Archbishop of Sydney

University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle

Isaiah 11:1-4; 1 Cor 12:4-13; Lk 8:4-15

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
4/8/2008

This evening we gather in prayer and worship at this Eucharist to invoke God’s continued blessing on the University of Notre Dame Australia as we celebrate a changing of the guard, the inauguration of a new chief executive, Celia Hammond as Vice-Chancellor. We thank God for what has been achieved under the retiring Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Tannock.  God has blessed this university and we pray that it may continue.

It seems appropriate within the framework of the Mass readings to reflect on the role of a Catholic university in our contemporary Australian life. We often remark on the increasing Americanisation of Australian life, but Catholic Australia has not followed Catholic U.S.A. in its enthusiasm for founding universities. This commitment to tertiary education is one of the sources of American greatness and the Australian equivalent of the American ratio means that we would have about twenty Catholic colleges or universities in Australia. We only have two, although both have multiple campuses across states.

St. Paul writing to the Corinthians speaks of the one Spirit giving a variety of gifts to different individuals, just as the body has many different parts. So too a large religious community like the Catholic Church has a bewildering variety of religious and service institutions as well as the equally bewildering variety of religious orders. It is sometimes alleged that not even the Holy Spirit knows how many women’s religious orders exist!

In Australia we have parishes, hospitals, homes for the elderly, research institutions, social welfare agencies, missionary and development groups as well as a wide range of educational agencies from kindergarten to tertiary level.

So the lecturers at Notre Dame do not teach like priests in a pulpit; do not give religious instruction like that received in a primary or even a senior secondary school. They do not offer personal formation like a seminary and Notre Dame is not primarily or exclusively a research institute. Neither is Notre Dame a technical school imparting particular skills in our technological age.

Sometimes it is easier to spell out what a university should not be than to win general agreement about what a university is. One American university president quipped that a university was a community where everyone was united in a common concern about car parking!

Pope John II’s 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae spoke of the Catholic university as an academic community which protects and advances human dignity and culture through teaching, research and services offered to the local, national and international communities. It has an institutional autonomy and guarantees academic freedom within the confines of truth and the common good (par 12).

More particularly Notre Dame is at this moment largely an undergraduate university, offering a range of first rate professional courses, where students are encouraged to struggle to discover truth and meaning, to respect and love the culture within which we live and are equipped to think, to analyse and synthesize; to solve problems, to build on and improve what they have received and conserve all the good they have inherited. They are encouraged to scrutinize reality as they struggle to put together a personal synthesis of higher truths.

Notre Dame is also a lay-led Catholic university. We rejoice in this although the University acknowledges gratefully the support it continues to receive from other sections of the Church.

Ex Corde Ecclesiae recognizes that today Catholic universities depend “to a great extent on the competent and dedicated service of lay Catholics”. For Pope John II this was “a sign of hope” and “a confirmation of the irreplaceable lay vocation in the Church and in the world” (par 25).

I remember hearing a few times of academics claiming that a Catholic university should have good relations with the Church. I always objected to that claim because it expresses a category mistake. It is an error, somewhat like those make who contrast their own community with “the official Church”. While this is not repeated as often as it used to be (at least in my part of the world), we must always remember that there is only one Church. Certainly there are officials in the Church and it is generally beneficial to have good relations with them (although we never find a pearl in an oyster where there is no grit!).

So too a Catholic university does not have a good relationship with the Church, because it is an institution, a community within the Church. Pope John Paul’s document is entitled Ex Corde Ecclesiae i.e. from the heart of the Church, precisely to make this point.  The Church is not coterminous with the clergy and all communities of the baptised live and work within the Church. Notre Dame is at the heart of the Catholic Church community in Perth, Broome and Sydney.

The Australian Government today is encouraging each university to develop its particular strengths, to find its niche. If we go to Isaiah’s list from the first reading, I suppose all universities are committed to searching for wisdom and insight, for counsel and knowledge and preparing young people for the proper exercise of power. But only a religious university, or perhaps a theology faculty in a secular university, would search out the proper meaning of “the fear of the Lord”.

Certainly a Catholic university has to be committed to a systematic exploration of the God question, of the relationship between faith and reason, of the interaction of Catholicism and culture today as well as in the past.

Significant twentieth century thinkers like Christopher Dawson and T. S. Eliot insisted that religion stands at the heart of every thriving culture and civilization. Certainly Nazism and Communism showed us two examples of life without God, cruel and disastrous experiments.

A contemporary British philosopher Roger Scruton has explained one dimension of this beautifully [1].  He writes that the loss of religion means that knowledge is lost and this brings not liberation, but a fall.

One essential dimension of human life is how we confront suffering, diminishment, loss.

Christianity enables us to bear our losses by setting them in a transcendental perspective, not as meaningless afflictions but as sacrifices, consecrated suffering.

Scruton also claims that a relentless pursuit of pleasure rather than penitence produces a contagious hardness of heart.

 “Those brought up in our post-religious society do not seek forgiveness” he claims, “since they are by and large free from the belief that they need it. This does not mean they are happy. But it does mean that they put pleasure before commitment and can neglect their duties without being crippled by guilt”.

This is a grim picture of a godless public opinion. Our common sense notions have been heavily influenced by 2000 years of Christianity and a post-Christian common sense would be radically different. A Catholic university encourages its members to examine and evaluate such claims and counter claims. A small minority today is working hard to make our society deaf to God’s call to faith and love. This is a struggle in every age, but is being waged more intensely now in the Western world.

Stan James’ poem points out the danger:

“Sometimes we’re at our lives
The same way dogs are at a concert –
We hear all the sounds
And none of the music”.

The gospel today tells us of the seed falling in different places to produce widely different harvests. Let us pray that Notre Dame University will go from strength to strength and produce a hundredfold harvest, educating people who are not only interested in God, but believers and doers. People who recognize good Christian music and love it.

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

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1.    R. Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. (2005) pp 227-231