Valete Speech for Parade College, Bundoora

Given By Archbishop Denis Hart
at Parade College, Bundoora,
on Monday, 24th October, 2005,at 7.30pm

...

My dear Friends,
         
Thank you for the opportunity to be with you tonight on this significant occasion in the life of the College and in the individual lives of so many of its members.  It was a genuine pleasure for me to accept the kind invitation from Brother Moore and from staff and students to be here with you. 

I would like to greet you all:

• I greet the teaching and support staff of Parade:  You have set yourself not only to teaching but to living out high ideals of Christian leadership, and I want to express my admiration on behalf of us all.
• I greet the parents of the school, especially those of thegraduating students: You are the unsung heroes of so much of what we celebrate tonight.  Your long and quiet sacrifice day by day is the foundation of all else, and we thank you.
• And especially, of course, I greet the students of the school and the graduating class of 2005.  You will be experiencing so many feelings tonight: pride, relief, hope, excitement; perhaps also some uncertainty or disappointment or sadness, all part of a great mix of emotion as you step out into a new stage of your life.

In these years of your schooling you have achieved great things.  Some of them we all know about.  Some are measurable and will be acknowledged tonight.  Other achievements, including some of the most important, are known only to a few, or perhaps only to yourself.  You have not only dealt with the exacting demands of study, but have faced the challenges that come from the search for meaning and identity, from friendship and love and grief, and from all those other challenges in a young person’s life, which call for steps into maturity that are not always easy to take.  We are proud of you, and we all bless you and wish you well.

As you know, the story of your school goes back to 1871; Parade is the oldest Christian Brothers’ School in Australia.  Your school has played a proud and much-appreciated part in the history of Catholic Melbourne.

The old Parade building in East Melbourne, now renovated and serving different but related purposes in Catholic education, is a powerful reminder of the kind of foundations that were laid by the founders of your College.  They were unshakeable foundations, built to last.  I do not mean merely the stones and mortar, though it is true enough of them.  I am speaking rather of foundations that are laid deep in people and communities, foundations that are dug down into the bedrock of life itself, that connect us with the earth from which we came, that connect us with the deepest parts of our lives as individuals and of our common humanity, and that connect us with the mysterious presence of the God who made our world and continues to keep it in being, drawing all things towards himself.

I have been asked to give what you call here the Valete Address.  At a basic level, “Valete” simply means “Goodbye”.  There are goodbyes to be said tonight on all sides, full of gratitude, sadness, relief, anxiety, excitement, even full of mystery, because in these moments of life we do not always know exactly how much we are leaving behind and how much we are taking with us, or who we will see again, or whether we will be able to return.

But “Valete” means more than “Goodbye”.  In fact, it really means “Be well”, “Be strong”.  “Valete” means: “May you have the strength you need to accomplish the things you undertake”.  It is a wish and a prayer, a well-considered and thoughtful prayer.  It is what we are all hoping and praying for you as we say goodbye, and more than goodbye, tonight.

All of you have received much from your education here at Parade.  If I may be allowed to say so, you have almost certainly received more than you realise.  It may be many years before you begin to suspect what deep foundations you stand on.  They are foundations that go down into the earth of life: the life of our families and of our community, into the life of humanity itself. 

You stand on foundations that have been laid by heroes and saints and teachers of wisdom, people who were inspired and inspiring.  They are foundations made out of all the best and noblest things in life: love, faith, generosity, imagination, endurance, hope, courage.  The Lord himself worked at laying them.  I want to invite you not to take a superficial or cynical view of life.  It is not an easy task, for we live in a materialistic and individualistic culture, which is constantly inviting us to think only of ourselves and to measure ourselves by what we own.  A Catholic education stands for something else; something nobler, more humane, more ambitious, something which is ultimately a great adventure.  It opens us up to the broadest horizons of life for ourselves and for our world.

We are not really here to say “Goodbye”, but to pray that you have the strength you need for the potential that opens up before you.  Your friends need you to be a person who is true to them and to yourself.  Your family needs you to be someone who is generous and thoughtful and open to growth and change.  Your future teachers and employers and colleagues need you to be someone who will use the gifts and talents you have been given.  Your Church needs you to be, like us, servants of one another and pilgrims on the journey that leads us into God’s mysterious future.  Our whole world needs you to keep building and repairing this wonderful but wounded world of which we are all a part.

The foundations on which you stand are very deep: they connect not just to the history of this or that, they connect you really to the deepest aspirations of humanity, and ultimately to the image of God which is in each of us.  They invite you to discover that there is no-one in this world who is not your sister or your brother, to know that what enriches another enriches you, and that what impoverishes another impoverishes all of us.  They call you to solidarity and compassion, to generosity and service.  They forbid you to live merely on the mediocre surface of life.  They invite you not to underestimate yourself or your potential, to know that you have much to give because you have been given much.  They invite you to know that you draw not just from your own strength, but from sources of life that run deep, and that ultimately flow from the God who made us.

I think my job is not really to say Goodbye, but to offer a prayer for you which comes from all of us: May you have the strength you need to accomplish what you undertake; and may you not shrink from undertaking those great and noble ideals which our tradition inspires in us.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.