Archbishop of Sydney

125th Anniversary Mass - St. Joseph’s College, Hunter’s Hill

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
15/8/2006

Apoc 11:19, 12:1-6, 10; 1 Cor 15:20-26; Lk 1:39-56

Today is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul into heaven.  It is a particularly Christian teaching, taught by Our Lord himself that, eventually we too shall be in heaven, or the nether regions, as persons with a body and soul.  Where Jesus and his mother have gone, we shall be in a similar way after the resurrection of the body on the last day.  While it is a provocative teaching and a powerful consolation, it is no coincidence that the authorities are celebrating the College’s 125th Anniversary on this Catholic feast day.

You cannot understand the history of St. Joseph’s College without some understanding of our Catholic faith in Jesus Christ.  The first brothers did not come from the other side of the world in 1872 to make money, or to satisfy their own ambitions.  They made their sacrifices, gave up their homelands and the legitimate possibility of marriage and family, not merely to give you and your predecessors a good education, but to hand on to you the Catholic faith.  Neither did they come to teach you rugby union; because the game was in its infancy then and in fact the college played Aussie Rules for some years before it adopted Union (it was a Rugby union historian, not a propagandist for the Southern game, who told me that!).

I am pleased too that you have come to St. Mary’s for this Mass, as this is your Cathedral even if you do not come from Sydney, because it is the site of the first church, the mother church of all the Australian continent.

Look at what your ancestors built, without government money, over the generations to give witness to their faith.  Governor Macquarie laid the foundation stone in 1821, but the church did not open until December 1833.  It was burnt down in 1865 and they had to start again, when we were a much smaller and poorer community than we are now.  The nave was only completed in 1928.

There has always been a close link between the Cathedral and Archbishop on the one hand and the Marist brothers and your college on the other.  The Marists ran the Cathedral school for 30 years and Archbishop Vaughan, the second Archbishop of Sydney, blessed the foundation stone of the first timber building at Hunter’s Hill, constructed mainly by the brothers and their novices, on October 6th, 1882.  Forty-four boarders had come by ferry to start under the French principal Brother Emilian Pontet on July 18th the previous year.

I will not bore you with all the important landmarks in your impressive history, but the magnificent H-shaped building was blessed and opened on St. Patrick’s Day 1894 by the third Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Francis Moran.  It is truly a worthy companion building for this cathedral and indeed something of an Australian equivalent (architecturally, but only in that way) of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School, as one teenager girl is alleged to have exclaimed on her first visit a few years ago.

We are here of course for a number of religious purposes and I ask you to join me in prayer as we thank God for all the blessings received over 125 years by staff, students, parents and friends.  But we should also pray for one another today, you as students for one another, for the principal Mr. Tarlinton, the first lay principal, for all the lay teachers and brothers, for the parents and old boys.  And finally we should also pray that the achievements of the past will long continue into the future, and will serve as a springboard for even better things educationally and spiritually over the years ahead.

There is one strange aspect of the Scripture readings for today’s Mass, which is worth your attention on this important anniversary, because it is not the way we normally think of mothers.  All three readings speak of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of violence and the final victory of God and goodness.  None of them speak of soft options or easy victory.  I know that most in the Joey’s community love their sport and understand the need for hard work and discipline if you are to prevail.  Life is like that too.

The book of Revelations (the Apocalypse) is the strangest in the New Testament and this excerpt speaks of a violent war between a woman, Mary of course, “adorned with the sun, standing on the moon and with twelve stars on her head”, pregnant with her Son about to be born.  Ranged against her was a huge red dragon, with seven heads, who was trying to devour the baby.

It is a grotesque image of the struggle which continues in every age, including our own, between good and ill, between faith and fear or despair.  No-one can escape joining in on one side or the other.

St. Paul in his letter to the people of Corinth takes up this theme in a more subdued and different way writing of the victory over sin and death achieved by Christ’s resurrection.  God and goodness will prevail, because eventually Christ “will put all his enemies under his feet and the last of the enemies to be destroyed is death”.

And finally the first chapter in Luke’s Gospel speaks of Mary’s role in establishing the reign of mercy for all God fearers, when the proud of heart will be routed, while the lowly will be exalted and the hungry fed as God promised to Abraham nearly 4,000 years ago.

I am now approaching old age.  Some of my young friends tell me I have well and truly arrived!  Whatever of that, I do not believe that I have been wasting my time and so on this anniversary day I ask you all, students of this famous Catholic college, to take heed of your teachers and your tradition and commit yourselves once again to God and goodness and love.

St. Joseph’s College is not driven by the market or the profit motive, but by the mission of Christ.  You too are called to join this long struggle, to be givers not takers; men of faith, not spectators, much less cynics or scoffers.

You too are called to make the Catholic faith your faith, in your heart of hearts; not just the faith of your parents or school, but yours.  A faith where you will believe that the one invisible God loves you, all of us; that the teachings of Christ will be your moral compass, so that in good times you will be grateful for your blessings and in bad times, when you need forgiveness, or consolation or strength, you will hang on to them in the darkness.

And to those of you who already understand and love your Catholic faith, recognize where the central strengths of St. Joseph’s tradition lie, I repeat one central truth.  If none of you come forward to join the brothers, or teachers or priests, and more broadly in the church if none of you take up the call to service and leadership, the Spirit of St. Joseph’s and in the Church will slowly slip away to other places.  The logic is simple and irrefutable.  St. Joseph’s College without any Marist brothers at all would be different and diminished.

There is another reason for you to be clear about what is important in your life, to know what your basic principles are and follow them, because I cannot promise you good times like those we have enjoyed since the Second World War.  There are clouds on the horizon and we pray that they will neither darken and gather, nor increase.  We should be praying for peace.
Father Marcellin Champagnat founded the Marist Brothers in France in 1817 after the persecutions of the French Revolution and the death and suffering of the Napoleonic Wars.  The brothers arose from these ashes when many had believed the church was finished.  Champagnat knew better, built for the future and founded many schools believing that a good school was like a good home, characterised by love, respect and confidence.

He emphasised Mary’s place in the devotional life of his schools because “every young person needs a family and every family needs a mother”.

Mary was Jesus’ first and most faithful follower so I pray that all the teachers and students at St. Joseph’s College today and in the future, will “follow Christ as Mary did”.  May God bless you all.

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