Short Address at the Annual Archbishop’s Dinner St John’s College, University of Sydney, 22 October 2015

It is a pleasure to join you for the St John’s College Annual Visitor’s Dinner for my first time as official Visitor of the College. Founded in 1857 during the episcopate of my predecessor, Archbishop John Bede Polding – the College’s first Visitor – St John’s is the oldest Catholic university college and, I understand, the second-oldest university college of any sort in Australia. So it has been part of the University community for a very long time and produced alumni who have contributed greatly to Church and society in Australia.

I am pleased to acknowledge Very Rev. Gerry Gleeson, Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of Sydney and Fr Brendan Purcell; the Chair of Council, Professor Tobin, and the several eminent fellows; the Rector Mr Diethelm, Vice-Rector Dr Gallagher, Dean Mrs Christie, and Dean of Music Mr Perrignon, and other College office-holders and staff; and the outgoing student President Alexander and incoming one Leo, and the rest of the student executive. Above all, I am especially pleased to meet all of you, the students of the College.

“In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was made App and dwelt somewhere in the virtual universe.” It is easy today to inhabit or at least slip in and out of an alternative reality created by devices – iPhones and Pads, Androids, Tablets and Kindles – each with almost endless connectivity, apps and tools, social networks and so on. The average young man in the West is said to send 120 messages a day; that seems incredible to me but then I think of some young priests and just maybe it is true… (You chaplain, Fr Mannes, on the other hand, probably uses a goose feather quill to produce his communications.) I believe that most smartphone users check their phones several times every hour; 20% of young people do so every couple of minutes. Four-fifths of smartphone users now keep them nearby through all their waking hours, half check them regularly even when on holidays, and a whopping two-thirds keep them close-by and active even when they are asleep! Research suggests that we are fast passing the stage of ordinary reliance on these technologies and coming to a point more like addiction, with all the associated dependency, anxiety, stress and distraction.¹ Half of those who use these devices predict that they would suffer a high level of anxiety if their smartphones were out of action even for a short time.² I’m not sure that is a good thing…

Now, don’t get me wrong: I am no technophobe. I use these things as much as the next guy. I’m there amongst the daily users of Microsoft Word, email and Google; I’m amongst the seven out of ten managers and professionals who check their phones within an hour of getting up each day and the seven out of ten ‘online adults’ with a Facebook account;³ from time to time I tweet or have others tweet for me; I’ve got a YouTube channel and all my homilies are podcast or vodcast and sometimes live-streamed; there’s even an Archdiocesan Archbishop Anthony App which I hope you all have on your smartphones! I once had a man take a mobile call in the middle of my hearing his Confession in the cathedral: he blithely discussed his shopping list for the way home and I was too flabbergasted to tell him off!

So, like many of you, I know well the good uses of these technologies, I am all-too-aware how dependent on them I have become, and I also know they have their risks and downsides. Pope Francis recently questioned whether for all the information we are any wiser and for all the social networks we really have more or deeper friendships. We need to recover the arts of attention to one thing or person at a time and of face-to-face conversation.

Your college has been named for St John the Evangelist, who wrote the Fourth Gospel. The prologue of that Gospel begins a little differently to my talk tonight: “In the beginning was the Word, who was with God and was God… and the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us” (Jn 1:1,14). He didn’t want to be a virtual God to us, a mere theory, principle or effect of software. He didn’t want to dwell only in inaccessible light, in ‘the heavens’, in the virtual universe. No, the Catholic faith is grounded in the two mysteries your patron St John intimates from the very opening words of his Gospel: the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation, the transcendent and the immanent, the One is both true God and true man, the One who bridges those two universes or dimensions. We Christians do not believe in esoteric gnosis, secret knowledge, hidden gods, but a God-made-man so we might have real friendship with Him and salvation through Him. The Word and the Sacraments that extend His Incarnation in our time are the true and highest connectivity. The Church is where we are online with what is really real about God, creation and ourselves.

Someone whose life was grounded in the Word-made-flesh was Roger Bede Vaughan: earlier this evening I blessed the refurbished Vaughan Room, named for him. He was a Benedictine monk and priest like Archbishop John Bede Polding whose portrait hangs to my left. He followed Polding as Archbishop and so was the second Visitor of this College. Unusually, he was also Rector of the College for a time. Within a few months of arriving he took up residence in this College which he found effectively ‘a ruin without a student’ to be seen and he determinedly rebuilt its standing in the community. He remained here for the following six years that he was Archbishop, until his premature death aged only 49, and so that John’s became the de facto archepiscopal palace.⁴ Vaughan was not out of place here: he had a powerful personality, possessed great learning, had been a Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy, contributed to leading reviews, published an important two volume work, The Life and Labors of St. Thomas of Aquin, and was an accomplished orator.

Vaughan was personally ascetical: he mostly wore his Benedictine habit (as you will see in the portraits in the Vaughan room) rather than the trappings of a bishop sduch as you see in the grand portrait to my right. His room here at John’s had no carpet and only a few books and a crucifix; on his desk were only a skull reminding him of death and judgment. Wealth, for him, was serving God and doing good in our world and one part of that good to which he was particularly committed was Christian education. He wanted the students of St John’s to be educated so they would rise in society and acquit themselves well in “the battle of life”. While an intellectual himself, he realised that “a good life is more conclusive than a brilliant argument”.⁵

Johnsmen and women could do much worse than have Archbishop Vaughan as a role model. Instead of misusing or even idolising the latest fad or technology, our energies should be directed to developing a loving relationship with Christ, the Word-made-flesh, and contributing our talents and energies to building up his Kingdom of life and love, as Vaughan did. That is real wealth.

Nisi Dominus frustra: your college motto critiques the vain self-sufficiency of our age that says it is all up to us, and all for us. It comes from Psalm 126 in the Latin Vulgate: “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labour.”⁶ That Psalm goes on to observe that “In vain is your earlier rising, your going later to rest, you who toil for the bread you eat: when the Lord pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber.” From my recollection of my days at the University of Sydney, when I often visited my friends in this college, there was the occasional case of someone going late to their rest and not always because they were hard at their studies; they certainly had to rely on God doing the work for them while they slumbered! These days the Rector assure me, you students take your task very seriously. I am glad of that. Like Vaughan I want you to be a credit to your Church, your College, your families and yourselves. I want you to learn all you can at this university and apply all your best efforts to that task. But it is good to be reminded that we must, in the end, rely upon God and not just our own energies; and that you can rely upon God’s friends, the Church, this College, your colleagues, to mediate that help to you. God bless the Rector and staff, council and students of St John’s College!