Our People

2nd International Gathering in preparation for WYD 2008

Mass at Mary MacKillop Shrine, North Sydney
Memorial of St Ignatius of Antioch

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
17/10/2007

“Our true homeland is in heaven” (Phil 3:17)

On behalf of all of us attending the Second International Gathering for the World Youth Day in Sydney 2008, I want to thank Sister Katrina and the Sisters of St Joseph and their friends for the welcome we have received here today, as we have throughout our journey to World Youth Day. Earlier this year we celebrated the arrival of the World Youth Day Cross and Icon in Australia by bringing them – and the team that would be carrying them on pilgrimage around Australia – here to Australia’s premier site of pilgrimage, to the tomb of our only Blessed, Mary MacKillop.

Even were she not our first and so-far only recognised beata, her very name in religion, “Mother Mary of the Cross”, made her the ideal person to whom to bring our Cross and Icon. At a convent of her sisters, in a shrine for people searching for solace, healing and strength, and before the resting place of our beata, we consecrated the twelve month journey ahead for the Australian organisers of the World Youth Day. Today we consecrate the efforts of each one of you, our international leaders and organisers of the same World Youth Day. We dedicate all our efforts to our Saviour Jesus Christ who hung upon a simple wooden Cross such as the WYD cross; to Mary whom we honour as the principal Patron of this World Youth Day under the title “Our Lady of the Southern Cross, Help of Christians”; and to Blessed Mary MacKillop of the Cross, present with us in this place, and also named as a patron of the forthcoming World Youth Day.

With representatives here today of well over a hundred countries and movements from around the world, we might ask with St Paul: where is our true homeland (Philippians 3:17- 4:1)? This land of Australia around which Mary MacKillop travelled, founding convents and schools, is both beautiful and harsh. We are a land made for realists — people who tell it how it is, who are practical, not afraid of difficulties, who see dangers as opportunities and hurdles as something to be jumped over or perhaps rammed through. This was the land in which God planted Mary MacKillop — of Scottish immigrant parents, born into hard work and even poverty, but brilliantly gifted in solving problems so that God’s Kingdom might come even in the Australian bush. Her motto was ‘never see a need without trying to do something about it’, and what she did was to give us two things: a system for schooling for this difficult land so that all children might learn the 4 Rs of reading, writing, ’rithmetic and religion; and a religious family, the Sisters of St Joseph, who have imitated her goodness and practical sense for generations.

As I have visited various countries talking about World Youth Day, I have sometimes been asked what saints people will visit when they come on pilgrimage to Sydney. When in Rome I usually stay with my Dominican brothers at San Clemente, a wonderful ancient basilica which boasts the bones of many saints including Pope St Clement (whom we recall in the Roman canon), Sts Cyril and Methodius (the great apostles to Eastern Europe), and the bishop-martyr whom we celebrate today, St Ignatius of Antioch (who is buried under the altar). That’s just in one church! Rome, is of course, a city of saints and martyrs, of which Ignatius is only one, though perhaps the best documented of all the early martyrs because he wrote a wonderful series of letters to the Christians in the places he visited on his ‘pilgrimage’ to Rome, to his execution and to heaven. In Cologne for the last World Youth Day we had the relics of the Three Holy Kings, of St Albert the Great, St Edith Stein and many others – including, in one church alone, the bones of St Ursula and her 11,000 virgin-martyr companions all along the walls and ceiling! We do not have the bones of 11,000 or so canonized saints to offer our young pilgrims next year: in fact we have only one, nearly-saint, buried just here. So, as I have kept telling our young people here in Australia, what we must offer the young pilgrims of the world here in Australia is living saints!

