Our People

Association of Principals of Catholic Secondary Schools of Australia

Conference Nurturing the Faith under the Southern Cross
Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
13/7/2006

We are told she was a virgin: she ‘had not known a man’. But the word also tells us that Mary was a young woman, by today’s standards a student of middle or upper secondary school age. She had received a good religious education, as she was pondering the Word of God when the angel appeared to her and had been pondering it for many years already. She understood it well enough that she could make some sense of what the angel of the Lord was saying to her and could give her consent. And in due course she would pass on to her son what she had learned, so that he too would grow in wisdom and understanding, so much so that by the time he was a teenager like her he would be astounding his teachers in the Temple.

In Western iconography she is commonly portrayed as older than that, beautiful of course, usually blonde and blue-eyed like those who paid for the paintings, and nursing a big, fat Italian baby. In the image of Our Lady of the Southern Cross which you have chosen for your conference she is more universal. But in Eastern iconography she is even more timeless and we often see her still pregnant with the unborn baby Jesus visible through her glass belly. The child already blesses us from the womb. Mary is like a monstrance bearing the Blessed Sacrament for all to see. At the beginning of the Gospel scene from which we have just read, she carries Christ as if in a Eucharistic procession to Elizabeth and her unborn baby John, who must in due course proclaim Jesus to the world.  Elizabeth, Luke reports, felt the child leap in her womb and so named her ‘Our Lady’ or ‘Queen Mum’, ‘the Mother of My Lord’.  According to one tradition little John was doing somersaults, dancing for joy that Mary and Jesus had come.  In another tradition he leapt into kneeling position, his hands together in prayer, though still a fœtus. Neither would have been very comfortable for Elizabeth! But either way the response is to Mary the walking monstrance and to Jesus the Divine One she bears within her. And she unveils Him, delivers Him from the tabernacle of her body, at the Nativity. Her first meeting with Christ, however, takes place at the Annunciation, when the Word that she conceived in her mind at Gabriel’s greeting now becomes Incarnate in her womb. God became Man within her, through her Fiat, her “Yes”, her Great “Amen” to God.

This word we translate as ‘Yes’ is in the original Greek text, genoito. It implies two important things for us. First of all the mood of this verb is optative. It expresses a desire: Mary is not just saying “OK, if you must”. Rather, she is saying “Yes, that’s what I want! O that it might happen! Let it be! Yes!” It is not a grudging acceptance of God’s demands, but an ecstatic and wholehearted acceptance, a generous gift of self in one word. The word genoito is also in the middle voice, a construction that we find hard to express in English. North American English catches the voice in phrases like “Don’t beat up on yourself”. It suggests an identity between the subject and object of the verb. The activity of God in the life of the teenaged Mary was also Mary’s activity. She was both an active subject and a willing recipient of God’s work. She spoke the Word and He spoke her. Amen, yes, they said to each other. And all of history changed for ever. The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. All because of a very few, barely audible words.

But Mary could be more boisterous, as all teenagers can. In our Gospel passage she is singing at the top of her voice. It is almost as if mere conversation is not enough for what she has to tell her cousin. And what a song! The Magnificat has been the evening song of praise of our Church every day, every evening, for two thousand years. All generations do indeed call her blessed! As we gather as an education community we might measure ourselves against the exuberance of the teenaged Blessed One.

Do we respond with the Fiat, the Yes, the Great Amen of Mary to God’s call to each of us? Do our principals, staff and students should always magnify the Lord and rejoice in God our Saviour? Do we humble the proud-hearted and raise up the lowly through and in our schools? Do we fill those hungry for knowledge and wisdom, for skills and experience, with ‘good things’?

Changing enrolment patterns in our schools and changes in our Catholic community mean that we are called at this time in our history to re-vision and remake our Catholic schools as centres of the new evangelisation. We need to recover that original exuberance of the youthful Church for sharing the Gospel with the world. Either we believe the Church is essentially missionary and her primary task is evangelization, as Pope Benedict XVI has said, or we believe it is a maintenance operation for those already comfortable with the Church. Christian witness is not first and foremost about a curriculum or textbooks or programmes or buildings: it is about people – Jesus Christ the revelation of the Trinity of Divine Persons and of the human person, and those human beings – disciples – who identify themselves with him and are grafted onto him as onto a vine.

