REMARKS FOR REMEMBRANCE SERVICE FORBONDI TERRORIST ATTACK
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL FORECOURT, SYDNEY, 17 DECEMBER 2025
Dear friends, we gather this evening in what should be a season of joy, feeling a great weight of sadness; our celebration of peace, now marred by violence; the festival of light for Jews and Christians, now overshadowed by darkness and death. An unspeakable evil has visited our city, claiming 15 lives, leaving scores more injured, grieving, traumatised, and profoundly wounding our whole community. It will never be forgotten.
This darkness challenges us all. It challenges our Jewish brothers and sisters. Last Sunday, as they celebrated Hanukkah, they were met with one of the oldest and darkest of human hatreds. The Jews have suffered slavery in Egypt, exile in Babylon, oppression by empires, twice the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. They’ve known centuries of diaspora, pogroms, the Shoah, antisemitism in many guises. Now carnage in our own city.
How can anyone live faith openly when fear whispers to hide your identity and existence? How can anyone maintain hope when despair seems the only response? How can anyone trust their neighbours, when trust is so callously violated?
Our Jewish friends teach us to hope, believe, trust even amidst great darkness. Think of Jessica Rozen, desperately searching for her son amidst gunfire last Sunday, seeing a little girl screaming and throwing her arms around her, shielding her with her own body until the shooting stopped. “I got you, I got you,” Rozen kept repeating. “I did what I could,” she explained simply later.
To the extent that I can speak for Catholics, Christians, believers, those of good will, I say to our Jewish sisters and brothers: you are not alone. We got you, we got you. As members of a shared humanity. As fellow believers under God. As neighbours and friends. This attack on you attacks all that is good and holy. It wounds us too.
We gentiles were best represented last Sunday by heroic emergency workers, lifesavers, police and others who intervened. And by Ahmed al-Ahmed, who ran at one gunman, sustaining injuries but managing to disarm him and force his retreat. He saw the victims, his father later explained, and instinct, humanity, conscience made him intervene.
But the dark stain of antisemitism on our city and nation challenges us all. Hannukah and Christmas challenge us also. To light a candle of fraternity, justice, goodness. To be instruments of comfort, healing, mercy. To repair broken trust, torn social fabric, fractured peace. To demonstrate the best of humanity after witnessing the worst.
Tonight civic and religious leaders join together to commemorate the dead and to declare: Never Again! To dedicate ourselves and our communities to building a better culture, safer laws, more civil discourse. To cultivating an environment where hatred finds no fertile ground, where violence is not tolerated, where ugly rhetoric is confronted before it divides and radicalises. For two years now, week after week, demonstrations have taken place here in Hyde Park, within earshot of the Great Synagogue, where inflammatory messages were articulated unchecked, slogans chanted that only turned up the temperature, messages delivered that made violence thinkable. This must stop!
Hanukkah and Christmas proclaim that Darkness cannot overcome Light. A day’s worth of oil can by God’s grace burn for eight. A family’s courage can spark a nation’s hope. The heroes of Bondi defy the haters who would turn Australians to the dark side. Our task is to keep the light burning.
My Jewish friends: your resilience inspires us. And those who died this Hannukah will be remembered. We will honour them best by ensuring antisemitism is prevented and denounced, that beaches, homes and businesses, places of worship and festivals are safe, and that no human being lives in fear. Eternal rest grant unto the victims, O Lord, and healing for the survivors. זכרם לברכה Zick-ron-am Liv-rck-ka May their memories be a blessing!