St Joseph’s Cathedral Rockhampton
1 Corinthians 13:4-13; Matthew 13:44-46
Among the many achievements of the Catholic Church in this country perhaps the most remarkable is the system of Catholic schooling built up since 1820 when the first school was opened in Parramatta. In many ways, it is unique worldwide; and in many ways it has built not just the Church but the nation. Beyond 1820 the number of schools grew, though resources and personnel were scant, and it was a real struggle.
A turning point came in 1875 when the Queensland government decided that all schools, if they wanted public funding, should offer an education which was “free, compulsory and secular”. The bishops had no problem with free and compulsory, but they had real problems with secular: they understood education as embracing the whole human person. So they decided to go their own way without government funding. The decision seemed foolhardy to many at the time, but it turned out to be a triumph against the odds as Catholic education went from strength to strength with no government funding until the 1960s when it began as a trickle.
But the triumph didn’t happen by chance: it was built on the rock of sacrifice – the heroic sacrifice of the women and men Religious who were the lifeblood of the system and who often lived lives of real poverty and extreme hard work. Without them and their sacrifice, the bishops’ decision would have come to nothing. But there was also the sacrifice of many lay people who were determined that their children would have a genuinely Catholic schooling of high quality and who were prepared to pay for it. Catholic education in this state and country, therefore, was built on sacrifice and the blood, sweat and tears sacrifice always entails. That can never be forgotten.
It’s tempting to think that those days are past, now that funding for our schools is adequate and assured, and that facilities are therefore vastly better than they were and teachers can be paid justly and on time, which was not always the case. But the truth is that Catholic education will always be built on sacrifice, even if the nature of the sacrifice may be different in these different times.
Earlier we heard the celebrated words of St Paul: “There are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:13). In the Greek that Paul uses, there were three words for love: eros, which was love under its aspect of desire, philia which was love under its aspect of friendship, and agape which was love under its aspect of self-sacrifice. And the word Paul uses here is agape, love under its aspect of self-sacrifice. When faith and hope pass away, self-sacrificing love remains. It is eternal, because it is God, the God who is agape. It was that love which inspired the sacrifice that built Catholic education; and it’s that love which inspires Catholic education now and will inspire it in any time to come. Or if that were not true of our schools, then they might be Catholic in name, but they would not be Catholic in fact.
In the Gospel we’ve heard, Jesus speaks of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price. Both are supremely worth having, but to have them we need to sell everything, give everything else away. To have the treasure and the pearl requires great sacrifice. The treasure and the pearl are not only Catholic education as an enterprise but each of the young people who come to our schools. They are the treasure that must be dug up; they are the pearl that must be prised from its shell. That’s what our schools are for. But it won’t happen without sacrifice; and we ourselves are to be the sacrifice.
This means that Catholic education depends upon more than political engagement, financial viability and professional competence. They are all important; but they can never substitute for the self-sacrifice required of those responsible for Catholic education. That will mean putting not ourselves but the young and their needs at the heart of what our schools do; and that will mean putting Jesus Christ at the heart, the Lord whom we see in the young and who alone can meet their deepest needs and satisfy their deepest longings.
In the end, it is the sacrifice of Christ upon which Catholic education is built, the total self-sacrifice of the Cross, the love that is stronger than death. It was the sacrifice of Christ which took root in the women and men who laid the foundations of Catholic education in Australia; and it is his sacrifice which remains the foundation of what we do now. If we can teach the young to live the mystery of the Lord’s Cross, they will learn that life not death has the last word, that there is no weakness that cannot become a strength, that hope can be born from what seems hopeless. In the learning, they will become the treasure uncovered and the pearl revealed; and so too will we in the teaching. But if we are to teach the mystery of the Lord’s Cross in our schools, we will need to discover it in our own lives. We will need to see where and how in our own life death gives birth to life, where weakness becomes strength, where hopelessness gives way to hope. If we can discover this deep paschal rhythm in our life, we will not only possess the treasure and the pearl we desire. We will ourselves become the treasure and the pearl; and then we will be able to lead the young not only to possess the treasure and the pearl but to become themselves in time the treasure and the pearl, possessed not by the Church but dug from the field of the Church and prised from the shell of the Church to be offered to a world which often searches for the treasure and the pearl where they cannot be found.