Archbishop of Sydney

National Catholic Education Conference Mass

St. Mary’s cathedral
Isaiah 32:15-18; 1Jn 4: 7-11; Mk 12: 28-34

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
28/9/2006

Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah could be applied (without too much exaggeration) to the Australian story in this Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.  Despite the brutal origins of the convict system, despite the injustices heaped upon our indigenous brothers and sisters (which we still battle today, often ineffectively) millions of Australians have lived peaceful lives in quiet dwellings, turned the countryside into fertile land and established security and a fair measure of peace.

Despite all our imperfections, the Spirit has been poured on us from above and one of these channels of grace for Australian society has been the Catholic Church here and more particularly the Catholic schools.  We should thank God for what we have received from our predecessors in Catholic education, especially those who laboured for ninety years with no government money at all, rejoice in the service that we presently offer and ask God for wisdom, courage and perseverance as we confidently move into the future.

All Catholic communities, and especially Catholic schools, have to be communities of faith and love – or they are neither Catholic nor communitarian.

This is the import of the two New Testament readings tonight.  God himself is love and it was this love within the Godhead which inspired the Father to send His Son to live and die among us, and then send his Spirit to give us the capacity to believe and to follow Jesus’ teachings in our daily life.

The Lord Jesus did not come with a set of questions or comfortable affirmations.  He came to us with a set of answers, with the requirements that we repent and believe and with the commandments that, first of all we must love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength and the equally difficult second commandment that we love our neighbours as ourselves.

A few of our students might be unclear about how we should love God and some, like a quarter of their peers, might wonder whether there is a God to be loved.  But all of them should know that we teach, as Jesus taught, that God loves each one of us and that we should love one another.

By and large our students understand the Christian commandment that they love one another, as I dare to believe that overwhelmingly, our schools are happy communities, generally well geared up also to help the less fortunate here and overseas.

However we need to go further – and we do.  We must show in our lives and make explicit in our teaching that Christ’s is a tough love; not sentimentality, not the soft tolerance of anything goes without any principles, but clear headed compassion and sympathy.

Christian love does not allow us to love and then do anything we feel like doing (as a saying of St. Augustine is alleged to suggest).  We are stuck with Christ’s warning that if we love Him we shall keep his commandments.

It is possible to keep the commandments without love, although I suspect this rarely lasts long.  What is true also is that this formalism is always empty and often poisonous.  Love is essential, but we cannot love one another without keeping the commandments.

Pope John Paul wrote magnificently on faith and reason and on the essential relationship of truth and freedom and I want to say a few words on the equally essential link between love and reason or rationality.

Recently Pope Benedict has been in the news for his academic address at Regensburg his old university and once the seat of the Holy Roman Emperors.  His passing references to Islam dominated the media, but most of the speech was about the importance of God for every society, and especially Western societies like ours and to emphasise that rationality, reason is an attribute of God.  God is not cranky, or capricious.  God is truthful.

The Pope quoted the beginning of John’s gospel.  “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” pointing out that the Greek word “Logos” means both word and reason.

The Holy Father acknowledges that this reverence for reason was taken into Revelation, into John’s gospel from Greek philosophy and this was a providential conjunction.  Here lies one of the secrets of European and Western civilization.  Here lives the reason for our Catholic schools, for our reverence for education, why Catholics should never be fundamentalists and can never be post moderns who reject the idea of truth.

More practically, it means that whatever measure of success or failure we might have religiously with our students, we must labour mightily to convince them that they stand under the truth; that they can no more ignore the search for truth than they can turn their back on goodness or love.

It is a tragedy that so many young Catholics feel they are free to pick and choose their beliefs, that so many of them believe all morality is relative to time and place, to particular circumstances.

Are they free to pick and then choose to reject the two great commandments of love?  Of course not.  A Christian is not someone who follows his conscience in a loving way.  Every human being is obliged to do that.

A Christian is a person who elects to follow the person of Jesus Christ, who returns Christ’s love, who believes that Christ explained the reasons for living and how we should live.  A Christian accepts the two great commandments of love or he is not a Christian.

A Christian acknowledges her failure to love and requests forgiveness.  A Christian does not define his sins out of existence and is not free to reject the central Christian mysteries after a little mature consideration.  A Christian is someone who accepts Christ’s answer.  Here lives the secret of the survival of the Catholic Church for two hundred years.

To stem the exodus we need to hang on to the children of Catholic parents, but to reverse the trend we need to inspire many to conversion, to a change of life, to a new acceptance of Christ and of the Church.

By a happy coincidence I was shown recently the speech Father Paul Stenhouse a Sydney M.S.C. gave at the relaunch of Peter Coleman’s biography of the great Australian poet James McAuley.

McAuley was a cultural warrior, a politician, first editor of Quadrant, immersed in the struggle for truth and love.  An unbeliever at first, then much impressed by a missionary bishop and nun in New Guinea he became a Catholic in 1950.

This was how he saw what became for him “the supreme question: Whether the Catholic Church is not in fact the sole mistress, guardian and nurse of the infinite spiritual wealth of the Christian Tradition, the only full and authentic source of that living water for which my soul is enflamed with an increasing thirst”.  That is the question for us too.

At the least our students should know what the Catholic Church claims.  We are not offering one holiday package from a set of equally valid alternatives; nor are we offering a philosophy, another way of life.  We are calling our students to faith in the Son of God, a faith lived out in the Catholic Church.

Faith and love reinforce one another in truth.  When faith and love are strong we seek the truth and are not searching for short cuts, not fudging the challenges.

 I believe a few lines from McAuley sum up our situation.

 I know that faith is like a root
 That’s tough, inert and cold;
 Yet it can send up its green shoot
 and flower against the cold.
 I know that there is a grace that flows
 When all the springs run dry.
 It wells up to renew the rose
 and lifts the cedar high.