Saint Kevin’s College Presentation Evening

Address given by Archbishop Denis Hart
at the Melbourne Concert Hall
on Thursday, 9th December, 2004, at 7.45pm

...

Dear Mr Russell, Parents and Young Friends of Saint Kevin’s,

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you tonight. It was a genuine pleasure for me to accept your kind invitation. Saint Kevin’s has been an important part of the Archdiocese of Melbourne since its foundation in 1918. I am very conscious of the immeasurable contribution that the Christian Brothers, lay staff, and alumni of this College, the whole Saint Kevin’s family, have made to church and community in Melbourne over many years.

Saint Kevin’s is very well known throughout the community for setting its students’ future lives on a solid foundation. Each student, of course, must build in his own way on the underpinning he is offered at school, but generation after generation of Saint Kevin’s boys have shown the marvellous and life-enhancing quality of the ethos that the college has developed. It is an inspiring tradition and a challenging example.

It would be impossible to put into words the many feelings that are with you all tonight; pride, relief, hope, anxiety, and much else besides.

There is a great deal of well-earned pride in achievement that has come only from long commitment and hard work. Some achievements we celebrate publicly. Some of the hidden achievements, which will not be mentioned aloud, are greater still. Teachers have summoned up reserves of dedication week by week that may not have always been noticed. Parents have continued their long and quiet sacrifices day by day. Students have dealt with the demands of study and have faced the challenges that come from the search for meaning and identity, from friendship and love and grief, and from those challenges in a young person’s life which demand steps into maturity that are not easy to take.

In the Gospel Jesus speaks about how the Father “sees all that is done in secret”. We have much reason to be proud, but we can celebrate only certain things.

I want to ask you above all, whether you are young or old, to have some sense of the mystery of your life. The steps you have made this year, whatever they may have been, are steps on your journey to God, and the Lord walks with you, even if you do not always realise that he is there.

What other feelings are there tonight? Relief, of course, especially for the Year 12 students, and perhaps also their families. And hope: this is a wonderful moment of hope. As you are looking forward to a whole new stage of your lives, all of us join in wishing you well.

I am sure there are anxieties and disappointments among our feelings, too. We have to accept our failings, learn from our mistakes, and make these painful experiences, too, another part of the strong foundation on which our future can be built.

It is a natural tendency to give attention to tangible and measurable things: fine buildings, healthy accounts, good grades, victories, trophies, achievements, outcomes. It is essential, however, that we do not lose sight of all that we cannot measure and touch.

When the Bali bombing shocked our country two years ago many people observed how tragedy reminds us that the most important things in life are never the ones we can measure and number. Love, faith, courage, generosity, kindness, family, friendship, endurance, even acceptance of what cannot be changed - these are the kinds of things that make life worth living.

We live in a fortunate country and a good society. Nevertheless, hour by hour, with formidable insistence and persuasiveness, our consumerist culture invites us to think that the quality of our lives can be measured by the things we own and buy. We know quite well that this is not true, and yet we are somehow persuaded by it.

A Catholic education and a Catholic school stands for something far greater than the diminished view of life presented by such a stunted culture. Jesus spoke of “life to the full”. To invite us to such a life is the mission of the Church and also of a school like Saint Kevin’s.

We need to re-imagine our lives. We are often invited to believe that religion diminishes life, but the opposite is true. Jesus tells us that if we love God, God will come and make his home in us and live within us. Is any vision of life grander and more magnificent than this?

I want to say especially to the young people here tonight: You have heard again and again that Catholicism will stunt your life. It is simply not true. You are the inheritors of a noble and humane tradition. To be a Catholic is to live in a world of the broadest horizons. It is a world that encompasses love of learning and desire for God.

• It calls you to be true to your innermost self.
• It calls you to care for others, to know that there is nobody in the entire world who is not your brother or your sister.
• It calls you to work for a life that really is “life to the full”, one that realises all your potentials, especially the grandest and the most challenging; it forbids mediocrity.
• It calls you to be someone who will make a difference to our community and our world, who will make some contribution to creating a world that is a decent place for everyone to live in.
• It calls you to stand against violence, racism, sexism, injustice, prejudice.
• It calls you to look beyond the superficial and the passing to the real heart of things.

Catholicism connects you to a tradition of heroes and saints and teachers of wisdom; and most of all to the God who dwells within you. It invites you to talk to God as to a friend, and to know that your prayers are heard. It invites you to think of your life as no small thing, but as something glorious, an opening onto the infinite.

You stand on well-laid foundations. I invite you to continue living and exploring the tradition of faith you have begun to know. If you do, you will find it a great adventure.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.