Our People

Address to the Catholic Education Office Sydney dinner and graduation for the “Leaders of the Future Programme”

Lidcombe

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
24/10/2006

One of the great joys of my life as a bishop is visiting the schools in my area. Once as I entered a kindergarten class a bold five-year-old boy threw up his hand and asked in full voice: “Do bishops get good pay?”

“Not really,” I responded, “but—”.

“I’m going to be a doctor,” the boy interrupted. “They get good pay.”

“Have you thought of being a priest?” I asked, “They do wonderful work. They are close to people and close to God, and they bring people and God closer to each other.”

“A priest?” he responded with exasperated innocence. “A priest? They don’t get good pay. Our family only puts one dollar on the collection plate!”

Now I can tell you that that boy – who will probably be a millionaire before he has finished his Catholic schooling – had also asked the principal whether principals get good pay. Ordinary teachers, he had decided, did not. I certainly hope that in due course you will all get “good pay”, both in this life and especially in the next! But I can tell you that there is no pay in this world so good as that I receive when I see the faces of those young people when I visit them at school or when I call down the Holy Spirit upon them at Confirmation. As teachers I am sure that you also have moments of such spiritual satisfaction in your ministry – and plain entertainment also. At several different schools when I have played “Show and Tell” with them and have asked the children what they think my crozier is, they have told me it is my walking stick. I obviously look very old to them!

It’s a sobering thought that though I’m aging, enough apparently to need a walking stick, I’m still a young bishop, by the standards of the contemporary Church and by Australian standards. People tell me that after I have finished organizing half a million young people to and from and during World Youth Day I will look a great deal older! But whatever of that, the fact is that there is presently only one bishop under 50 here in Australia. Ours is an aging church hierarchy leading aging congregations in an aging Australian population also led by aging politicians, judges and other professionals. If it is always a challenge to identify, form and support future leaders, it is especially important in such a situation.

But there are two more reasons why it matters very much. One is that changing patterns of staffing and enrolment in our schools mean that we need a new generation of leaders with a passion for the Catholic identity and for the evangelizing and catechizing potential of our schools. There are now few consecrated religious of the calibre of Br Kelvin to lead and guide us. Furthermore, those whom we must teach increasingly come with various degrees of connection with and disconnection from God and the Church, so that we can take nothing for granted. This means there are all sorts of challenges and opportunities ahead for which we need people of professionalism, talent and passion such as yourselves.

My third reason for saying that “the Church needs you” is that World Youth Day is less than two years away. Fear not: I am not about to cut to a commercial break and show the WYD08 “get with the spirit” DVD or the short one of testimonies of our Catholic school students that was shown today – though these are more inspiring than anything I could say. Rather, I want to highlight that in two years from now literally hundreds of thousands of young people will be returning to our schools, whether as teachers or as students, and to our universities and parishes and other parts of our Church, many of them on fire with faith. They will need places to deepen their new-found or newly rekindled faith, spaces to lead and to serve, people a little older and more experienced to mentor and guide them.

That means that post World Youth Day we are going to need more priests, religious and lay leaders than ever before, to help keep alive that youthful flame of faith and to direct that energy in many possible ways for the building up of God’s kingdom. Fortunately, vocations are likely to come in good numbers. I hope that in addition to priestly and religious, married and committed single vocations, many will be inspired by the vocation of Catholic education as a place they will put their passion and energy in the years ahead. And that means we need people like you to be ready to lead and encourage them. It means we need you.

The Church here in Sydney and the education community take huge encouragement from the wise succession-planning the Catholic Education Office is undertaking here. The heads of our Principals may not all be as grey as the heads of our clergy, but the only way to stop that situation arising is to spot and train new leaders for tomorrow. I’m very, very happy tonight, on behalf of the Cardinal and the Archdiocese, to be able to congratulate those of you completing the “Leaders for the Future Programme”. In what time is left to me before the arrival of our Main Course I want to say a little about this Programme by way of thanks and encouragement, as well as invitation.

