Carnivale Christi Festival

Address given by Archbishop Denis Hart
to open the Carnivale Christi Festival
on Thursday, 25th September, 2003 at 6.30pm

Address

My dear Friends,

Again this year I am delighted to be with you for the Carnivale Christi Festival. Francine Houlihan and her wonderful collaborators have done it again! One look at the programme; play, art, a Gospel reading, music, a great diversity which unfolds the richness of human endeavour and which opens to our young people the richness of Catholic culture to be loved and explored and to be spiritual nourishment for their lives.

I am particularly pleased that a Gospel reading has been inserted into the festival because it is in the Gospel that our lives intersect with the life and activity of God, who comes to save and enrich us with the beauty that Saint Augustine described as ‘beauty so ancient, beauty so new’ and then sees the challenge we face, “you were within and I outside”.

The discovery of beauty in art, music, literature, always leads us to reflect what God has wanted us to have and that in which he has wanted us to grow. With thankfulness and hope we come to admire that beauty.

My prayer is that this festival will be an annual part of Melbourne life and will provide new enthusiasm and vigour to our Catholic life and unlock for us the priceless heritage of the human contemplation of the divine, who is beauty personified and who won for us life by his cross and resurrection.

With esteem for the capacity of the artists, for the enthusiasm and giftedness of Francine Houlihan and her collaborators, I pray that as I declare this festival open it will provide enrichment, inspiration, a deepening of faith and an enrichment of beauty to all who come this way. Just as the Transfiguration revealed the glory of Christ, so may this festival in a more muted, human way show us the wonder of the faith with which God has blessed us.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.