Australia Day

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
24 Jan 2010

Often we take our blessings for granted until we lose them.  An outsider is sometimes needed to recognize what is basic.

On Australia Day we rejoice that Australia is home, we cherish our childhood memories, the annual rituals of the Christmas holidays, the beach, Test cricket and the Australian Open for the tennis.  We set high standards for our sportsmen and women, criticize their lapses and errors and rejoice especially when their grit and determination bring unexpected victory, as in the Sydney Test.  All this presupposes peace and prosperity.

We are proud that we are a free nation; free to claim that life is good, free to insist that too many situations are unjust and free to be irreligious or religious.

Too often we take for granted the huge contribution the Christian churches have made since the First Fleet to that unexpected success of turning a settlement for convicts into the Australia of today.  Many want to migrate here.

Later this year the Christian contribution to Australian life will be recognized internationally, when Mother Mary MacKillop is canonized in Rome as a saint.

Born in Fitzroy, a Melbourne suburb she will be the first Australian born saint and the Josephite sisters today continue her work which brought education and religious knowledge to tens of thousands of youngsters, many of them from poorer country families, especially in earlier days.

Catholics worship only God, but venerate the saints and pray for their help.  Jesus encouraged us to pray for our daily bread and Catholics and Orthodox often pray to the saints asking them to put in a word for us with our good God.

Sometimes, but very rarely, these prayers are answered so that cures occur which cannot be explained by medical science.

Sixteen years ago Kath Evans, a wife and mother of six, a woman of faith and prayer, was diagnosed with inoperable lung and brain cancer.  Ten months later she was given the all clear.

A few people are hostile to the very notion of miracles.  No one in the Church denies that there are also spontaneous remissions of illnesses; like miracles they are also very rare.  But Jesus performed miracles and told us that God is good and interested in us.  Why not ask for a hand?

We don't know why one or two are cured and thousands aren't, anymore than we can understand why only some are born happy, rich or brainy.

But nearly always in the Bible the recipients of miracles have strong faith and requested the miracle.