World Youth Day Mass

Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Auckland, New Zealand
Ex 17:3-7; Rom 5:1-2, 5-8; Jn 4:5-42

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
23 Feb 2008

The readings tonight are about water, about life giving water. One of the few things which divide Australians and New Zealanders is water – not the ditch between us, the Tasman sea, but the fact that much of Australia is regularly short of water (Victoria is coming out of seven years’ drought, we hope. My state of New South Wales still has about 45 percent of its area in drought conditions), while New Zealand, even on the North Island is rarely in drought. Certainly the heavy rains of the past 24 hours, in what passes for your summer weather, would have been very welcome in Australia.

But we all understand that we die without water. It is possible that the mysterious disappearance of some ancient civilizations in Central America was caused by drought. Therefore it is not surprising that water is often chosen in the Bible as a symbol for those spiritual realities which we cannot see or touch, such as faith, love, hope and goodness.

You are here tonight as part of your preparation to host days in the diocese and then to participate in Sydney World Youth Day. Your task now is to prepare well. The most exciting part will be the trip and the week in Sydney itself, but the most important challenge is how you are going to live the rest of your lives as adults.

Like everyone else you are free to choose and you are already choosing by the succession of daily choices, small or important, that you are regularly making.

Your choices are making you into givers or takers, believers or doubters, loving adults or cynics, even haters. To go forward on the narrow road to life you will have to take decisions, to make promises and keep them. If you are always keeping your options open, you will continue to be adolescents for many years, decades in fact. One mission attempted is worth more than keeping open half a dozen options, while one mission accomplished is worth more than 100 unattempted options.

Therefore I thank God that you have decided to come to Sydney for World Youth Day in July. No doubt many factors influenced your decision, but you have decided well to go on pilgrimage, to be a tourist or traveller with a religious purpose, as believers have travelled for thousands of years.

You have decided to come to Sydney to strengthen your faith. But I ask you to come for a second reason, which is to help strengthen the faith of our young Australians. Young Aussies are great young people but for the moment there the tide of faith and religious practice is slowly going out, receding and taking thousands of young people with it. Your coming, with more than 150,000 others from overseas, will help strengthen the faith of our young people; in fact strengthen the faith of us all; young and young at heart.

You will draw strength from one another as the streams of living water bubble up from your prayer together, your happy times together, from welcoming Pope Benedict, going to confession, attending the Mass and Vigil and following the Way of the Cross.

In the meantime, your task now is to prepare your hearts and minds for the World Youth Day and more importantly for your future and the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well is worth pondering, not least because it will focus attention on the attitudes and convictions you are developing to marriage and family and to your preparation for marriage, or, more unusually, the single vocation.

The Christian understanding of purity of heart, right conduct inside and outside marriage are counter cultural today, but the Christian package works. We need to understand why and become convinced of its validity. I regularly invite young adults to identify the men and women they admire, identify what inspires them and helps them be good and contributing citizens. In many cases it will be their Christian faith and Catholic principles.

The Samaritans too were worshippers of the one true God, followers of Abraham and Moses, but there was bad blood, strong mutual prejudices between them and the Jews. There were theological differences as the Samaritans would not worship at the Temple in Jerusalem and did not accept the writings of the great prophets, such as Ezekiel. They had also helped the Syrians in their war against the Jews in the second century B.C.

What proved to be an important spiritual encounter, a conversion experience for this Samaritan woman and her friends, began with an exchange of basic courtesies and greetings. If Jesus had not spoken, if she had broken off the conversation, none of the spiritual gains could have occurred.

Even by our contemporary standards, the Samaritan woman was interesting and colourful; five husbands and now a partner! Whatever else about her, she liked men!

I wonder though what lay beneath the externals, the confident smile and the banter. We do not know how many of her husbands died or how many divorced her, but those hidden wounds would have been deep. There must have been sorrow and sadness for her, her children, for the men involved. She must have been depressed, perhaps tempted to despair, to believe that in her life nothing worked out.  Naturally, she became defensive with Jesus when asked to bring along her husband. “I have no husband,” she replied.

“You are right there” Jesus replied, “because, although you have had five, the one now is not your husband.”

Confronted by this truth, the woman might have lost her temper, abused Jesus for impertinence or simply walked off and left him. She certainly never anticipated being in such deep water when Jesus asked her for a drink.

But she was honest with herself, open to this unusual and spiritual man talking about the living water that takes away our thirst forever. In humility she acknowledged him. “I see you are a prophet,” she said.

Most Australians today and I suspect most New Zealanders know that right and wrong are important, but many Australians are uncertain whether it is important to believe, to worship our unseen God.

Most of the Jews then had a different approach. To worship God in spirit and truth, to have nothing to do with false gods, was important for them. The Samaritan woman accepted this and knew also that God would send a Messiah, Christ, the anointed one “to tell us everything”.

It was then that Jesus, Our Lord, said something he never said to his fellow Jews; he acknowledged to her that he was the Messiah. “I who am speaking to you, I am he.”

This is a beautiful story, which has recurred again and again in history; a wounded person allowing God’s love, the cleansing waters of life, into her heart; the person judged least likely to turn to religion being cured and healed by God’s love.

Her conversion can be our conversion, if we are honest and open and prepared to pray.

Let me conclude by spelling out one basic fact of Church life and issuing a challenge or invitation, especially to those of you who already know and love Christ and the Catholic community.

The basic truth is that unless a percentage of you step forward into leadership roles in the Catholic community, the Church will fall over, slip into irrelevance.  The Church cannot exist without priests, religious, leaders in the new communities; without Catholic teachers, social workers, parish helpers and most basically of all good Catholic parents.

I am sure God is calling each of you to a stronger faith, to be a better person and I am equally certain that God is calling some of you to leadership.  Listen to his call. Open your heart to his challenge. Do not switch off, or turn to another channel.

The Spirit is moving among you, not just as He always does, but in a strong way. Everyone has been encouraged by the way the Cross and Icon were received here and by the numbers coming to Sydney; fifty percent more than anticipated.

Your task is to slow the tide which is going out; to slow it and reverse it so that many more young people will be brought to Christ Our Lord.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.