Santo Nino in a New Land

I am told that in some parts of the Philippines, the Christmas season is not considered over until this feast has been celebrated, and over the last week many of you have spent quite a lot of time preparing for the celebration today. In a real sense, the Feast of Santo Nino began here in Broome a week ago and culminates today.

During the time of preparation I saw people who have a wide range of gifts and talents come together to organise this event.  There were those who could plan, organise, sing, play music, create, construct, clean, dance, serve, and read. All who were involved are part of the Church, who share in the one spirit, just as St paul tells us in the letter to the Corinthians. As part of the one reality, the one family of the church, we come with what we have to offer to make this community, this parish, and this town a place where God’s Spirit shines. In doing this, the faith and life that is inside us is able to emerge.

So what has Santo Nino got to do with this?

In this beautifully constructed shrine, we see the tiny statue of the Christ Child, the Holy Infant, Santo Nino. When we look at him, he doesn’t really look like an infant because of his dress and crown, but even more so because of his face. His face is not that of an infant, it is of a much more mature and wise boy. This is where we will start to discover the gift of the Christ Child.

The Christ Child comes to us with the energy, faith and trust of youth. He has not learned to be afraid or embarrassed in the way that we do as we grow. He is who he is: young, vibrant and he will set out to conquer the world! He is the one who calls us here today. He is the one for whom we have prepared this beautiful celebration, and he asks us to join him.

In many places in the Philippines, and here after Mass, women will dance holding the image of Santo Nino, celebrating and rejoicing. This is tradition of many years in that country that has now been brought to us in Broome. You are called to live your faith. In some who come to Australia I see that strong faith made weak by a materialism and easy life that is enjoyed by many in this country. Santo Nino calls you as he calls all of us to hold him high and be happy, be joyful and be proud of our faith.

To prosper in our faith we need to support one another, to be there for each other and to encourage one another in faith, not to hold each other back. Today’s gospel shows us how Mary encouraged Jesus as a young man to begin his ministry and lead people to God. He did this when people were together, happy and enjoying themselves. The other day I was told that this feast is largely a cultural one for many people, not a religious feast. The person who said that did not realise that our religion is incarnational. Jesus became one like us so that we could be raised is be like God. Christ is with us when we are celebrating, dancing, building one another up, defending the weak, caring for the poor. During this Mass we bring all those feelings, thoughts and actions together and put them in front of the image of Santo Nino and remember that God is here with us. Soon we will bring bread and wine to celebrate and remember that the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross continues to hold and nurture us in this country at the start of this New Year.

Filipino people were the first Catholics in Broome, the first parishioners. The challenges faced by Fr Nicholas and his band of Manillamen as they were called were great, but they did not give up and the faith of the church in Broome is the result. Now the numbers of Filipinos is growing again and you have brought us this gift of the Feast of Santo Nino. May we all be encouraged by your faith and vitality. May you proudly hold your statues of Santo Nino high and proclaim the wonders of God among all the peoples . 

Homily Feast of Santo Nino, 20th January 2013, 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C, 

Our Holy Families

The Christmas crib tells us of a wonderful story that is almost too good to be true. In fact, many believe that it is not true, that it is just a fairy story. This clear, clean story is wonderful for our young children, but as we grow older it loses its punch. However fondly we experience or look back on our childhood, we cannot identify closely to this family. For us it is one that just exists in books and art. The Holy Family, for all intents and purposes, comes from another planet.  

As we mature we need to leave behind the glossy story and look at what is in the scriptures and tradition; for it is there that we will find the Holy Family, living and true.

The Jewish tradition was similar to that of our Aboriginal cultures in Australia. Women were promised to older men who took them as wives when they were mature enough to assume the duties of married life. Acceptable as it was then, this is not the ideal of any young woman today. Mary was pregnant before Joseph had taken her to his home, and with paternity unclear (at least publicly), there was huge trouble brewing. Socially, Joseph made it worse by accepting this woman into his house, probably bringing more shame on an already suffering extended family. Banished to a cave on the edge of town, they camped out with shepherds and then went on the run from Herod. Finally, in the Gospel passage today, Mary and Joseph lose their son, not in the supermarket for five minutes, but for three days!  This is the real story of the real people who are in our crib. It is by contemplating this reality that we can connect it with our own.

This Family is Holy because together they strive to do God’s will. Holiness is the spiritual quality derived from participation in the life of God. It is empowering, it lifts us up and we come to the realisation that we can become so much when we live in God. In this encounter we realise our own lack of completeness (or to put it another way, our own unworthiness), but rather than being beaten down by this realisation, we are lifted up by the same Christ we see in the stable.

