Blessing and Opening of the Joint Academic Centre for Newman College and Saint Mary’s College,
University of Melbourne

Homily Preached by Archbishop Denis Hart
on Sunday, 3rd October, 2004, at 3.00pm

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

It is a great pleasure for me to be here today on this important occasion, the blessing of your new Academic Centre. It expresses a dynamic vision of Catholic University education in Australia. It signals our commitment to a faith, which is at the service of the university and the wider community and engaged in dialogue with all that is good in human endeavour. It expresses our hope for the present generation of young people and our commitment to them and to the generations that will come after them, as our pilgrim Church continues its journey. Most of all, this blessing expresses our desire to dedicate to God, the source of life and of true wisdom, both this building and the lives and work of all who will enjoy its wonderful facilities.

Newman College, of course, is named after Cardinal John Henry Newman, perhaps the most outstanding English Catholic of the 19th century. Since 1911 the College has been in the care of the Jesuits, and I want to thank them today for the inspiring work they have done here over these many years.

One of Cardinal Newman’s greatest and most influential works was his Idea of the University of 1858. One of Newman’s key words in this book is “enlargement”. The university, he thought, is a place where people should grow in every way, where minds should be opened to the truest meaning of ourselves and of the world in which we live. Such enlargement of the mind is not the result merely of learning new things and getting new ideas, says Newman, but of ordering what we learn and making our own what is most important and most life-giving. It is a dynamic process, a movement which is at once towards wisdom, towards God, and towards our own centre.

A great intellect, he says, takes a connected view of everything, of old and new, past and present, far and near, and has an insight into the way the search for truth brings us to our own moral centre, and makes us able to receive and use God’s gift of wisdom.

You have enlarged your facilities, but I know that you have done so in service of the enlargement of minds, in the magnificent sense of which Newman speaks. I pray that this will indeed be a place where minds are opened and the seeds of life-long wisdom are planted and nurtured.

Saint Mary’s College is named for Our Lady, the Mother of the Lord. Since 1962 it has been in the care of the Loreto Sisters. Like the Jesuits, they also draw inspiration from Saint Ignatius Loyola and the great spiritual and educational tradition which he established in the Church; Mary Ward expressed it anew for women religious and for the young women and girls they dedicated themselves to educating. I want to thank the Loreto Sisters, too, for the inspiring work they have done here over these four decades. We are indeed fortunate in the leadership they continue to give.

Newman, as it happens, wrote movingly about the Blessed Virgin as a model of learning. She did not go to university, but Newman found her the very pattern of anyone who studies with a view to wisdom for life: Mary did not just accept, he says, but pondered upon what she learned; she did not just possess learning, but used it; she enlarged and developed what she learned, and reasoned upon what she believed.

This new Centre connects two colleges, but it is also a symbol of a very important contribution which these Catholic Colleges bring to the university: that is, our deeply held conviction about the connection of faith and reason. Pope John Paul has compared faith and reason to “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth” (Fides et Ratio 1). In their different ways Mary and Newman lived out this invitation and this challenge, to bring learning to the service of faith and faith to the service of learning, to stand against the fragmentation of life, to prefer what unites to what divides. I hope you will continue to find them inspiring examples.

I wish to thank all those whose vision brought this project to its beginning - the imagination of Allan and Maria Myers to build a library with the unanimous support of the two College Councils.

I wish to thank, too, all those whose labours brought the project to completion: Peter Corrigan, Architect; Peter Stosius, Builder; and the magnificent supervision of Mr. Ed Ryan.

Finally, I want to thank those whose generosity has made it possible for the vision to become the marvellous reality we see before us today: donors, College staff and students.

In particular, on behalf of all those near and far, present and future, who will benefit from this facility, I want to express our heartfelt gratitude to Allan and Maria Myers for their extraordinary generosity.

The Scriptures are not entirely clear about when wisdom comes to us: Qoheleth seems to think that those who stay up late at night (in order to study, I hasten to add) are likely to find the gift of wisdom. The Book of Proverbs, on the other hand, favours those who get up early in the morning. I am not sure what the opening hours of the new centre will be, but I hope everyone who uses it, whether in the day or the night, will feel something of the presence of the Holy Spirit who leads us to the truth.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.