Romans 12:9-18; Luke 4:16-22
As I move towards retirement, I find myself looking back; and looking back, I find myself more conscious than ever of the debt I owe to the Christian Brothers. Like three of the archbishops who went before me – Duhig, Rush and Bathersby – and the one who will follow me – Mackinlay – I was educated by the Brothers – in my case, not in Queensland I’m afraid, but primary schooling at Rostrevor College in Adelaide in the fifties and secondary at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne in the sixties.
Over the years I’ve heard contemporaries of mine complain, at times bitterly, about the schooling they received; and I’ve wondered were we at the same school at the same time, given how different my own account would be. What I received wasn’t perfect, but it left me with happy memories and a deep sense of gratitude to the Brothers who taught me.
Later in life, when I was working in the Vatican before being named bishop, I was again in close contact with the Brothers. As well as serving in the Secretariat of State, I was chaplain to the Brothers’ General House community when Brother Edmund Garvey was Superior General and Brother Dan Stewart Superior of the House. Each week I would escape from the Vatican for Mass, a good meal and fine company. It was, as the Irish say, great craic.
It was a difficult time for the Brothers. The abuse crisis was erupting around the world, and Brother Paul Noonan, an Australian General Councillor, died suddenly while on visitation in Africa. The way in which the community responded to these crises is one of my most vivid and moving memories of my time in Rome. When I was named bishop, the General House community gave me the crozier which I’m using today and which I have carried around in my car through my years as bishop. They also gave me a first-class relic of Blessed Edmund Rice, which has accompanied me to this day. It has been in my chapel at Wynberg and will go with me to my bayside bungalow when I retire.
So my debt of gratitude is deeply personal. But it’s not just personal, because a host of others would be no less grateful for what they received from the Brothers, who shaped not only individuals but societies. The fact is that Queensland and Australia would be unrecognisably different were it not for the Christian Brothers.
Today we look back across 150 years of Edmund Rice Ministry in Queensland, and therefore back to the day when three Irish Brothers, Barrett, Noonan and Nugent, started teaching a small and motley band in what is today St Stephen’s Chapel. They started in the same year that the Queensland government passed the Education Act which withdrew funding from denominational schools. So the Brothers were drawn immediately into the drama of the bishops’ decision to build a Catholic schooling system without public funding. The decision seemed foolhardy to many, but it turned out to be a triumph, largely because of the heroic efforts of the Religious, among them the Christian Brothers. The task in the early days was to offer upward social mobility within a framework of traditional Catholic religion. This they did magnificently.
All of this looked back to the prophetic initiative of Edmund Rice in early nineteenth century Ireland. The prosperous Waterford businessman, like Mary MacKillop, saw a need and did something about it. Poverty and, with it, ignorance were demons on the loose in the penal days of Ireland. Edmund set about exorcising them, striking a chord in many hearts, which is how the Brothers came to be.
In undertaking a ministry of education, Edmund looked back to the great educators of the Church, especially a figure like St Jean-Baptiste De La Salle. But he and they looked back in turn to the great teachers of the infant Church, first among them St Paul whose voice we’ve heard today. “Ave doctor gentium”, “Hail teacher of the nations”, the inscription declares in the Roman basilica of St Paul’s Outside the Walls; and anyone taught by the Christian Brothers was in one way or another of Gentile stock. So St Paul is here today.
But the Apostle looks back to the figure of the only Teacher, Jesus Christ (cf Matt 23:10) whose voice we have heard in the Gospel. If he is the only Teacher, then it is his “gracious words” that have echoed in the classrooms and down the corridors of the Christian Brothers’ schools in Queensland and wherever.
But in what we have heard in the Gospel, Jesus himself echoes the voice of the prophet Isaiah, who speaks of a God who has anointed him to bring “good news to the poor, liberty to captives, new sight to the blind”, words which Edmund Rice understood in an unusual and potent way.
Yet the prophet looks still further back to the Exodus, which is the fountainhead of biblical religion and therefore of Catholic education and Christian Brothers’ schools. When we open the Bible, it begins with the creation “in the beginning”. In fact, however, the Bible begins with the liberation of slaves; and that is where Christianity and Christian schooling begin. Therefore, this moment of celebration is set within a long and deep context which takes us back to the very beginning and goes far beyond personal gratitude.
The poet Seamus Heaney, himself educated by the Brothers in Northern Ireland, once remarked that people speaking in clichés about Christian Brothers’ schools missed the essential. “What has not been said enough”, he remarked, “is that there is asense of a radiant universe in which you are kind of important. There is a kind of shimmer factor in the back of your mind” (The Australian, 1996). The shimmer factor in the back of the mind wasn’t just the kind of Celtic glow found in an Irish poet. It was and is the shimmer of a God who against all the odds sets slaves free, even from the Egypt of poverty and ignorance and injustice. Beyond that liberation there beckons “the radiant universe in which you are kind of important”. Today we, and I, give thanks for those called into Edmund Rice Ministry who, through 150 years in this State, have not just taught reading, writing, arithmetic and religion, but have pointed to that radiant universe of which Heaney speaks and have set in the back of our minds a kind of shimmer factor.