Put under a microscope, it could be aside that the Holy Family was unique, at best unusual, and this is our invitation into their life, their holiness.

In our families we live with many contradictions.  The family is the basic unit of society, and any society that has denied this has fallen into chaos. The family, consisting of a mother, father and children, is the best forum we can use to engender generosity, love and stability; it gives the best chance of providing security, culture and identity.  We need strong families: anything else is second best, or in modern parlance, not ‘best practice’. This may be the case, but last week I heard commentators on the radio giving advice on how not to end up in family fights on Christmas Day.  The family is the best safety we can offer for our infants and youth, yet we acknowledge that the majority of physical and sexual abuse happens in the family home. In our families we can experience the best and worst that human nature can exercise.

So what can you and I with our varied and unique experience of family life, take from this feast celebrating the domestic life of Jesus Mary and Joseph? The Holy Family began a journey when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. It was never a smooth journey, and there were many tears, disappointments and heartaches. Mary and Joseph made it through because of their unswerving trust and faith in God’s promise, their huge capacity to accept each other, to forgive others, and hope in what lay ahead. This Holy Family is our family, their experiences our experiences, their faith our faith and their God our God.  

As we embrace the aura that surrounds the crib, resolve to make our families places of trust and faith, of forgiveness and acceptance, of hope in the future and like the unique family of Nazareth, places of encounter with God.

Homily on the Feast of the Holy Family, 30th December 2012, OLQP Broome.

Blessed are they who Believe

Yesterday I saw in the news that Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s leading academic proponents of atheism had said in an interview broadcast worldwide on Aljazeerah TV that: being raised Catholic is worse than child abuse, and further that the mental torment inflicted by the religion’s teachings is worse in the long-term than any sexual abuse[i]

Just in case you think that Dawkins is isolated and that his thoughts are not those of others, on Friday I was told that my name came up in conversation at a workplace function in Broome. The general consensus, as reported to me, was that Fr Matt was a good bloke, but that Catholic stuff is all a bit weird. The Catholics at that workplace agreed that the priest was not a bad bloke, but did nothing to answer the charge that all that Catholic stuff was a bit weird. Instead they all went a bit quiet, accepted the accusations, and missed the opportunity to stand up for their faith.

Today, if you and I are under any misapprehension that out beliefs are held by a majority of people and are not under attack, even by fellow Catholics, we are clearly wrong. In many ways we are back to where we began.

The nativity scene we have in front of us is very familiar, but before the euphoria of Christmas night, let us take a moment to consider the main players. We have the location, an shed or cave in a backwater town of a remote and troublesome Roman province. Shepherds are there, the lowest on the social rung: they slept outside with their animals. If they were in Broome they would be in the open on Kennedy Hill or the other side of Demco. Then we have two people who are truly extraordinary, who rise above the madding crowd and they are just as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago.

God has promised never to abandon his people. Mary believed that promise and was able to recognise God’s messenger in the Angel Gabriel. This enabled her to reach out to Elizabeth and in turn be affirmed in her faith. Joseph was likewise guided by God. He accepted Mary his young and pregnant fiancée, knowing the public ridicule and disapproval it would precipitate. Our two main players bucked the cynicism of the day because they believed that God was active in the world.

At Christmas we are given the chance to affirm our faith, a faith that if lived to the full is not socially acceptable to many in our world who prefer the soft and secular option.

Elizabeth may you say of us the same that you said of Mary: Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.

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[i] http://news.peacefmonline.com/religion/201212/151192.php

Christ the Only King

One hundred years ago the world went mad and descended into the mess that was to become World War One. German, English and French armies all declared loudly that God was on their side. Of course, God was supporting those who showed respect and dignity in the cause of peace, and there was not much of that to be found. In the soul searching after the war, many became disillusioned with faith and put their trust in ideologies such was communism, fascism and Nazism. The atheistic regimes that came to power in Russia and Germany were responsible for more deaths than in any conflict in history. Most of the deaths were planned so that a more pure society could emerge. In the midst of this tumult and burgeoning of militant atheism, the Church, declared the feast we celebrate today, the Feast of Christ the King.

The Kingdom we seek, the kingdom we build, is not of this world. It is not a kingdom that can be bought and sold, not one that can be taken by force, not one that can be built by political machinations. The kingdom we seek to build and be a part of comes directly from our faith and is based on truth and justice, and is of God.

Unfortunately, life has often never been that black and white. Members of the church have not always thought that a little bit of force here and there is a bad thing. The chaplains who chose to walk up and down trenches in the First World War declaring the enemy as the devil to be eradicated were at best misguided. Whatever they were doing, they were not preaching the Gospel of Christ the Universal King. Standing before Pilate, Jesus declared: I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth, and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice. Not many people listened to Jesus, and he was led to his death.

