Introduction to Sydney Catholic Schools End of Year Staff Mass
St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, Thursday 2nd Week of Advent, 12 December 2024
Sometimes in life we feel besieged, as though, in the words of our Gospel, the violent were taking God’s kingdom by storm (Mt 11:11-15). In a report entitled Persecuted and Forgotten? Aid to the Church in Need recently named eighteen countries where Christians are “subject to increased risk of harassment, arrest and violence—churches are burnt, Christian women are abducted and raped, and the faithful are killed for their beliefs.”[1] In the most egregious cases, entire communities of Christians—often dating back to the earliest years of the Church—have had to flee or face death.
In Australia believers are fortunate to enjoy freedom of worship, speech and association, but we should never take it for granted. The recent spate of anti-Semitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne are appalling and deserve condemnation by all. There are also some who would marginalize all religions, and especially the Catholic Church, interfere with who teaches what in our schools and churches, severely curtail our contribution to welfare, healthcare and education, or exclude us altogether from the public square.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the incoming student leaders of our schools for 2025 and hearing from them about the challenges in their local communities. There were some consistent themes: the power of consumerism and the social media; the unremitting secularisation of the culture and its negative stereotypes of Catholicism; the polarisation in the media and community; contending with personal doubts, lukewarm faith or lack of support for professing and living faith; and the challenges of leading others through such things.
Teaching, too, can sometimes feel like it did for the prophets of old, trying to maintain hope and offer guidance in an often unsupportive world. How do we maintain sufficient faith, hope and love within ourselves to share with others, light for them in darkness, counsel amidst fears? In our Gospel we hear of our Advent prophet, John the Baptist. Like some persecuted Christians today, he’s languishing in prison awaiting likely execution (Mt 4:12; 14:3). Filled with dark doubts, he sends his disciples to check that Jesus is all He was cracked up to be. Jesus reassures them. He then addresses the crowd (Mt 11:11-15), lauding His cousin as the greatest man born in the old covenant. He says he’s Elijah 2.0—a reference to the courageous prophet who led the Israelites away from idol worship. John addressed the sullying of souls by proclaiming a baptism of repentance (Lk 3:1-3). He stared down the violent wolves by proclaiming the coming of a Lamb and Dove (Jn 1:29-32,36). He promised something greater (Jn 1:20,27,30), One who would baptise not just with water but the Holy Spirit’s fire (Lk 3:16-17).
Eventually John was put to death for speaking truth to power and for his countercultural adherence to God’s will for marriage (Mt 14:3-12). Yet for all of his courage and fidelity, Jesus says, an ordinary Christian, least in His new kingdom, is greater (Mt 11:11). It’s a puzzling assessment, unnerving even. What would we have to be or do to be worthy of being counted greater than John the Baptist?
Martin Scorsese is one of cinema’s most awarded directors, with movies like Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). He’s had a complicated relationship with his Italian Catholic faith. With five wives and some strange views, he’s called himself ‘a lapsed Catholic’ but insisted there’s really no way out of it.[2] More recently he declared that “after many years of thinking about other things, dabbling here and there, I am most comfortable as a Catholic. I believe in the tenets of Catholicism.”[3] Some of his films have strong spiritual themes, which doesn’t mean they are orthodox, let alone hagiographical. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) was a controversial epic about Jesus’ struggle with his own humanity; Kundun (1997) about the fourteenth Dalai Lama; and Silence (2016) about an apostate Jesuit missionary to 17th-century Japan.
After meeting Pope Francis last year, Scorsese said he’d like to make a new film about Jesus.[4] In the meantime Fox have just started streaming a series, Martin Scorsese Presents the Saints. The most recent episode is on John the Baptist whom Scorsese says was “born to be a holy messenger” but got caught up in the political and spiritual tensions of his day. He was a seeker, Scorsese says rather self-referentially: “John searched for a path, but a path to what? Knowledge? Enlightenment? Truth? All of those things at once?”[5]
Well, if the Baptist as a holy seeker speaks to the famous director, he speaks to us, too: about the search for knowledge, enlightenment and truth in the face of our complex social situation; and about the ‘prophetic’ role of our SCS leaders and staff, principals and teachers, indeed the students themselves. In meeting us in history as one of us and offering us a share in His divinity through His sacrifice on the cross, Christ inaugurated a new and everlasting covenant—a relationship with God like no other and infinitely greater than those that preceded it. It is in this sense that we can be “greater than John”, not through our own merits but through being joined to Christ Himself.
This, my dear friends at Sydney Catholic Schools, is the cause of our Advent joy! It is the source of hope that animates all we do in Catholic education as seekers and prophets. Your efforts this year past to serve our schools and so “all the children born of women” entrusted to them, have contributed to Christ’s project of building a new kingdom amongst them. Hopefully all will have gained from the past year with us, and many have come closer to being the courageous prophets and well-rounded human beings, learned and wise, that we need in our time, proclaiming Christ and the Good News He offers to a new generation. And in the year to come we will redouble our efforts under new leadership. I encourage each of you to deepen your relationship with the One to whom John pointed—even from the womb, when he was at Jordan baptising, when he was languishing in prison, and as he joins us in Advent—the Child-child whose Jubilee 2025 we will celebrate in the year ahead. Thank you and God bless you!
[1] https://acninternational.org/persecuted-and-forgotten-a-christians-persecution-report/ So, too, earlier this year the highly-respected Pew Research Centre published a study that found harassment of religious groups has reached an all-time high around the world and that Christians are by far the most targeted group, suffering some sort of persecution in as many as 160 countries: Pew Research, Globally, Government Restrictions on Religion Reached Peak Levels in 2021 , 5 March 2024 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/03/05/harassment-of-religious-groups-returned-to-peak-level-in-2021/pr_2024-3-5_religious-restrictions_2-02-png/
[2] Robert Blake, After Image: The Incredible Catholic Imagination of Six Catholic American Filmmakers (Loyola Press, 2000), p. 25.
[3] Cindy Wooden, “Filmmaker Martin Scorsese talks about his faith, unpcoming movie ‘Silence’,” National Catholic Reporter 16 October 2017.
[4] Nick Vivarelli, “Martin Scorsese meets Pope Francis, Announces film about Jesus,” Variety 29 May 2023.
[5] Taylor Penley, “Martin Scorsese brings John the Baptist’s story of defiance and faith to Fox Nation,” Fox News 24 November 2024.