only by helping the young, but by supporting the elderly in their too frequent isolation and by challenging the racism in our society.

“Youth Off the Streets”, works around Sydney, in Griffith and Walgett, even in Aceh, Indonesia.  They make a difference.  During their three years in Macquarie Fields, where youth unemployment once hit 20 percent, the crime rate has dropped by one quarter, 25 percent.  Hope brings healing.

CHRIST: OUR CHIEF WITNESS
Leaders from both parishes and schools liked the quotation attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Always preach the gospel and use words only if necessary”.  They understood that actions speak louder than words.

After Father Chris’ talk the student leaders present shared their own experiences of reaching out to people in need.  I was impressed by their generosity and commitment.  Some told of their work on the St. Vincent de Paul Night Patrol van, others of cleaning the homes of needy people, or assisting at the Matthew Talbot Hostel.

While Jesus told Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that He had “come into the world to bear witness to the truth” (Jn 18:37) His teachings would not have been accepted as well as they were during His lifetime without His kindness to the sick and suffering and His miracles for them.

And the effectiveness of Jesus’ witness after His death, of His gospel, was immeasurably enhanced not just by His resurrection, but even more powerfully (especially for those who are suffering) by the persecution He endured, and His own suffering and crucifixion.

In the first Christian centuries nearly all those venerated as saints were martyrs, men and women who followed Christ’s example of giving their life as a supreme example of witness to God’s truth and love.  The memory of the martyrs was cultivated then as it is today, because it was recognized that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Tertullian. Apologeticus 1).  Today however in Australia we are usually called to daily witness in smaller things, a white martyrdom.

You will all enjoy many marvellous moments during World Youth Day as Pope Benedict is among the best teachers to take up the See of St. Peter as Pope and Bishop of Rome in 2000 years.

But the Way of the Cross through Sydney’s streets on Friday afternoon - the Scriptural re-enactment of Jesus’ walk to Calvary recounted in gospel passages and accompanied by beautiful words and music - will be the supreme teaching moment of the week.  Probably even the youngest among us will never again see in Australia such powerful public witness to God’s love in action through His Son.  You must be there.  A television audience of one billion viewers is possible as  more than that number watched the W.Y.D. Way of the Cross in Toronto in 2002.

WITNESSES
Genuine witnesses show the way, point to the truth, inspire and motivate.  They find strength in difficulties and struggle to overcome personal weakness.  Tradition is constituted by a chain of such witnesses across generations and centuries.  Truth today still spreads through the enthusiasm and example of witnesses, especially among friends, even friends and contacts on the internet.

Effective witnesses need a deep belief in the causes they promote; core values which call to perseverance and commitment.  A skin-deep espousal of religion is no substitute for a commitment to Christ and the Catholic Church.

A truly Catholic witness not only knows who Christ is, true God and true man, but tries to imitate Christ in daily living.  All the baptized are called to wholeness (or holiness), which is not the same as being a pious bore or a pain in the neck and need not mean being eccentric.  The personal wholeness of the best Catholic witnesses means that they are alive for friendship and service, sustained by faith and hope.

A truly Catholic witness loves the Catholic community, has Catholic friends, regularly worships and prays, is loyal to her Pope and archbishop.  Even from early years she has fond memories of good times and good people, of First Communion, perhaps of family baptisms.  Later he will be sustained by recalling beautiful funerals of loved ones, by happy marriage ceremonies, by the personal healing from good confessions.  The Catholic Church is our mother and teacher, the Body of Christ.

Adult Catholic witnesses also know that the Church is imperfect.  Everyone can remember a bad example of Church and the media now highlight lapses and failings as well as crimes.  But we should not forget all the good things, the blessings, the many examples of quiet and hidden service.
It is an advantage for all adult Christians to know something of Church history, so that our times today with their particular possibilities and problems can be set in context.

Many ages have been worse religiously than our own.   Some have been better.  Australian life today offers a basic prosperity to most citizens, a rarity in history, with a good measure of justice and decency.  But an increasing minority find it difficult or unnecessary to believe and Christian understandings of sexuality, marriage and family are under a sustained attack unprecedented in the Western world since the days of the pagan Roman Empire.  The sexual revolution, the disintegration of married and family life, is not a novelty, not an emancipation into freedom and happiness, but a relapse into paganism, a reassertion of power and self over love.  This damages many people.

Wise and knowledgeable witnesses are needed to warn society away and to persuade Christians to follow life-enhancing paths, even when others venture up dead-ends.

OBSTACLES
Tensions always exist between the people of the beatitudes and the surrounding community, because the Cross remains a sign of contradiction.
Witnesses therefore need to be nourished by regular prayer, to strive for humility and insight, because it is easier to see the faults of others than perceive our own deficiencies.   We should pray for fewer blind spots, strive to bolster our courage to resist the fear of unpopularity and study well to remove our ignorance and lack of understanding.  Integrity and competence are needed for effective witness.

A lapse into fundamentalism provides no solution and makes matters worse in the long run.  We all must believe in the Catholic fundamentals, faith, love, hope, the creed and the commandments, but fundamentalism is something else again.

Fundamentalism rejects or undervalues reason, oversimplifies, is often intolerant and latches onto the literal meaning of Scripture texts in an individualist and black-and-white fashion.

We also need official Catholic teaching to guide us through the difficulties of Scriptural interpretation.

Above all we must never become false witnesses, nor follow them.

False witnesses lead us away from the truth and distort or deny central Christian teachings.  They cannot deliver on the mistaken hopes they inspire, are often attention seekers and sometimes even liars and cheats.  We follow a different way, we follow Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life.

One interesting particularity of both meetings of youth leaders was that no young person mentioned political life as an opportunity for Christian witness.  However we need Christian witnesses among our politicians.

The obstacles are real but so are the opportunities.  So pray for the spiritual fruitfulness of the Sydney World Youth Day, both for our Australian pilgrims and for the many tens of thousands of young pilgrims coming from overseas, especially our brothers and sisters from Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands and New Zealand.

May the Holy Spirit inspire during this time a rich harvest of persistent witnesses in every sphere of Catholic and public life.