Today we find something of a parallel. Some have walked away from the church in the revelations of weakness and of seeming inaction in the face of misconduct. Over the last weeks the media have fed us with a constant diet of anger against the Church. The leadership of the Church has been seen as uncaring at best, and criminally negligent at worst. Whist some are using this as an opportunity to display rabid anti-Catholicism and discrimination, many are angry that we seem to have not borne witness to the truth, that we have not tried to follow our own advice.

Well, at least to some extent they are correct, and the upcoming Royal Commission will be a chance to be humble before God and move forward to concentrate once again on building the Kingdom. I read yesterday that ‘this will be the end of the Catholic Church.” We all know that will not happen, but we will be humbled, and despite the untruths that will undoubtedly be told along with the truthful evidence, God is in this process of purification.

Always know that we are building the kingdom. Let us not take our eyes off Jesus Christ, our universal king, who us leading us to this reign of God.

Homily, OLQP 25^th November 2012 Christus Rex

Living Stones

The feast we celebrate today is ostensibly about a building constructed on the Lateran Hill in Rome in 324, the Cathedral Church of Rome. So is this a tangible sign of what many see is the growing irrelevance of the church to modern Australian society; or maybe something else?

The mandate of the WA Bishops to the CEO mentions nothing about buildings, yet we seem to spend so much time stressing about their maintenance and construction. This year has seen the flurry of openings of completed BER projects, and most of you have spent a good deal of time stressing over the completion of new buildings, or extensions and alterations to existing ones.

We celebrate this feast not because of a beautiful Church in Rome, in fact a building known as ‘the mother of all churches’, but what it point s us toward. Today’s Collect prays:

God, who from living and chosen stones prepare an eternal dwelling for your majesty, increase in your church the spirit  of grace you have bestowed, so that by new growth your faithful people may build the new Jerusalem.

The beautiful places that we dedicate for worship in are intended to raise our minds and hearts to God, to point to something bigger and greater than ourselves. We are called to use all our gifts to be the ‘living and chosen stones’ that build the new Jerusalem.

Our Kimberley schools are magnificent places, made even better through the BER. We have great pride in their appearance and upkeep so that they are worthy places to hold and nurture the ‘living stones’ that are entrusted to us, our students. These living stones are not restricted to those we teach, but extend to include all those involved in the mission of the church.

During my recent convalescence in Sydney I noticed a fundraising appeal from St Mary’s Cathedral. It urged donors to buy a stone, numbered and located, in the towers of the Cathedral. Some of those stones are huge, others tiny; some are structurally crucial whereas others give flesh to the Cathedral bones.

All Christians are important, but due to the responsibility of the roles given to Kimberley priests and principals, we are all crucial to the flourishing of the Kimberley Church. We are the bones, we are the crucial stones. The school at Mulan or Ringer Soak may not seem to be as important to many as St Mary’s Broome, just as many see that our modest cathedral pales beside St John in Lateran, but we are all bones in the edifice of the Church, and she is weaker without each part which composes the whole.

We end the year as we began it and as we have lived it: through prayer. Prayer is the way we have been able to achieve the heights of our school year, it is the way we have been able to make sense of the disasters of the year. Prayer is the way we have been able to see beyond the maintenance and administration to the object of our passion, the passing on of faith and hope through appropriate and challenging education.

May God guide those of you who will soon depart the Kimberley. May he who led you’re here continue to guide you in grace. May he guide and strengthen those of us who will return to continue the mission in the red north.

May we never forget that we are all living stones, chosen to build the kingdom.

Homily 9th November 2012 for the Kimberley Principals. Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St John in Lateran

Always in Need of Reform

Last night at dinner I was asked why the Protestant Reformation occurred. It wasn’t exactly the pleasant dinner conversation I had expected, but nonetheless it was important to the person who asked and even more pertinent to today’s liturgy.

The church was once described as the necessary institution to disseminate the non-institutional message of Christ.  We exist to facilitate the saving message of Christ being transmitted to all people of all times. Even in these technologically sophisticated times, God can’t just have a Facebook page that people could ‘like’. Christianity is a religion of flesh and blood, of relationships: it does not live in a virtual world. If the Church did not exist, there would be no way for people to meet Christ as a person.  The Church is made up of people like you and me. Generally we are people who strive to live our lives along the lines of Gospel values. To the best of our ability we allow the Gospel to penetrate our thoughts and reflections so that we continue to grow closer to God and so that the Kingdom of God continues to come into being in our world.

