Archbishop of Sydney

Centenary Of The Completion Of Auckland Cathedral On 23rd February, 1908

Ezekiel 47:1-2.8-9; Cor 3: 9-11. 16-7; John 2: 13-22

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
23/2/2008

First of all I should begin by congratulating the Bishop, the Dean, committee and architect on the renovation of this Cathedral of St. Patrick and St. Joseph.  It is a gem in your crown, a masterpiece of devotion and restraint, featuring local artists, craftsmanship, poetry and history.  It is a wonderful example of the best of Catholic tradition, developing certainly but respectful of the past, not rejecting it.  The Cathedral calls us to worship, prayer and service.  Its beauty sets a standard for all of us in this part of the world who are privileged to have the care of a cathedral.

Twenty years ago I was a member of a joint-Churches committee of enquiry into the jails in my home state of Victoria in Australia.  When visiting a high security section of one of these jails I was impressed by seeing an elderly Catholic nun chaplain surrounded by hardened criminals, one at least of whom was a murderer, who obviously admired her as a friend and helper.

On remarking about this to another priest who had worked for years with delinquents, he explained that those of us who regularly live and work with good people can get used to them and take them for granted.  Others however who know evil well, and especially in the high security sections of jails which are often jungles, close to hell on earth, such unfortunates can be struck by the simplicity, by the aura of peace and benevolence around consistently good people.  Undoubtedly too years of life experience and being a woman in a male prison strengthen the likelihood of this recognition.

In a similar way I suspect that society generally (and Catholics) can become insensitive to the contributions the Christian Churches make to community life, to the vitalizing role Catholic teaching and practice makes to the maintenance and increase of both social capital here and now in our civic society, and to spiritual or supernatural capital for life after death, which we shall only enter after personal judgement by our benign and all-seeing God.

If Ezekiel was writing today he might have used the image of an electricity power station, but we still understand easily the symbolism of streams of living water coming from the Temple.  I am sure that this is not a misleading symbol of Catholic community life here for the one hundred years since the completion of the Cathedral.  Good Catholic communities, despite their faults and partly because they believe in personal repentance and God’s forgiveness, do regularly bring health and teeming life to the wider society.  As the years pass and the water continues to flow, new types of fruit emerge, perhaps not in every month as the Old Testament imagery claims, but regularly and in every generation, together with new medicines to heal new wounds.

Our first purpose in such an anniversary celebration is to thank God for the mighty efforts of those who laboured before us.  On this feast of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, who was martyred around 156 A.D. and was an important link with St. Irenaeus of Lyons in France, we remember in particular Bishop Pompallier, also from Lyons, who planted the apostolic succession of bishops in New Zealand, all the early missionaries and especially the Marists, then a recently founded congregation, who were given responsibility for the Western areas of the Pacific Ocean.

It was less than a year after the settlement of Auckland on September 18, 1840 that Bishop Pompallier received a grant of land for a church here.  In 1848 the new Church of St. Patrick and St. Joseph, the first stone building in this city, became the Cathedral of the new diocese of Auckland set up by Pope Pius IX and there was a succession of changes and developments before the new Cathedral of 1885 was dismantled, redeveloped and completed in 1908.

I was pleasantly surprised but also pleased and honoured when Bishop Pat Dunn invited me to celebrate this Centenary Mass, so following in the footsteps of my Sydney predecessor Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran who celebrated the inaugural Mass exactly one hundred years ago.

Press reports spoke of “fine clear weather”, a “grand line-up for the occasion” which included the Catholic Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward, members of parliament and a packed Church with representatives of the other Christian Churches.  Nearly ₤10,000 had been spent and ₤586 was collected leaving a debt of nearly ₤5,000.  The choir sang Millard’s Mass in G.

 You will be pleased to know that Cardinal Moran preached a rousing sermon of fifty minutes duration on the text “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; and may abundance be unto them that love thee” and even more pleased to note that Bishop Patrick has written to me pointing out that it is not necessary to repeat his feat.  I suppose only time will tell if his warning has been successful.

 I am sure the Cardinal was preaching to the converted, but he used Pius X’s 1907 encyclical “Pascendi dominici gregis” which condemned the errors of that age, summarized as Modernism, which was seen as a rationalist attack on revealed truth and an attempted revival of paganism.  They were ancient heretical errors under new disguises, he explained.

On a happier note he rejoiced that there were then 90,000 Catholics in New Zealand’s four dioceses, fully equipped with churches, schools and institutions of charity.  This Cathedral he described as a gem, “so fair in its proportions, so perfect in its architectural merit, and arranged in beauty even to the minutest details.  Thus equipped in everything that was needed, Holy Church would be enabled in the fullest measure to carry on unfettered her glorious mission amongst them”.

We would use different words today, bitter experience has taught us not to be so triumphalist in tone, but my message would be similar.

We have solid reasons for confidence about the future, as long as we continue to open all channels for the breath of the Spirit and continue to follow fully and happily the person and teachings of Jesus Christ as understood in the Catholic tradition.

I mentioned that we began this centenary celebration by saying thanks, but equally important tasks are to ask the good God to bless our present activities and to give us hope and joy as we move into the future.

The gospel reading for today about Jesus cleansing the Temple of the money changers and salesmen is a stiff reminder that we must strive to keep our faith, our motives and our practice pure and not be poisoned by the world around us.  We share much that is good with surrounding society, but the people of the Beatitudes must always experience intermittent tension with those who follow other ways.  We know well that the old denominational rivalries between Christians are wrong in theory as well as practice and that one significant tension is with those of an aggressive secular agenda, which often wants to exclude the Judaeo-Christian tradition from all public influence.

New Zealand faces all the wonderful opportunities and challenges common to the peaceful, law-abiding English-speaking nations.  But you have your particular opportunities and challenges with your own Maori peoples and the migrants from the Pacific Islands, who have much strengthened your Church in this city (and my own archdiocese of Sydney).

We must always remember the Christian and Catholic capacity for new growth and rebirth.  The new missionary orders which were born in nineteenth century France after decades of revolutionary turmoil and anti-Christian violence were both unexpected and wonderfully fruitful.  New Zealand benefited much from this.

I know that the journey of the World Youth Day Cross has been greeted enthusiastically by your young people and that more than 4,000 young pilgrims are presently planning to come to Australia for World Youth Day in July.  These are good signs.  These are healthy fruits born as always from the streams of water coming from the throne of the Lamb, Jesus Christ Our Lord.  These young people will be following the Cross.

May God continue to bless and reward the Catholic Church in Auckland and may your Christian endeavours be blessed and go from strength to strength.

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