Mass for the Centenary Of Saint Patrick’s Parish, Mentone

Mass Celebrated By Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Patrick’s Parish, Mentone,
on Friday 13th August, 2004, at 7.30pm

Introduction

My dear brothers and sisters,

It is a real joy for me to be here with you all and with your parish priest, Father John Walshe, today as we thank God for a century of Catholic life in Saint Patrick’s parish. It is also a joy to greet Bishops Mulkearns and Matthys Sister Mary Joseph, your pastoral associate, and my brother priests who have come to share in this celebration today, along with representatives of Kilbreda, Saint Bede’s and Saint Patrick’s schools and other parish organisations.

We are also celebrating this weekend the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She already shares body and soul in the Resurrection of Jesus, her Son: she is a sign of the glorious future that God has promised to his Church. So today we look back in gratitude for so much that has been given us, and we look forward in hope to the gifts of God, which are still to come.

Let us come humbly to God, then, and ask for his strength and forgiveness.

Homily

My dear brothers and sisters,

Almost exactly a century ago, on 13th August 1904, Archbishop Carr appointed Father Thomas Quinn as first parish priest of the newly formed parish of Mentone. The parish was cut out from the enormous “Brighton Mission”, but it was itself very large. It extended from Moorabbin to Carrum, and included Highett, Cheltenham, Black Rock, Beaumaris, Heatherton, Dingley and Mordialloc, but its centre was here in Mentone, where there was already a small church built in 1885 on the present site of Kilbreda College.

Many of you will know much about the history of your parish and of Mentone. This beautiful part of Melbourne was first developed as a tourist and holiday area and the streets were given names - Como, Venice, Naples, Florence – of glamorous and exotic places that people could perhaps only dream of visiting. The Coffee Palace opened to great fanfare in 1887. No wine, ale or intoxicating liquor was to be sold there. It was not a great success and fifteen years later, just as the parish began, the Brigidine Sisters were able to buy it for Kilbreda at a bargain price.

Much has changed since those days, but you still remain here after one hundred years as a living parish community. You are an expression of our faithfulness to God and a symbol of God’s faithfulness to us. There have been four churches over that time. I have already mentioned the first. The second was built in 1905 on the Kilbreda site, and the third, which is now the parish hall, became the church in 1930. The fourth is this great church, opened in 1960, one of the most impressive in the archdiocese. It, too, is a symbol of faith, the dwelling-place of God among us, a sign that we are a people who believe that God is not far from us.

Being a parish and building a church, forming a community where people care for others, coming to church to give thanks to God in prayer and sacrament, cherishing the memory of our community’s history - all these things are ways in which we express the conviction that our faith must take concrete form in our lives and in our world. We believe that in Christ God has taken on our human flesh and dwelt among us, “full of grace and truth”, and in being a parish community we seek to do something like that; to let our faith in God take on form in this time and place, so that we can witness to one another and to those around us how much God loves us, and how we are trying to let his love set us free from all that holds us back from loving one another.

Mentone is no longer a holiday destination, but we are still a people on pilgrimage, the greatest of all journeys, the one on which God draws us to himself, and to a future we can barely dream of.

There have been eleven parish priests over the century of your existence. I cannot mention them all, but most of you will remember Cardinal Pell, of course, and Bishop Kelly, Father O’Hanlon and Father Daly. Some of you will recall Monsignor Adrian Martin and Father Timothy O’Sullivan, who was here from 1917-1928. Each of them brought something special to the parish. The many years during which you had Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament here are well remembered throughout Melbourne. Who knows what grace and what fruit that prayer produced for you and others? It is a marvellous part of your heritage and your story, and it is important that you strive to keep alive a real spirit of prayer and of contact with God. Adoration completes the wonder and search for the active, living God, who is offered in sacrifice and is present as food, medicine and comfort on our journey to eternal life.

Your principal patron is Saint Patrick, the great missionary of Ireland in the fifth century. At the end of his life Patrick wrote a declaration of his faith. “In truth and joyfulness of heart,” he says, “I want to bear witness before God and his holy angels about the gift of God. I came to feel about myself,” he says, “that I was a sort of letter from Christ to the people, a letter written in the heart, not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God.” You, too, can say that about yourselves. “I might not know much,” Patrick continues, “but I know one thing with absolute certainty: God in his mercy has come to me and raised me up, and so I ought to give thanks to him.” You can say that, too. “He has given me a great grace, and I must not hide the gift of God, ‘ Patrick said; and you can say that, as well. Indeed, you must, as we all must, if we are to be faithful to the inheritance we have received from those who have gone before us, and above all if we are to be faithful to the call of Christ to be his disciples.

Please accept my congratulations today as you celebrate the centenary of your parish. Let us make our prayer for one another in the words of “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate”, and ask:

God’s strength to sustain us
God’s wisdom to guide
God’s ear to hear
God’s word to speak;
God’s hand to protect us
God’s way before us
God’s shield to defend us,
God’s angels to deliver us.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.