How are we to be living saints, people whose true homeland is not just Australia but heaven? In our Gospel passage Our Lord Jesus gives us one of the most beautiful images in the whole of the New Testament: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest” (John 12:24-26). Some metaphors and parables are difficult to unpack: but the truth of this particular image must hit everyone immediately. Letting go, falling, hitting the ground and dying are hard, but the only other option is solitary, petrified security. If we die with the Christ who was laid in the earth, with Ignatius of Antioch who was fed to the lions in the Colosseum, with Mary MacKillop who left her straightforward life to gallop around the harsh Australian countryside in full black habit, revolutionising the care of young people in the process – if with these we die to self, then from our brief fall might rise up something wonderful: something as wonderful as generations of happy young people, or as wonderful as religious women passionate about Christ and eager to carry out God’s holy will.

And it is his will, not my will, that matters. Mary MacKillop was one determined little miss, with that stubbornness which in religious and saints we call “single-minded devotion” – like St Paul who was fond of prefacing his remarks with “I say – and the Holy Spirit agrees…”. But when our single-minded young Mary suffered injustice at the hands of a bishop frightened by nasty gossip and exaggerated stories, she submitted humbly and without bitterness. Like any good Catholic, she knew our pastors can be weak or muddled, and so she and her sisters prayed constantly for “our poor, dear bishop”. She knew too that it is God’s will that must prevail, not our wills, and she waited for Providence to resolve her position.

Mary MacKillop is exemplary for her trust in Providence even in adversity, for her patient persistence, and for her respect for everyone in the meantime. This was not a woman who cast God in her own image so as to get her own way: this is a woman of virtue, of faith, of the Church, a woman devoted to the Kingdom of God, who sought to cast herself in God’s image, or at least to let Christ do this in her. As she made her way across Australia on horse back she must often have seen the Southern Cross which God placed in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere at the dawn of the cosmos as a promise of difficulties and of salvation to come. In that heavenly constellation she would have seen a reminder of Christ crucified and a call to believe in his risen power and glory. She truly set her heart on the Kingdom of God, on heaven as her homeland, and trusted that everything else that she needed would be given to her.

Today there seem to be many more ‘enemies of the Cross of Christ’, as St Paul calls them in our reading. Paul speaks about those who are proud of what they should think shameful and his words cut deep in contemporary Australia and many of your home countries too. Who would have thought that from a movement designed to extend the benefits of life and economy to more people, the consumer economy would develop into a whole value system, consumerism, one which commodifies people, their talents, their bodies, their relationships, and which treats them as expendable or even, sometimes, as worthless? A system which excludes belief in anything that is not immediately observable and exploitable, and therefore excludes God and love and so much else that is so important?

There are a couple of responses to this. One is to give up on the world, but this is never a Christian response. God himself never gave up on us. Even after our worst sins and betrayals, he thought it worth taking part in our earthly lives, dressed not as Creator but as a man. We know, too, that time and again God has not given up on us, but has demonstrated his unending love for the human family and the earth, and called us back to build with him a culture of life and love, of truth and justice. That call is made anew as we await a new Pentecost for Australia and the young people of the world at World Youth Day next year.

If we Christians must never give up on this world, we should nonetheless never quite be at home in it. As St Paul said, and Ignatius of Antioch repeated, and as Mary MacKillop was fond of saying – indeed as we read on her tomb – we are only travellers, pilgrims on this earth; our true home is in heaven. World Youth Day is a great opportunity to reflect on what it means to be permanent pilgrims visiting a temporary home. Despite the mortgage, we are all only renters! Despite how ‘at home’ we sometimes feel, we are always looking for more! However happy we might be at the moment, are hearts are restless until they rest in God! Over in our side chapel are the earthly remains of one of the Patrons of World Youth Day 2008, a woman who knew herself to be a pilgrim and who dedicated herself to the young. A natural friend for us as we prepare to bring the youth of the world to Sydney. For as Jesus says, ‘wherever I am, my servant shall be there too’. May Blessed Mary MacKillop and all those servants of God named patrons of our journey ahead, come to join us and bring us not just to this promised Great South Land of the Holy Spirit, Australia, in July next year, but through that temporary homeland to our true homeland which is heaven.

Bishop Anthony Fisher OP
Coordinator, World Youth Day 2008
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney