Our People

Red Mass Homily

By Most Rev. Julian Porteous
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
30/1/2006

For a Catholic key moments are marked by the celebration of the Mass. Key moments, like, of course, our First Communion, our Confirmation, Marriage, and our Funeral. The Mass, each Mass, engages our lives with the mystery and grace of God. Each Mass is a transcendental moment – earth and heaven unite. Christ, Son of God, Word made flesh, who suffered, died and rose again, becomes truly present amongst us, according to his own words. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him”.

Our lives become engaged with God “who did not cling to his equality with God, but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave and became as men are”, as St Paul puts it in his letter to the Philippians (2, 6-7)  

Thus we Catholics from the very beginnings of the Church celebrated the mystery of Christ each Sunday, or the Lord’s Day. Through the Mass our lives, lived week by week, are brought into the mystery of Christ. Each Mass is an act of worship on our part – we acknowledge God as the author and sustainer of our being. We humbly recognize that all is from him, and he deserves our praise and thanksgiving. We join the angels in acknowledging the greatness and wonder of God – “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of power and might”.

Each Mass is an offering of ourselves and a placing of our lives before Almighty God. And knowing the poverty and frailty of our human condition we come seeking from the Father of All the grace of strength, guidance, peace. Amidst the trials and strains of life we take an opportunity for refreshment to our spirits, for encouragement to faithfully fulfill our tasks, and at times for healing of hearts damaged by the pains of life.

Each Mass is a moment to bring ourselves in our humanity, full of the struggles and weaknesses, into the crucible of redemption – the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Lord.

Divine Wisdom

At the commencement of the law term of 2006 may I reflect with you upon a theme proposed by the first Reading. Solomon humbly asks of the Lord, “Give your servant a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil, for who could govern this people of yours that is so great”. It is a gift I am sure all of us would want to ask for.

The Lord’s response is given, “Since you have asked for this and not asked for long life for yourself or riches or the lives of your enemies, but have asked for a discerning judgment for yourself …. I give you a heart wise and shrewd as none before you and none will have after you”.

And so history and common speech will acknowledge the Wisdom of Solomon.

And what is wisdom? It is a natural gift in some, born of an insightful mind, a sense of truth, and the product of experience. Our Christian tradition also speaks of it as a distinctive attribute of God that can be shared with us. Divine Wisdom.  St Thomas Aquinas thought that though a good mind can give you knowledge of divine things, God's supernatural gift of wisdom makes your mind divine (ST 2-2, 45, 2). Thomas does not mean you become like God, but he means that with the divine gift of wisdom you feel at home with the divine. You accept the divine perspective readily and you now see the world in a literally different way - you see things now through God’s eyes.

Accepting this divine gift of wisdom means developing a particular sensitivity towards truth, and a distaste for falsehood and deception. Wise men and women find truth comes as naturally to them as good food and clean air - and falsehood is as repulsive to them as rotten meat and foul stench. People often explain law by appeal to the great cardinal virtue of justice, but justice is meaningless unless it is an attempt to get to the truth. People who are not wise can of course know all sorts of truths, but wisdom means seeing how all these truths fit together as parts of the divine plan, and, indeed, having an absolute love of the truth.
 
Of course, knowing the truth always has an effect on action; truth does not stay in the mind: it lives through our words and actions. The greatest Catholic thinkers have asserted, often against a hostile world, that our individual and social actions are not to be aimed at pleasure or utility or personal convenience but at truth.

This is not an easy thought to uphold today, but it is crucial. Whole generations of young people grow up - and enter professions such as the law - believing that we should act for whatever is most socially useful, or has mass community endorsement, or is convenient, or gives great pleasure. These are not bad people: they really believe that this is what we ought to do. But of course these same ideas have been used internationally to justify the most abhorrent acts and policies, and to justify the worst negligence towards human beings and timeless moral values. Instead, Catholic teaching asserts that social and legal action is to reflect the truth about the human person and to communicate that truth throughout society. Whether in family law, criminal law, stem cell research, abortion legislation, IR legislation or wherever, good law does not rest with enabling what people find agreeable or convenient: it seeks out the truth about the person and upholds that truth even in the face of community indifference, even in the face of community hostility.

The path of Wisdom will not always be a popular path, but is it our great task and responsibility.

Today, in this Mass as we bring our lives and our service in the law before God, we can make young Solomon’s prayer our own: “Give your servant a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil”.