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Home > People > Bishop Fisher > Addresses > Article	Printable Version

Ordination as Bishop

St Mary's Cathedral

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
3 September 2003

Dear friends, please take as said my echo of Bishop Julian’s words of thanks to so many of you who have made tonight possible and made it such a beautiful act of worship of God through Christ our Eternal High Priest. As someone who has spent the last few years working very directly for and with the family, I recognize that tonight I am surrounded by my family: my natural family, my Dominican family, my Melbourne family, my fellow priests and religious, my new brother bishops, my old and new family and friends here in Sydney and beyond, and with them the entire family of the Church, militant, suffering and triumphant, the saints on earth and in heaven. How blessed are we all to have such a family!

Every family needs a father and Archbishop Canalini does us all a great honour in being here tonight as a tangible link with our holy father, Pope John Paul II. As our programmes remind us, will in a few weeks be celebrating his silver jubilee as successor of Peter and of Gregory the Great. What a grace it has been to have served the whole of my religious and priestly life to date under this pope and to have spent the last few years working in his Institute for Marriage and the Family. In humble affection and gratitude I pledge tonight my communion and fidelity to him and his successors. These are surely the most exciting, most challenging and so most graced of times to be a Christian and a Catholic. John Paul has given us the wisest of directions for the journey of humanity into the third millennium and for the mission of God’s Church as humanity’s best friend and surest guide.

His Grace, Archbishop Pell, is also a father to us all in this Archdiocese and we already owe him a great debt of gratitude here and throughout Australia. As a pastor he has always exhorted and cajoled us with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. May he long continue to challenge us to build up God’s kingdom on earth. I count it a very great privilege to be able to assist him in that great adventure.

One of our Prime Ministers once said that if you are not living in Sydney you are just camping out. Well, while it is great to be back home in Sydney I will always remember fondly how great it was camping out in Melbourne these past few years. I want to record here my gratitude to Archbishop Hart and to the priests and people of his Archdiocese for their friendship and encouragement in the years I was privileged to serve there.

Tonight Julian and I are made by God’s grace successors of the apostles – a most exciting, daunting and humbling vocation. I am comforted that the originals included some rather smelly and unreliable fishermen, some rather unsavoury small businessmen, a tax-collector, a political fanatic, a youth, and a traitor… Time will tell which I am most like – but it is wonderfully consoling to know what God’s grace can do with such unpromising raw material! It is also a great comfort to know that I will be joining the company of the bishops and I thank my new brothers for welcoming me so graciously into their community of teaching, holiness and service.

I greet with affection my brother priests and seminarians. It is you who have taught me the ‘cure of the soul’ and if, as a relatively young priest and now a baby bishop, I still have much to learn in that department, I humbly ask you to keep teaching me. I also thank my fellow religious. Many of you and your predecessors first nurtured my faith and vocation, including my many teachers amongst the Josephites, Mercies, Patricians and Jesuits. Thanks be to God for all of you and for the many religious who serve in this Archdiocese.

My Dominican brothers, of course, merit particular acknowledgment from me tonight. Tom and Mark, my fathers in St Dominic, accompanied me today like groomsmen at a wedding. They stopped me getting too nervous and did not lose the ring. With Bishop O’Grady and the twenty or so other friars preachers here tonight from around the world, as well as the Dominican sisters and laity, they represent the family who over the past two decades have made of me a friar and priest. I want to record how immensely proud I am of all my brothers in the Order and what an enormous debt of gratitude I owe them. It was they who taught me to reverence the truth above all the mirages; they who instilled in me a passion for the contemplation of that truth in prayer and study and community; and they who showed me how to pass on the fruits of that contemplation to others, as St Dominic did, preaching with courage, clarity and compassion. These same men and women have generously handed me over tonight for service in the Archdiocese of Sydney; I ask you all in return to keep praying for and supporting the Dominican family and indeed all religious and priestly vocations.

Few are blessed to have both parents at their episcopal ordination and I thank God for the gift and presence of my parents Colin and Gloria. If much of my life has been and will be devoted to the defence and support of human life and love, it was of course first in my own home, the domestic church, that I heard the Gospel of Life and Love proclaimed by my parents. Tonight I am blessed also by the presence of my dear brothers and sisters and their families, all my extended family and so many of my friends: thank-you all for loving me so well. My sense of the preciousness of life and love has been magnified by many years with the pro-life and family movements and, most recently, with my wonderful colleagues and students at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family. Thank-you all for sharing my passion for the Gospel of Life and Love: long may you all carry forward that precious message to our world.

It is great to be back in Sydney and to be back in this new way as a shepherd in this most beautiful of cities. God and our Holy Mother the Church now offer me an exciting and daunting new opportunity to serve as priest, teacher and shepherd. I entrust my new ministry to the protection of Mary, Help of Christians and Queen of the Most Holy Rosary. With God’s grace and the continuing love and prayers of you all, I vow to give all my energy to this great new task. Pray that I might always be true to my motto from St Paul and St Dominic: veritatem facientes in caritate, speaking the truth in love (Eph 4:15).