This was recognised in the first Vatican document on The Catholic School published way back in 1977 when I was still at a Catholic Secondary School myself:

The achievement of this aim of the Catholic school depends not so much on subject matter or methodology as on the people who work there. The extent to which the Christian message is transmitted through education depends to a very great extent on teachers. The integration of culture and faith is mediated by the other integration of faith and life in the person of the teacher. (43)

Our principals and staff must have a genuine appreciation not merely of the CEO rules, rather like the rules of a bridge club, but of the fundamental commitments and driving passions of their institution which explain why on earth we care about the things we do. Mission statements and mission officers and charism talkfests and conferences all have their place. But what matters most is that education leaders and staff see themselves as the carriers of the mission, as like Mary the Theotokos, as bearers of the Word of God to others.

Recently a bishop told me that he was visiting one of the schools in his diocese and a teacher asked him what his particular interest or connection was with the school. He said he got the distinct impression that he was seen as a kindly old man who occasionally wandered into the school and patted people on the head or who appeared at occasional school events wearing an exotic party hat. He explained that he was her employer and that he was very interested in what she was doing. She was astonished at the thought that she worked for a bishop or indeed the Church: she thought she worked for the CEO! Imagine her astonishment if it had been suggested that she worked for God!

I have no doubt that most of the principals of our Catholic Schools do indeed take a vocational view of teaching and educational leadership; they do see themselves as exercising an office or ministry or apostolate which is rooted in their baptismal calling but which also shares in the munus docendi of the bishop and the surrounding clergy. But for those who choose our education bureaucrats, principals, deputies, RECs and teaching staff, there are many questions about how we can best recruit, form and inform, orient and nurture, retain and reward the right people. Mission is about people. People who can say Amen. Not a passive, whatever you say sir, three bags full sir Amen, but a Marian genoito, a passionate, active, engaged Amen-Alleluia to the person and Gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of his Church, to the whole of our vision of the good life. Put simply: if Catholic principals and teachers are to be prime agents of the new evangelisation and catechesis, they must, just like the clergy, receive the Scriptures and Tradition into their hands to read it, believe what they read, teach what they believe, and practice what they teach. That means we must first be evangelised and catechised ourselves. And this will be no one-off affair: evangelisation and catechesis is a life-long process for principals-and-teachers-as-disciples themselves.

The Church’s esteem for Catholic principals and teachers and for their vocation is undoubted and is, I suspect, much higher than that of the general community. The fact that we have consecrated whole religious congregations and dedicated a massive network of buildings and personnel to this project is testimony enough to its prominence amongst our central goals. Pope John Paul argued that the educational sector “occupies a place of honour” in the work of the new evangelization and directed pastors to encourage and support Catholic teachers. He praised Catholic school teachers and leaders for their dedication to their prophetic task and noted that that the Church has only:

words of esteem and encouragement to all those lay faithful, women and men, who with a civic and Christian spirit, are engaged in the education of children… [We need our teachers] to be true witnesses of the Gospel, through their example of life, their professional competence and uprightness, their Christ-inspired teaching… To these lay faithful the Church entrusts the task of allowing all to better understand the intimate bond that exists between faith and science, between the Gospel and human culture. (Christifideles laici 62)

As Pope Benedict XVI noted in his homily to the young people at the Final Mass at Marienfeld for the World Youth Day in Cologne: “Anyone who has discovered Christ must lead others to him. A great joy cannot be kept to oneself.” That is true of our principals and of even some of our young teachers. It can be true of our students as well. World Youth Day comes next to Sydney. 2008 will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to renew our Church and society through reconnecting the young with every corner of our Church’s life and apostolate. The teenaged Mary first proclaimed the Christ as Saviour in the Gospel canticle she sung us today. Teenagers can do it again. Pope Benedict continued in his World Youth Day homily:

I know that you young people have great aspirations, that you want to pledge yourselves to build a better world. Let others see this, let the world see it, since this is exactly the witness that the world expects from the disciples of Jesus Christ. In this way, and through your love above all, the world will be able to discover the star that we follow as believers.

Let us join Mary in her great Amen, Alleluia, Magnificat. And let us lead our staff and students to share in that delight as we “Nurture the Faith under the Southern Cross”.