Our People

Homily for Blessing of the University of Notre Dame Australia Law School, Sydney

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
10/3/2006

This is a great day for the Church in Sydney and for the legal community in Sydney. As a bishop and a sometime Sydney lawyer, I’m particularly proud and happy to be here to ask God’s blessing on this new facility for legal research and teaching ‘within the context of Catholic faith and values’. Many people have worked hard for this day and many have invested generously in this project. What was a dream for some years is now a reality: there is a Catholic law school in Sydney.

Just what does that mean? Laws are sometimes thought of as blunt instruments, sometimes as practical guidelines, sometimes as quasi-moral truths. They are above all human norms—but norms that can reflect human beings at their highest and their best. The law expresses the hopes and needs and ideals of men and women living together in society. It captures us at our most ethical: it shows us to ourselves as thinking people, people of high ideals about how we should live together, people who put their best efforts into justice and equity and honesty. Hence, we call upon St Thomas More today, the sublime patron of lawyers who shows all in the profession the fortitude required if we are to serve this high calling.

The law is not only the work of human hands. It is also, at its best, a participation in that divine law which is God’s and the natural law which is at the intersection of God and man in reason. So it is that our Scriptures reverence the Law and the law-abiding man and woman, and invite us to cultivate law-ward hearts. Nor is this only an Old Testament concern. Despite the new-found freedom of the first Christians, St Paul followed Christ is insisting the Christian Gospel completes rather than overturns the Law and draws men to place their new-found freedom at the service of all that is true and good and beautiful rather than at the service the anarchy of untutored desire and current fashion.

A Catholic law school, then, is a very natural phenomenon. Social life at its best is built on a passion for justice, the absolute protection of the rights and dignity of all persons from conception to natural death, and a profound ethical commitment to all that the common good requires. And it does not take a genius to note that these too are amongst the focal concerns of the Catholic Church and Christian faith. As Pope John Paul II pointed out, in what increasingly deserves the title of ‘a culture of death’ the law and the Church can be either servants of an alternative ‘civilisation of life and love’ or merely acquiesce in or even serve the lethal alternative. These concerns are omnipresent in the documents, prayer and witness of the Church; and present most importantly of all in the teachings of Our Lord Jesus Christ whose preaching on charity and justice changed forever our understanding of what is lawful and what law is for.

Recently I was contributing an essay to a collection on The Vocation of the Lawyer and the Lawmaker being published by the law school at your namesake, the University of Notre Dame Indiana. When preparing that text I recalled that when I preached at the Red Mass for the opening of the legal year I had noted what a high number of saints were lawyers or at least had legal training. Given the kinds of jokes that are told about lawyers that might be unexpected: judges and advocates told me afterwards they were surprised – and rather pleased that there was still hope for them. This highlights the fact that all vocations – the law included – should in the Catholic picture of things be ways to God, to sanctity, to building up the kingdom of God on earth and inheriting it in heaven. Indeed in some ways the law should have a certain pride of place.

So it is that this law school does not sit isolated from the rest of the University. In particular, the fact that all law students will take units in philosophy, ethics and theology binds the study of law together with human wisdom, ethical science and the vision and witness of the Church. Law matters. Good law is not made up on the hoof, thrown together for convenience, for political correctness, or to suit transient fads and fashions. We invoke today Our Lady Help of Christians, patron of our country and our archdiocese, and constant reminder to us all of mercy and service, justice and compassion. These timeless values, common to all people of good will, will from this day be confirmed before the broader legal community by this university of ‘Our Lady’, Notre Dame de Sydney. Together with the prayers of our patron, St Thomas More, we ask the protection and example of Our Lady Help of Christians as this new venture begins.

I am very pleased to express the deep gratitude and the admiration of the Catholic community to Vice-Chancellor Tannock, Dean McComish, Ms Howard and all the staff and students of the Notre Dame Law School. The Archdiocese and the City of Sydney welcome you. May your contribution be lasting and distinctive and may your work for the study and practice of the law be an inspiration to the legal community in our city, state and nation.