First, I know that undertaking this Programme has meant a significant commitment from you outside school-hours, a sacrifice for yourselves and your families. This shows that all of you understand that we are at a critical time in the life of our education system and that you are at a critical time in your own professional life. You have demonstrated a willingness to take the initiative to ensure the future of our schools and your own place in them. I have reviewed and been impressed by the very positive feedback from you on the Units you have been offered. It is a wonderful thing that when so many decry or are indifferent to the Catholic vision for life and for education, and the teachings of our Holy Scriptures and tradition, that such a number of young, quality teachers stand ready to offer themselves for a Catholic future. On behalf of us all — of our God, our Church, our children and our future — I thank you very much for this.

‘Leadership’ is an important concept – and a word that should not be used lightly. In some parts of society it suggests someone walking out in front while others timidly follow. Jesus’ image of the Good Shepherd with his sheep might conjure such a relationship, but we know if we read the stories of his flock in our New Testament and our two thousand year history that they were no mere mutton. He made it very clear he did not want to lead a blind flock but wanted to be the head and face of a living Body, the trunk for a fruitful vine, the brother of a family of saints. Because he regards us as his body, vines, siblings he does much more than issue directives: he literally takes a beating for us, indeed he gives his all. True leaders, of course, are never self-obsessed. They delight in the achievements of their flock rather than in the honouring of the shepherd. There was no limelight on the man who hung pathetic and hideous on a cross at Calvary — indeed he was the very opposite of a performer at a motivational leadership seminar!

Our schools need you as leaders to be like Christ: indeed, as the Church calls her priests when they most deeply fulfil their vocations, and all the baptised when they exercise their common priesthood, we need you to be alteri Christi, other Christs. If you are other Christs, then you will head a living body of diversely gifted members, you will sustain a living vineyard of fruitful colleagues and students, you will be brother or sister to them and delight in their limelight rather than hogging it for yourself.

I was asked by Br Kelvin to say a little about my own experience of leadership. After more than fifteen years of tertiary education and many years of religious formation I thought I was well prepared and well placed for the life of a Catholic academic priest and friar. I could see, at least dimly, a likely course for my life in educational leadership and teaching. Beware thinking you’ve got it all worked out: God loves to trip us up at that very point. I was confident that at least my relative youth and inexperience and the still-infant project I had been given to lead in Melbourne protected me at least for a time. Wrong! God and the Pope had other plans for me…

So I was to be an auxiliary bishop (and parish priest to boot). Well, I thought, at least I’ll have a good few years learning those ropes: time to settle in to my parish, my region, my committees and my new leadership rôles; new, but fairly predictable. Wrong! Along comes another Pope and World Youth Day and before I know it my life takes a whole new turn…

I don’t know what God has in store for me after that, but leadership, I am learning, is not the neat unfolding of one’s planned CV. It might make sense in retrospect, it might become clear that there was a plan behind it after all, but at the time it is all unfolding, Christian leadership is a mystery in God’s hands and the hands of others as much as in our own.

So at a relatively young age I had to assume a new leadership rôle as a bishop for the Church in Sydney. That means I had to assume a new kind of servant status, just as Pope Benedict found himself suddenly called by the Holy Spirit and a conclave of cardinals to be Servant of all the Servants of God. Humbling though it is, my task is to pray for you and worship with you, to proclaim and clarify Catholic teaching to you and for you, and to govern you and with you. Of these, it is prayer and worship — what the Second Vatican Council called “sanctification” — that matters most. That’s back-to-front by the standards of this world, where leadership is so often the noisy, ‘out there’, ‘in your face’ stuff of changing the world. The Christian wisdom about leadership is that it begins in quiet, in the calms of thought, reflection, prayer, In a busy world, where educational leadership can sap you of every ounce of your time and inspiration, you must always make time for this.

Mother Teresa was once approached by a priest-bureaucrat for advice on how to improve. She suggested, to start with, that he set aside two hours a day for prayer. But, the young man explained, he was terribly busy with all sorts of important ecclesiastical and secular business. Many people depended on him and he had to get it all done and on time. To which she responded: sorry, she hadn’t understood just how busy he was and how important his work was. In that case he should pray not two hours a day but four! The secret of Christian leadership, especially in a world demanding some much of our time and energy and pressing you to umpteen accountabilities and reports and meetings and busy-ness, is to stop, often, and for quite a while, and talk to God, rest in God, try to let his strategic plan rather than our own lead us the leaders.

Now I will not pretend that when I received that fateful call from the Nuncio telling me I was to be a bishop I had never had to lead before. I had various experiences to draw upon: as a Christian in the world, a student and one time lawyer; as a Dominican friar with rôles in my community and my Order such as being in charge of those in formation; as a Catholic priest with rôles in my local Church such as an Episcopal Vicar and pastor; as a teacher, first in the Australian Catholic University and then as founding director of the Australian campus of the international John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. All these experiences have contributed to the man I brought to my new rôle and hopefully taught me a few things about leadership.

Two I have mentioned already: that the ministry of leadership is part of the mystery of God’s plan for me which we call rather grandly ‘vocation’; and that if God is largely to blame for it, we must rely on him to give us the grace to make it happen well. We must fly to him and his saints in prayer and very often. A third lesson has been that while leaders must always be humane, charming, discreet and, if possible, humorous, they must above all “tell the truth in love”. That’s my motto, anyway. If you listen to those whom you must lead and share with them that little wisdom you have so far gleaned, in humility and compassion, then it will do much good, even amongst people who think rather differently to you. Sometimes you will be right and you will persuade others, and truth will triumph and human freedom and happiness be well served. Sometimes you will be wrong and others will, in their mercy, tell you, one way or another, and hopefully you will learn and they will not be too much harmed by your mistake. Most often you will probably be part right and part wrong. The Church is, of course, our great compass here, and I commend the Church and her Lord to you as a trustworthy guide. But whatever the sources of our little wisdom, you must tell the truth in love.

A fourth thing I have learnt as a Christian leader is that if you work with a group with common ideals, you can do great things: indeed, because of that multiplier effect, we call divine grace, you can do the impossible.
All these lessons come in very handy for my current job as Coordinator of World Youth Day. We can look at this as the greatest educational leadership project of the Sydney Archdiocese since we took on the extraordinary task of building our schools system. On the one hand, it is one of the greatest events in the world, dwarfing smaller-scale events such as the Olympics in its sheer scale of numbers attending and in the importance of what it seeks to do for the youth of the world and for the Church and society of Australia. It is potentially our greatest ever teaching moment and our educational culture and environment will, I hope, never be quite the same! Now somewhere in the mystery of all that is a youngish bishop who thought he would never have to deal with a class of more than a hundred or so, let alone 500,000, who must plan with God and his servants, who must pray and listen and share his passion for truth with a God and with colleagues who can make the impossible happen.

Yet even with my great team in the World Youth Day office and all our committees and colleagues, we cannot do it alone. The task of evangelising and catechising a whole city, a whole nation, a whole generation cannot be undertaken by a team of people in the Polding Centre and their collaborators. It needs a much wider circle of leaders. It needs you. Today’s launch of the National Tours part of Activ8 with Bishop Wingle and the representatives of all our schools demonstrates what wonderful things you can do with World Youth Day.

So I am asking you tonight, as we celebrate the leadership gifts God has given you and the vocation to which he calls you in service through our Catholic schools, to consecrate some of those gifts to helping us capitalize on the extraordinary spiritual energy that will be unleashed into the Sydney skies in 2008. If you open your minds and hearts and hands to the WYD experience, you will have a wonderful time spiritually yourselves – I guarantee you. It may well change you forever and for the better. Whatever of that: hang on, because Sydney is in for quite a ride! The “Leaders for the Future” Programme gives to the Church in Sydney just what it needs at this time — and I believe that God through his Church and through WYD will give you in return new gifts and new colleagues as a new generation join you in the great project of Catholic education.

Cardinal Pell is at the Vatican this evening and so could not be here. I know this “Leaders for the Future” project has been very close to his heart since he launched it with Brother Kelvin in October 2005. It will be my pleasure shortly to speak to him about the success of tonight’s event and of the Bishop Wingle event this morning. As his auxiliary and in my own right I am happy to be here tonight to recognize your achievement past and your promise for the future. I thank you on behalf of the Archdiocese for your generosity and I look forward to working with you for the generation to come!