However, this has not always been the case through history, and it is not always the case in our Church today. Like all other humans, we become bogged down in our own ways of doing things and stuck in our ways. We also try to cut corners and sometimes have a public and a private face that are very different. The current crisis of sexual abuse bears that out only too well. The Reformation the 16^th century was brought on, at least in part, by the desire of some to constantly reform and the inability of others to listen to that call. One of the big issues was that some believed that if you just did things or built great edifices, you could get into heaven. We all know that you can’t buy God’s love or forgiveness, but it is amazing how many of us try, even now, to buy off God with actions or prayers without actually changing our hearts.

In the Gospel Jesus teaches us that God is not impressed with outward appearance without inward change. He makes it clear that the numerous dietary laws of the Jewish people are not going to get any them close to God unless they are accompanied by true interior change of heart. Outward signs are necessary, but are only real when they indicate what is going on inside a person’s heart. The Reformers in the sixteenth century saw rotten people in the church who thought that they could buy God. This was a time where rich people believed, as some people of Jesus time did and some in our time do, that power, position and money spent on extraordinary edifices to the glory of God could smooth the way to heaven . Challenged by the reformers, the Church would not listen and the reformers rebelled and formed breakaway churches. In time many of these breakaway churches suffered the same fate whereas, thank God, the Catholic Church seems to have realised that we are in need of constant purification so as the keep on the path towards the Kingdom.

The short story is that outward appearance is important, but only as an indicator of what is going on inside. We build beautiful buildings because of the love we have for God.  We show respect in the way we dress, treat one another, and reach out to one another because it comes from within.  Goodness, as well as all the negative aspects that Jesus lists, come from within: if we are people of integrity, they should all show in what people see in our public lives.

We all need constant reformation to keep ourselves on the right track. In this Year of Grace may we recognise both our need of grace and the grace of God working in others to keep us building the Kingdom of God together.

Homily 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time,1st September 2012, OLQP Broome

Communion of Love

Last night I was in a conversation with a person who had ridden a bike into a town in France called Lourdes.  He was fascinated by the place and so I shared the story.  Our Lady appeared to Bernadette there in 1858. It did not matter to Bernadette that no one believed her, that people ridiculed her and her family. The truth was important, and that is what Bernadette told people, even though it brought her, in the short term, much suffering.  In telling that story I could not help thinking of today’s Gospel.    

Jesus said some uncomfortable things and held some unpopular views. His teaching on the bread of life, to which we have been listening over the last weeks, is a central example.  As with all difficult teaching and firmly held views, there is collateral damage. When challenged we are faced with the choice to continue to follow or to leave. This, of course comes down to the issue of trust. Who has the greater authority, me or the Church? Recently, after a difficult conversation involving a central tenet of our faith, a person said to me: “Well that is what I believe and it is right for me.” I had to reply that in most matters of faith and morals, something is either right or wrong, so in stating that he was right I needed to point out that he was saying that the Church for the last 2000 years was wrong, a very unlikely scenario. In these times our decisions have implications, because if we disagree our communion with the church is broken.

The Gospel tells us that after this teaching, many walked away from Jesus. The Jewish dietary laws forbade the eating of blood, and here was Jesus telling his disciples that if they did not eat of his blood that they could not have life within them.  This was decision time, a turning point. It is the high point of the bread of life discourse, because this Jesus who has spent much time witnessing and explaining now calls those who were curiously following him to make a decision. The consequences are stark: follow Jesus and you will be persecuted by your fellow Jewish people. As with all things, you cannot believe everything and be everybody’s friend: there are tomes that a line has to be drawn in the sand.

Jesus still draws a line in the sand and asks us on which side of the line we stand. He asks us to identify completely with him through the Eucharist, this most scared of rites where we consume his body and blood.

He Eucharist is not only food and drink for us, but it is our opportunity to identify completely with Jesus and his mission. This leads us to the concept of communion. This Holy Communion that we share is the paramount expression of our inclusion in the mission of Jesus and the faith of the Church. By approaching the altar we are saying in front of the congregation that this is our faith our hope and our life. In other words, before we arrive at the altar we have said that we believe what the Church teaches and that we have communion with Christ and the Church: in other words, there are not obstacles, not serious sin, between us and Christ.  Phew!

Jesus leads us to the realisation that communion with him is essential for the Christian. This communion is celebrated and strengthened through the Eucharist and ultimately through Holy Communion where we take the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord and saviour into our bodies. What a gift! What a responsibility! 

May we never approach the altar casually or thoughtlessly! 

May we be worthy of this Holy Communion of love.

Homily OLQP 26th August 2012,21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B