Annual Migrant & Refugee Mass

Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne,
on Sunday, 13th October, 2002, at 3.30pm

Homily

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to the Cathedral today as we celebrate the annual Migrant and Refugee Mass. We also celebrate today Our Lady of Fatima. It was on 13th October that the final apparition took place at Fatima and we recall this afternoon that great sign in which the Mother of God herself shared her prayers with us.

It is appropriate that our Readings today ponder the theme of journeying. We hear of Christ travelling back to his Father after the Resurrection appearances and ascending to glory at the Father’s right hand. In the Gospel we see Christ sending out his disciples to journey to the four corners of the world, teaching and baptising. It is fair to say that our religion is one of travel, of starting out afresh. From the time Adam and Eve took their first steps out of the garden of Eden into a fallen world, we see God’s people taking long journeys, endeavouring despite hardships and misunderstandings to return to the Father.

The life of Jesus Christ too is a life of travel. Even before his birth, Jesus was travelling as his mother carried him over the mountains to visit her cousin Elizabeth — on a journey which the Pope has referred to, beautifully, as ‘the first Corpus Christi procession’. After Mary and Joseph’s long trek to Bethlehem, the Holy Family became true refugees, flying in a state terror and hiding in Egypt. Throughout the Gospels Christ continues to travel the countryside, halting only to teach, to heal, and to comfort those who come out to meet him. Finally, in that darkest of all journeys, Christ follows the via dolorosa, the way of the cross, walking out of Jerusalem to meet his death.

The Gospels and tradition affirm that Christ was accompanied in his travels by his mother. The Blessed Virgin follows in the footsteps of her Son, no doubt consumed by worry, but also by joy as she sees her son mature and begin his public mission. Tradition holds that even after Christ’s death, Mary continues to travel, journeying to Patmos with John, the disciple to whom Christ had entrusted her.

So Jesus and Mary are great travellers — sometimes on the move because of their great work and sometimes because of the need to flee danger. These are the same reasons why many of our migrants and refugees have left their shores and travelled to our country: some journey for work, others from necessity and the need to flee danger. Migrants and refugees follow a path that begins in anxiety and, hopefully, ends in peace and security. It is a path that Christ and his mother have themselves sanctified.

It is of course one of our most serious Christian duties to receive and care for the stranger and the voyager. It is much to be hoped that the peoples and leaders of our country will always realise this and that we will once again show the generosity and welcome that, at its best, our country has shown. We all need to take seriously Jesus’s words: that to care for the stranger is to care for Jesus, and to deny the stranger is to deny Jesus.

This year in our Archdiocese we are focussing on the Pope’s Letter for the new millennium, Novo Millennio Ineunte. Our theme for this month is ‘Starting afresh with Christ’. This is an especially appropriate theme for our Mass today.

Each and every one of us is called to stop, think, and to begin anew, following in the footsteps of Christ, his mother, and the disciples. This is why we are called ‘followers’ of Jesus: we are on a journey with our Lord, following him, in communion with our fellow-travellers in the Church.

Of course, this journey is more painful for some than for others: many of us have not experienced the pain and homesickness of the refugee or the migrant. Yet all of us have in common this one most important journey that we all must make: our individual journeys back to Christ.

So I thank those of you here for the model and example of courage and patience on the journey that you give us all. I thank too the Migrant and Refugee Office for the support its staff offers to our migrants and refugees. And I invite you all to ponder the challenge to start afresh with Christ. For he has assured us that however weary we may be, he is with us always ‘yes, even to the end of time’ (Mt 28: 20).

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.