Feast of Mary Magdalene

Mass Celebrated by Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Mary Magdalen’s Church, Trentham,
on Friday, 22nd July, 2005, at 7.30pm

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am delighted to be one with Father Gerard Johnson, your parish priest, and all of you to thank God for the centenary of Saint Mary Magdalen’s Parish, established just one hundred years ago.

You and I know that the hundred years is only part of the story of Trentham and we come thanking God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, for his many gifts and blessings, for the deep faith and generosity which has been here since the beginning and beg Jesus, really present in the Eucharist, to nourish and strengthen us as we continue our journey, joyfully thanking God for the many blessings of his constant presence.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This evening in Saint Mary Magdalen’s we gather together more than a hundred years of the history of the families and of the Catholic faith in this district. From 1854 early settlers bought leaseholds of a very large number of acres. The bullock teams numbered about one hundred. When gold was discovered at Blackwood many diggers passed through Trentham on their way to the goldfields. Since 1870 the Walsh family have lived on a farm two miles from Trentham and ten years later the railways were opened. The area is known for its rich, chocolate soil, potato growing, grain crops and pastures and for the enrichment, which the local springs provide.

In 1868, fourteen years after the first settlement, Trentham was proclaimed a town. Significant in the development of Trentham was that in 1870 the site was reserved for a Catholic church and two years later the first church was built on a triangular block between High and Bridge Streets. It is not surprising that the name of the person who selected the site was Patrick Murphy.

Trentham had been part of Kyneton in the time of Father Horatio Geoghegan and a church-school had been here from the earliest days, served by lay teachers until the Sisters of Mercy arrived in 1901. They actually resided here from 1906 until 1939, after which the Sisters came from Kyneton.

Tonight we celebrate the centenary of the establishment of Trentham as a parish in 1905. Note specifically that Archbishop Carr laid foundations for the church on 27 th May, 1906, and for the presbytery on the same day. Later on Archbishop Mannix was to establish the school foundation stone on 12 th June, 1938.

Your parish motto, ‘Fides Galea Caritas Hasta’ – ‘Put on the breast plate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation’ (1 Thess. 5:8), is a reminder of the courageous faith that has existed in Trentham for more than one hundred years.

Trentham has served eleven villages: Barry’s Reef, Blackwood, East Trentham, Fern Hill, Little Hampton, Lyonville, Newbury, North Blackwood, Spring Hill, Trentham and Tylden.

The parish has been served by twenty-six parish priests, from Father Collins to Father Gerard Johnson. The parish has been a seedbed of many religious vocations – at least four Priests, thirty Nuns and one Christian Brother and the firm faith of Irish settlers is a rich heritage, which has been passed on to us.

One thing, which in my mind has always characterised the Irish, has been their devotion to prayer, their love and respect for God and for the holiness of the Mass and the Sacraments, and their constancy in loyalty to the Church and readiness to defend it. It is perhaps a lamentable note of modern times that many of the more personal and communitarian aspects of family life in the country have been eroded by the advent of the motorcar and the general exodus to the cities.

Saint Mary Magdalen’s devotion to Our Lord, “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have put him”, when she visited the empty tomb is a reminder that the constant Irish faith is built on a purposeful and genuine love of the Eucharist, of the Rosary and of the faith that has sustained the Irish people and those who came to Australia for generations.

Our celebration tonight is one of memory and thanksgiving. Although we might lament the exodus, both from our town and from the way of life, which has been so spiritually enriching, we do need to remember that God is constant and faithful to his people. The Lord who lived, died and rose again will not desert us. He invites us to encounter that same Lord in the Mass and the Sacraments, to be faithful to prayer, and by our example in the community to make personal and active for the next hundred years our thanksgiving for God’s constant love and many blessings. Indeed, the same Lord who said again and again, “Do not be afraid little flock because it has pleased your heavenly Father to give you the kingdom”, will not fail his people.

It is most important for you and for me that we value the faith that has been handed on to us, that we live it and that by example we make that faith, which is for all people, to reach out into our community by our prayerfulness, our Christian example and service.

In this Year of the Eucharist the Church invites us to a renewed devotion to prayer, a readiness to show the attractiveness of the Gospel to our sisters and brothers, and to a confident, unashamed awareness that our God is with us, whom he has blessed so richly, as we celebrate this centenary.

May I personally congratulate you on all that you are and all that you do on this day, which incidentally happens to be the anniversary of my Ordination to the priesthood.

To the families, who have lived the faith for generations here, I salute you. To those, who search for God, I walk with you. For those, who need the mysteries of our faith, I celebrate this Mass, the greatest act of worship of God, when our God reaches into our lives and those of our families to draw us on to a journey where he is our Way, our Truth and our Light.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.