Red Mass 2012
Exodus 20:1-20, Ephesians 6:1-17, Matthew 5:43-48
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
30 Jan 2012
Last week I was in California staying at the new cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles on my way to a Bishops' meeting in San Diego. As you can see a cardinal's life is often full of hardship.
The old Los Angeles cathedral of St Vibiana was fatally weakened by a series of earthquakes and in any case the archdiocese with a Catholic population of about 5 million needs a much bigger mother church. There were a couple of thousand worshippers at the Sunday Mass I attended and they have 300-400 every morning at 7.00am.
The cathedral is rectangular, massive and quite controversial. Many dislike it but when thronged with believers and worshippers it is an effective worship space. Like the Melbourne Cricket Ground after all the renovations it needs people to come into its own!
I certainly liked the large plaza in front of the cathedral, with its own restaurant, olive and palm trees, umbrellas, seats and tables for many to have brunch after the 10.30 Sunday Mass.
On one side was a large, quiet and graduated waterfall, a gift of the Jewish community with an ancient Hebrew saying, inscribed in Hebrew and English: "Three pillars uphold the world, divine teaching, ethical service and loving kindness".
We have rich scripture readings to ponder as we gather to ask God's blessing on the vital work of the legal profession and the courts in the coming year, but I want to organise my thoughts around these three pillars. The legal profession is of course one indispensable agency of ethical service, all of us are called in our personal lives to practise loving kindness, while it is the Christian churches in this country within Australia's religious and irreligious pluralism who have to make the major part of the case for divine teaching. So I want to say a few words about the consequences of godliness or ungodliness in contemporary society.
Every ancient pagan city in classical Greece had its own god and every society follows forms of religion or pseudo-religion. The terrible political ideologies of the twentieth century, Communism and Nazism were virulent religious substitutes. Unbelief in Australia takes much more benign forms like New Age enthusiasms and more recently the struggle to appease an implacable ecosystem against humanly induced global warming. Others might slip further in other states and elevate Aussie Rules to a low pseudo-religious status.
It is always dangerous when nothing fills the void left by the absence of God and usually these gaps are not left open for too long, before they are filled and/or society starts to deteriorate.
In many areas statistics show that our social capital is being eroded. I suspect the situation is often worse in Europe so I can understand why David Cameron, the British Prime Minister - in the aftermath of the riots and despite the fact that he is only a "vaguely practising Anglican" for whom the call of faith fades out as well as in - I can understand why he called for a reassertion of Christian values and condemned as excessive a non-judgemental relativism. I recognise too that many Western agnostics acknowledge and support the moral role of Christianity, because no other sources are likely to be acceptable with most people.
The Mosaic Law, the source of our Ten Commandments, which we heard in the first reading is the remote but essential building block of daily life in Australia, of the Magna Carta, of our common and statute law and the Australian constitution.
Lawyers and priests know better than many others of the universal struggle between good and evil, which occurs in every human heart, and in every group or class of society. But the Judeo-Christian tradition not only sets limits to human behaviour and encourages self discipline. It also provides inspiration and purpose to individuals and communities, endorsing marriage and family life, offering everyone including the worst of criminals and sinners, the certainty of forgiveness after genuine repentance.
Monotheism also offers the stability that comes from the recognition that each of us, whether high, low or middle class, will answer to a good and all-seeing God for his life choices and actions. An absent god is a consolation to serious criminals.
Moses' Jewish contemporaries did not want God to talk to them, because they feared they would die. This is not an Australian reaction, where even believers will take God's broad-mindedness and unlimited patience for granted. But many believers and especially unbelievers today could understand that the Jews believed God lived in "thick darkness".
For a variety of reasons many today, especially among our elite opinion-makers, also find it hard, perhaps impossible to believe. Most are quite happy to gird their loins with truth, to put on the breast plate of righteousness, even work for the gospel of peace, but they decline to put on both the armour of God and the helmet of salvation, much less wield the sword of the Spirit. I regret this and believe that it will be more difficult to keep our society just, decent and supportive of the weak if this decline continues and worsens.
Life in the United States shows that God need not be only a minority enthusiasm and indeed even across the world today, not to mention across human history, European unbelief is not the norm, but the exception. The religious options for Australia are to follow the European or the American way.
Believers should not be pessimistic because the intellectual case for God has made a comeback, not because of philosophy or religious good works, but because of the metaphysical consequences of recent scientific discoveries. The case for monotheism looks better than at any time since Isaac Newton.
Anthony Flew, one of the twentieth century's best known atheists, changed his mind to accept God because "the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life" (especially in DNA material) has shown "that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together". He conceded "that of all the great discoveries of modern science, the greatest was God".
Flew came to his conclusions from biology, but the arguments are running in the same direction in physics. The Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe is certainly a boost to those who believe in Godly creation. Mathematicians have calculated the almost impossible odds against the emergence of life by chance, listing the extraordinary number of coincidences, tiny opportunities necessary for human life to emerge. This is sometimes called the anthropic principle.
One example is illustrative. If the power of gravity or the weak force was changed by less than one part in 1040, then the greater explosive force would probably have prevented galaxies forming or the less explosive force would have provoked a catastrophic collapse of the universe. There are many other similar examples.
In conclusion I must concede that I have moved some considerable distance from the commandments given to Moses and Paul's moral exhortations to the Ephesians.
But if both these accounts are to be evaluated or judged to be coherent, God must be real, rather than a more sophisticated, even irreplaceable version of Santa Claus. Belief has no long term future if it is only for children and the ignorant.
Australian society is grateful for the contribution of the legal profession, which extends far beyond the realm of law. All of us are grateful for your ethical service, and I invite you to join me in prayer to the one true God for justice, peace and faith in our society.
