Blessing of School Extensions at Saint Benedict's School, Burwood

Celebrated By Archbishop Denis Hart
at Saint Benedict's School, Burwood,
on Sunday, 18th June, 2006, at 3.00pm

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am delighted to be with Father Ross McKenney and with your Principal, Mrs. Louise Mackay, as we bless these new extensions.

It is fitting that this should take place on a Sunday because the Lord’s Day reminds us that in a Catholic school we owe our first allegiance to our God. In Catholic education we seek to prepare our young people most completely for their relationship with God and their preparation for life.

Homily

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today as we rejoice in this new development at Saint Benedict’s School we have a valued opportunity to reflect on the possibilities, which are provided to us.

Working with our government and community, you have provided new educational facilities. This indeed shows the respect, which is owed to each person and is a generous fulfilment of the responsibility that we have for our young people.

Thank you as a community for your wanting the very best for the young people of Burwood. Thank you for all that has been done by school, builder, architect, and by Father Ross McKenney to bring this project to a reality as we arrive to this day of thanksgiving.

Saint Benedict’s is a Catholic school. That is why our facilities are blessed. Blessing is invoking God’s presence upon all that happens here. It is reminding us that our schools are places set apart for the broadest kind of learning about God and the natural sciences. They are very much the place where our young enthusiasm and desire for knowledge about life intersect with our knowledge of and response to God, the Creator of Life.

Your patron Saint Benedict, living in the sixth century, was the founder of western monasticism, gathering communities of men and women to focus on God, to intercede for the world and to combine prayer and daily work as the particular contribution which they made to meet the world of his time.

Saint Benedict’s love of God, love of learning, ability to provide in his rule for relationships between people, gathers together all that we seek to do in Saint Benedict’s school; to be in touch with God, our Maker, from all that he gives to see what we learn and develop of knowledge and of our other gifts and to place it at the service of God and society.

This is the function which our Church provides to the Australia of our time and as Saint Peter said, ‘we have to show to the world the reason for the hope which is in us’.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.