Our People

"Consecrate them in the truth," Graduation Mass, University of Notre Dame Fremantle

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
16/7/2006

Were I not vested for Mass you would see my religious habit, and from that you would know immediately that I am a Dominican friar. When the great scholar John Henry Newman, who wrote the definitive text on The Idea of a University (1854), became a Catholic, he considered for some time whether he should take the white wool and black cape of Dominic himself. But on investigation he found that, in Italy at least, the Dominicans seemed to have great wine cellars but not do very much: “The idea I like exceedingly,” he wrote, “but it seems to me that the Dominicans are a great idea extinct!” A century later John Neill, whom we honour today, a man on fire with a passion for Catholic education at all levels, decided to enter that very order.

All most people know about friars is Friar Tuck from Robin Hood. Now certainly, like Tuck, many of us are fat and jolly. But I hope there’s more to us than that. The Dominicans have been around the universities of the world practically since their foundation. Indeed it is hard to imagine how universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Bologna and Salamanca could have happened without the advent and contribution of the friars. They taught philosophy, theology, law, and the new and old arts and sciences in them. They filled the teaching chairs and the students’ desks. They left behind such eccentricities as the Dominicans’ black gown which evolved into today’s black academic gown. Those of you who are wearing black academic gowns today might be pleased to know that you are thereby effectively Dominican tertiaries!

What might such mediæval friars preachers have to say to us in the early twenty-first century? What was their great idea which so fascinated the students and teachers of the great universities and still fascinated the likes of John Henry Newman and John Neill centuries later? The Dominican friars were driven by a single passion summarized in their motto: VERITAS, truth. They had a fervid interest in discerning and contemplating the truth and then communicating it to others in preaching and teaching. That can seem rather alien to our modern relativist, subjectivist world; strange to an age where meaninglessness is made into a major philosophy – ‘deconstruction’ – into an art-form – ‘punk’ – into an etiquette – ‘tolerance’ – and into a worldview – ‘nihilism’ – for so many. Instead of Christ’s prayer ‘Father, consecrate them in the truth’ (Jn 17:17) or the Dominicans’ motto ‘Veritas’, many in our age are more drawn to Pilate’s words: ‘Truth? What is truth?’ (Jn 18:38).

Of course truth, if you’ve ever looked for it, can be elusive, hard to find and hold onto with any certainty, even harder to communicate to others. Our age lacks confidence in its ability to articulate the truth. Indeed it fears those who have too much certainty, those who think they’ve got reality all sewn up. We’ve seen too many inquisitors, dictators, fundamentalists, ideologues and terrorists who think they have a monopoly on the truth, to make any grand claims anymore.

Worse still, truth often threatens, interrogates, cuts us to the quick: regarding our unjust social structures, institutions, policies; our own long-ingrained and firmly-held misinformation, prejudices, ideologies; our own inhumane behaviour, bad ways of relating, self-centredness. Truth tells us that we are very gifted, skilled and often generous people. But it can have harsh things to say about how we use our gifts and privilege, our degrees and qualifications, how carefully confined is our generosity. Truth demands a rethink, an intellectual, moral and personal conversion. It is not just because veritas is so hard to capture and communicate, but also because it is so subversive, so seditious, so profoundly disturbing, that we are so we often resistant.

Yet those first friars whose habits you wear today were convinced that the truth is ‘Gospel’, is ‘good news’. The past century, perhaps better than any other, has seen what bad news the big lies are and how they hurt people: lies like Nazism and Communism, genocide and jihad, whole systems of propaganda and violence on which many modern states thrive and along which lines others divide. Some would say ours is a culture of lies: financial lies we call advertising and tax-evasion and credit beyond our means; political lies we call pragmatism and self-promotion and ‘all for the sake of the party’; personal lies we call freedom, fashion and self-fulfilment. Lies like happiness through infidelity in our relationships, through aborting our babies, through abandoning our unemployed, sick or elderly people, through war with our enemies, through inattention towards indigenous people or rejection of refugees, or through self-indulgence and neglect of a thousand different kinds.

What drew the likes of St Dominic, St Thomas Aquinas, St Albert the Great, St Catherine of Siena and so many others to the Dominican thing was their conviction that knowledge liberates us. From falsehood, superstition, fear. From the mirages created by various interests. From the illusions we create for ourselves. Truth dis-illusions, without making us cynical. It releases the heart from unnecessary anxiety. It heals inauthenticity, that division of heart which is so corrupting. Knowledge is radically humanizing. It also allows us to love, because the more we know about someone love-worthy, the more we can and will love her or him.

