Our People

The Feminine Genius

Loreto Kirribilli 2006 Mass of Thanksgiving

By Most Rev. Julian Porteous
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
28/9/2006

In the Gospel chosen for today, we see Jesus sending out his twelve apostles in pairs. From the moment he first called his disciples to follow him, the Lord began to teach and instruct them personally. While he spoke in more general terms to the crowds who gathered in their thousands to listen to him, he took his chosen disciples aside on many occasions and gave them more specific instruction.

Part of that training was “on the job”, when he sent them out to do as he had done – to preach and to heal.

With this picture placed before us in this Mass, you, the graduating students of Loreto Kirribilli 2006, are conscious of being sent out. You have received not just an academic education, but you have been in a formation environment in Loreto Kirribilli, geared to the overall formation of your character and the promotion of your gifts. There have been two overriding thrusts to this formation – one is its Catholic character, inspired by our faith in Jesus Christ and our participation in the Catholic Church. The second is a particular concentration of the fostering of your gifts as women.

The Lord sent his disciples out. He would eventually, at his Ascension, charge them with the duty of taking up his work and expanding it to the very “ends of the earth”.  Today your school sends you out. Indeed, the Church whose faith and vision of human life inspired Mary Ward to establish the Institute of Mary, sends you out. You are sent out as women to make a contribution as women to the Church and the world.

Mary Ward, as you know, wanted her institute to do for women what the Jesuits were doing for men – forming strong and bold people of faith. She had a particular conviction that women could be prepared to take an active role in society as Christian women. On this occasion I would like, if I may say, as a bishop, to speak to you about going forth as women.

Our late and beloved Pope John Paul II spoke on a number of occasions about what he called the “feminine genius”. For example, in an Angelus talk on 23 July 1995, he said,

Woman has a genius all her own, which is vitally essential to both society and the Church.

Some days later, the Pope, reflecting upon a forthcoming UN conference on women in Beijing, commented on the contribution of women to the great cultural debates of our time and said,

How could the contribution of the feminine mind be undervalued? Women's increasingly qualified entrance, not only as beneficiaries but also as protagonists, into the world of culture in all its branches—from philosophy to theology, from the social to the natural sciences, from the figurative arts to music—is a very hopeful sign for humanity.

Your involvement as women in society and the Church is most important. You are asked by the Church to bring that particular “feminine genius” to the great issues of the day.

I would ask you to be aware of one area in particular where your “feminine genius” is most needed: that of the assaults of marriage, motherhood and life that we are experiencing in our society at this time.

Clearly for a woman the issues of life have a profoundly personal significance. Opening herself to motherhood a woman experiences the life in her womb unfolding and growing. This indescribable experience is a privilege of mothers, but all women have in some way an intuition of it, for all women are predisposed to the miracle of new life.

A mother is appointed as a guardian of life. A woman accepts it with care, nurturing the human being’s first contact with the world, which is carried out precisely in the symbiosis with the mother’s body.

Our society is losing its way on the question of the reverence for life. The current debate about the production of embryos – human beings – for the purposes of scientific experimentation draws us into the murky and dangerous world of seeing human life as disposable.

As women you can speak up for the sacredness of life. You have a special right to do so. You can embrace the role of being the guardians of life even from its very beginnings.

As women, grounded in your identity in the tradition of Mary Ward and established in your faith in this Catholic school go forth! Go forth into the world with the knowledge that you have something to offer, something to contribute. Be women of faith. Be women of courage. Be women who will engage in the struggle for a culture of life.