Installation of Fr Vincent Nguyen as Parish Priest of Parish of Lower North Shore – 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Parish Multicultural Festival – St Leonards Naremburn – 16 August 2026
During my monastic years, I was involved for some time in the work of interreligious dialogue. It was a fascinating experience because, in dialogue with people of other religious traditions, we often discovered remarkable similarities and parallels. Sometimes we found ourselves using different language to speak about experiences that seemed surprisingly close. Yet just as importantly, we encountered striking differences. And one of the dangers in interreligious dialogue, particularly when we are anxious to establish a universal sense of fraternity, is to minimise those differences, to pretend that ultimately we are all saying much the same thing. But we are not. The differences are real, and my own experience taught me that respect for the difference and otherness of another religious tradition is essential if an authentic encounter is to take place. Genuine dialogue does not say, “You are really just like me.” It says, “You are not me, and I want to understand who you are.” Paradoxically, it is only when we allow the other to be genuinely other that a true meeting becomes possible.
We do not always deal very well with difference. One writer has spoken of the “terror of otherness”. Faced with someone whose experience, culture, assumptions or way of looking at the world differs from our own, there is something in us that wants everything and everyone to become “more of the same”. We experience this even in our closest relationships. How difficult it can be to allow another person simply to be different from us. We wish they thought as we thought, reacted as we reacted, valued what we valued. Sometimes, quite unconsciously, we embark upon the impossible project of trying to make them more like ourselves. Inevitably, the result is frustration and conflict. There is, however, an enormous freedom in allowing the other to be other, in allowing another person to be fully themselves without experiencing their difference as a threat to me. Psychologically, it is one of the marks of maturity. Spiritually, it is one of the marks of holiness. I do not need you to become me in order for me to love you. Indeed, perhaps I can only truly love you when I have surrendered the desire to make you into my own image.
What is true of us personally is also true of us as a society. A mature society learns to welcome diversity in its midst. It is not frightened by the stranger or the foreigner. It has sufficient confidence in its own identity to recognise that the arrival of someone different need not diminish us but can enlarge us. It asks not simply how diversity can be tolerated, but how different histories, cultures and gifts can be integrated into a genuinely common purpose. This is an especially important reflection for us as Australians. The Australia in which we live today is one of the most culturally diverse societies in the world. Our neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, hospitals and churches are places in which people whose families have come from virtually every part of the globe now live alongside one another. This has become one of the great gifts of contemporary Australia. Yet we should not romanticise our history. Openness towards those who are different has not always come easily to us. Our history also contains exclusion, suspicion and the expectation that those who came here should leave behind much of who they were in order to become like those who were already here.
Multiculturalism at its best represents something much more interesting than that. It is not simply many cultures existing beside one another. Nor does it mean that nothing holds us together. It is the conviction that we can belong to one society, share responsibilities for one another and contribute to a common good without everyone having to become culturally identical. Unity does not require uniformity. And what is true of Australia is profoundly true of our Church. In fact, the word “Catholic” itself means universal. A monochrome Catholic Church is almost a contradiction in terms. From Pentecost onwards, the Church has been multicultural. The Acts of the Apostles does not tell us that when the Spirit descended everyone suddenly began speaking the same language. Quite the opposite: the miracle was that the one Gospel could be heard in many languages. Diversity was not abolished by the Spirit. Diversity became the vehicle of communion.
This morning we see something of that extraordinary reality as Fr Vincent is installed as Parish Priest of Lower North Shore Parish. Vincent’s own story, his Vietnamese heritage, his vocation and his ministry are themselves part of the remarkable story of the contemporary Australian Church. Fr Vincent, therefore, you have come to Lower North Shore Parish with a story. You come with a culture. You come with the experience of your family and your people. You come with your own journey of faith and vocation. And you come into a parish which itself contains many stories, many cultures, many experiences and many expectations. Your task as Parish Priest is not to make all these stories the same. It is to help them discover how, in Christ, they can become part of one larger story.
The ministry of a parish priest is itself a ministry of hospitality. Canonically, he is entrusted with the pastoral care of the community. Spiritually, this means that he is called to create a space in which people can encounter Christ and one another. He must listen before he leads. He must learn the stories of the people entrusted to him. He must recognise the gifts that are already present before deciding what is absent. He must be particularly attentive to those who stand at the edges: those who are new, those who feel overlooked, those whose first language is not English, those whose relationship with the Church is fragile, those who wonder whether there is really a place for them. Hospitality always begins with listening. To welcome the stranger means first to hear their story, to inquire into it and to allow it to remain different from my own. It is much easier to classify people than to listen to them. We can speak about “migrants”, “refugees”, “Vietnamese”, “Australians”, “young people”, “old parishioners”, “new parishioners”, “conservatives”, “progressives”, and countless other categories. Categories can sometimes be useful, but they can also protect us from the much more demanding encounter with an actual person. The moment someone tells us their story, the category begins to break open. We discover a name, a family, a hope, a disappointment, a sacrifice, a longing. We begin to recognise not a type of person but a person.
And this responsibility of shared hospitality is not Vincent’s alone. Installation is never simply about what a new Parish Priest promises to do for a parish. It also raises the question of what kind of community the parish will become with him. Will we allow our new Parish Priest to be himself, with the gifts and experiences he brings? Will we listen to his story as he listens to ours? Will we allow ourselves to be changed by one another? The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman provides a striking Gospel image of precisely this dynamic. She is a stranger and a foreigner, someone outside the cultural and religious boundaries of Jesus’ immediate community. The encounter is uncomfortable. She persists. She speaks. Jesus listens. And through that encounter the horizon opens towards the extraordinary universality of God’s saving mercy. The stranger becomes not a threat to the mission but a revealer of its breadth.
Fr Vincent, may you help Lower North Shore Parish become ever more clearly a place where difference is not feared but received as gift; where the stranger becomes neighbour; where those who arrive find a home; where older parishioners and newer communities recognise one another as belonging to the same story; where every culture is invited to place its gifts at the service of the Gospel; and where the table we share socially points always towards the deeper table around which Christ gathers us. The great miracle of Christian communion is not uniformity but reconciled diversity: many peoples, many languages, many histories, many gifts, gathered into one Body.
Then, our parish will not simply be multicultural because people of different cultures happen to worship here. It will become genuinely Catholic: a community in which our differences are not obstacles to communion but gifts placed upon a common table; a community in which hospitality becomes mission; and a community in which, through the encounter with one another, we discover more deeply the Truth who is Christ and the people he is calling us together to become.