This University’s patron is of course Notre Dame, Our Lady, the Seat of Wisdom. This year the University has chosen her Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to graduate its mid-year students. This draws our attention to what God has revealed, uniquely and definitively in the person of Our Lady’s Son, Jesus Christ. As St Paul sang in his beautiful canticle in our Second Reading:

Through the free gift of Jesus the Beloved…
we gain our freedom and forgiveness…
Through him we are showered with wisdom and insight.
In him the mystery of God’s purpose for us is revealed…
From him we have heard the message of truth
and received the Gospel of salvation. (Eph 1:3-14)

Wisdom has come to dwell with us. God has revealed himself. And the more we get to know him, the more we will love him; the more we love him, the more we will want to know him better.

Because truth frees and unites and impassions us to act authentically, credibly, veraciously, our lives can become a gospel, a story of good news, a book where the world may read the truth. Black and white is your academic habit, as it is that of the truth-friars, because the truth is black and white. These are the colours of reading and writing, of communicating a narrative to the world. Fr John Neill whom the University honours today with 200 other graduates had to work much harder than most of us even to get into tertiary studies. He knew that for many people in Australia education was far from as accessible or as elevating as it could be and should be. He wanted to make sure that really high quality Catholic education was available to all. He was specially eager that we might have Catholic university education available in Australia as it was on every other continent. I have talked to some of his primary and secondary school students; to staff members who taught with him as headmaster; to those who worked with him on the building of Australia’s two Catholic universities, especially this one which is his great love. All agree that his passions are for God and for people – and bringing God and people together through knowledge, through truth.

Some months ago a supposed academic specialist in medicine and ethics declared his opposition to a medical school for the University of Notre Dame because he thought the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘university’ are contradictories. He clearly knew no history, for the Church invented the university and built most of the great ones. He clearly knew no current affairs, since many of the world’s great medical schools and teaching hospitals and medical research institutions were founded by and operate under the auspices of the Church. For Fr John Neill like John Henry Newman, however, there could be no opposition between the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘university’. If this institution is good at being Catholic it will be good at being a university, and vice versa. And if it limps in either respect it will limp in both.

Fr John’s achievements in the world of education have been extraordinary and the university will detail those later in the citation at his graduation. I want to add a personal note: that his religious achievements more than equal his educational ones. I have seen him in action as an educationalist; I have lived with him as my religious superior; I have known him as Master of the young Dominican students in formation for the priesthood, as a university chaplain, and as a passionate advocate of Catholic education. But much more importantly I have known him as my father and brother in St Dominic. The Second Vatican Council declared, following the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, that religious life is supposed to be a school of perfection in charity. To be honest with you, it doesn’t always work: but in this case I think it has! I know it will embarrass him for me to say any more about this, but it is good for the rest of us to reflect upon it. Catholic education, real Catholic education, is about leading people – e-ducere – to the truth, to God, to heaven. It is about making saints. In Fr John it seems to me to have worked!

As I said, it doesn’t always. What’s true for religious life is true also for the academy that has adopted its habits. In many modern universities there are some of the most knowledgeable and sophisticated people in the world in their own particular art or science or profession. Yet with respect to real faith and wisdom they are five-year-olds. They never read a spiritual book, or do a philosophy or theology course, or think about the deep meaning and of their studies and the implications for their lives. They leave their religious development stunted at the level of faith in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. And so they either remain unable to reconcile their very grown-up professional knowledge with their very childish faith or else they feel very sophisticated, very grown up, when they jettison their five-year-old gods and call themselves agnostic or atheist.

This university is determined to assist its scholars to integrate faith and culture. All its students study some philosophy, theology and ethics. All its programmes reflect upon the deeper questions and challenge students to keep doing so. All its academics seek to integrate faith and life, philosophy and theology with the arts and sciences. All its graduates have, we hope and pray, something of that missionary fervour described in our Gospel passage today (Mk 6:7-13). We thank God today for the gift of the two hundred of you who are graduating, for the gifts of the education you have received, for your application to your discipline, and for the love and support of all those who have brought you to this day. Do not store up what they have learnt as a kind of private luxury, but be ready to share it with the world and live it publicly and with passion. For truth, as your very clothes declare, is now your qualification, your vocation, your calling. Your academic gowns are the habits of the truth-friars, of truth-seekers and truth-teachers and truth-livers. Above all, truth is your destiny, because you are sisters and brothers of the one who is The Way, The Truth and the Life in person, Jesus Christ, and children of his Blessed Mother, Notre Dame.