Archbishop of Sydney

World Youth Day Pilgrimage Mass

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Is 55:1-3; Rom 8:35,37-39; Mt 14:13-21

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
31 July 2005

We are gathered in St. Mary’s tonight to ask God’s blessing on our pilgrimage to the World Youth Day celebration in Cologne; we pray that God keeps us safe and sound and that our faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, will be strengthened as we go, by those we meet, by what we see and hear.  In the nineteenth century the French preacher Chateaubriand claimed “there was never a pilgrim who did not come back to his village with one less prejudice and one more idea”.  May that be our aim also.

The practice of going on pilgrimage i.e. visiting a sacred place for a religious motive is as old as Christianity itself.  Indeed we could say that Our Lord himself accompanied Mary and Joseph on pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem when he was lost there as a young teenager.

From apostolic times, even during the persecutions of the Roman Empire, pilgrims visited the places frequented by Jesus in the Holy Land of Israel.  Rome, the place where Peter and Paul were martyred and where there are tombs to the martyrs, has a tradition of pilgrimage nearly as old as the Holy Land’s.

Different countries and different times have different favoured pilgrimage spots.  In the Middle Ages Canterbury in England, where the Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by the King’s men in 1170, was the greatest pilgrimage centre in England until Henry VIII destroyed it at the Reformation.  Today Rome and Lourdes and Medjugorje are favourite spots for us, while San Giovanni Rotondo, the site of Padre Pio’s monastery in South East Italy has an extraordinary number of Italian pilgrims.  Today tens of thousands of pilgrims still walk the traditional way to the shrine of St. James in Compostela, Spain, a practice that has continued for nearly 1200 years.

We go to meet with Pope Benedict XVI and pray together in Cologne in their magnificent Gothic Cathedral, which has an equally splendid shrine to the Three Wise Men who visited the newly born Jesus.  They were searching for truth, wanting to meet the Messiah, God’s promised messenger.  Our search must always be for truth.  A good pilgrimage always includes going to confession, the sacrament of reconciliation.

We are not simply going on a holiday; not simply going as tourists to see new sights, but as followers of Christ who want to deepen our understanding of Catholic life and gain inspiration to be better people.

So I want to say a few words about today’s Gospel and about an institution I visited one week ago today, which truly follows Jesus’ way and imitates his practical concern for others.

In today’s Gospel passage Our Lord has just heard the news of John the Baptist’s execution by King Herod and retreated across the Sea of Galilee to a lonely place where he and his disciples could be by themselves.

However Jesus’ other followers were not allowing him to escape so easily, guessed where he was going and set out on foot.  Instead of a quiet time, he was surrounded by a large crowd.  Whatever irritation or disappointment he was tempted to feel, we are told that he took pity on them and healed their sick.

The numbers were large; five thousand men, probably the great majority, not counting women and children and as night fell they had little or no food, except five loaves and two fish.  After Jesus asked the apostles to sit the people down on the grass, he blessed the food, multiplied it miraculously and fed the crowd so well, that twelve baskets of scraps were left over.

As followers of Christ we should strive to imitate his practical concern for others in a thousand different ways.  One group who does this very well is the St. Vincent de Paul Society through all their works and especially through their Matthew Talbot Hostel.

Matthew Talbot was a nineteenth century Irish drunkard.  He was born in Dublin in 1856, the second of twelve children from a deprived family and obtained little to no education.

His excessive drinking began when he was twelve years of age as he started work in a wine bottling business.  The situation went from bad to worse and he became an habitual drunkard.

At the age of 28 he “took the pledge”, promised himself that he would not drink for the next three months.  He did not think he could last the distance for such a period, do without drink for so long, but within a year he had taken the pledge for life and never drank again.

His Catholic faith coupled with regular prayer and meditation helped his recovery immensely as he followed a twelve step rehabilitation programme, very like that now taught so effectively by Alcoholics Anonymous, formulated fifty years after Talbot’s recovery.

His holiness, his wonderful return from the brink was recognised in 1975 when the Catholic Church gave him the title of “Venerable”, the patron of addicts.

On last Sunday the hostel in Woolloomooloo named after him was blessed after a $1.6 million refurbishment programme.  While the N.S.W. Government contributes $3.7 million to the annual running costs, the rebuilding was financed by gifts to the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the lay Catholic group which runs the hostel and has 116 groups of helpers throughout the Sydney Archdiocese.  Many people know of them through their network of shops for cheap second-hand clothing, “Vinnies Boutiques”.

Founded in France in the 19th century by an academic layman Fredric Ozanam, they started in Sydney at St. Patrick’s Church in the city in 1881.

The Matthew Talbot Hostel dates from 1938, when Norman Gilroy, then assistant bishop suggested it to the Society.  Today the hostel provides more than a quarter of a million meals a year, while its beds are used nearly 37,000 times a year by homeless men and the 95 professional staff are helped by 350 volunteers.  In 2003-4 the expenditure was $6,800,000 and income was $6,425,000.

The refurbishments mean that 60% of the men now have their own room and the others have some privacy in an alcove in the dormitories.  Programmes have also been improved and expanded to help the men on the difficult path back to independent living.  Two men on this path to recovery were at Mass this morning, heard this sermon and asked my blessing afterwards for perseverance.

Most of these visitors to the hostel are young, many damaged by drugs and 70% have some form of nervous disorder.  The deinstitutionalization of mental patients has not worked.  Many are lost and alone, on the edges of our society, perhaps in jail.  One important work of charity now is getting them to take their daily medicine, which they often forget and is usually necessary for their equilibrium.

We do not have to go to the other side of the world to see this imitation of Christ.  It is close by, just down the hill but we pray that our pilgrimage to Cologne will help all of us to be better Christians when we return home.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen