Homilies
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6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 12 February 2023
At the Law Institute in Melbourne there is a restaurant called, “The Bottle and the Snail.” It is named after a famous law case in the early 1930s, the case of Donoghue and Stevenson.[1] A young lady had drunk a bottle of ginger beer and as she was finishing it discovered a snail at the bottom of the bottle. Within a few days she had fallen sick, but at the time there was no legal apparatus by which which could gain any kind of compensation. Eventually the case was taken all the way to the English House of Lords which accepted the principle in common law which is now the…
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Australia Day – 26 January 2023
There is always discussion about the date of Australia Day. Is the 26th January the most appropriate day to celebrate our national identity? One imagines that every year, the discussion will re-ignite, and only time will tell how the question is resolved. However, it strikes me that the very question itself highlights an essential element of our identity as Australians. Perhaps, our identity itself is marked by a question. It is a question that is inevitable given that we are people who live in the intersection between two perspectives. And we live, unsure of how to resolve these two perspectives. In the Australian experience, the most ancient of peoples intersect with the most modern,…
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Memorial Mass for the late Cardinal George Pell – Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral, Diocese of Broken Bay – 16 January 2023.
At any funeral, one of the most remarkable experiences is listening to the eulogy of the one whose life is celebrated. For a few brief moments it is like being at the window of the person’s life; something of the radical uniqueness of the person’s life, their story and their journey are glimpsed, how their life was inter-woven into the stories and journeys of others. Yet, even when we hear a eulogy, we realise that the memories being shared cannot fully capture the person who is mourned. Indeed, even our own most special memories of the one we love are but glimpses of the mystery of who they are. Yes, our memories hold…
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2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 15 January 2023
“Scapegoating” is a term we are well used to. We know the tendency of a group being assailed with problems to shift blame onto one individual. He or she must wear the group’s guilt and is sacrificed accordingly. Ordinarily, this person is ironically innocent of the group’s crime. That is also of the nature of scapegoating: there is an inherent injustice about its use -an innocent party is made to be responsible for the group’s woes. How we saw this play out in the extraordinary miscarriage of justice in Victoria in relationship to Cardinal Pell’s conviction in 2018, and indeed continuing to be played out in some of the media…
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Solemnity of the Epiphany – 8 January 2023
On New Year’s Eve last year, I was introduced to ChatGPT – the powerful, interactive search engine that is built with Artificial Intelligence. Its capacity is overwhelming, creating instant responses to questions that are as personal as they are detailed. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence to become an active partner in conversation brings us to a new threshold of the Communications Revolution. It suggests a new frontier of cyberspace. Clearly, the future belongs now to the engagement with Artificial Intelligence on a whole range of levels. It’s a brave new world. The remarkable thing, of course, about ChatGPT is just not its power to galvanise the scope of the internet,…
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Christmas 2022
The spirit of Christmas arises this year in a way different from the previous three. The COVID virus is still with us. Yet, this Christmas we have a sense of movement and association we have not enjoyed since Christmas 2019. And yet, still we sense an uncertainty and an anxiety in the humid air. Writing recently in the Sydney Morning Herald,Michael Idato remarked, “As the old year fades away, the exhaustion is palpable. Perhaps our post-pandemic lives have not lived up to the promise of the so-called Roaring 20s. The [last] year was to be a year of renewal and rediscovery. Travel was back. The world was back. So, what…
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4th Sunday of Advent – 18 December 2022
On this the Sunday before Christmas, we light the fourth candle for Advent – the candle of peace. Over our journey we have lit candles for hope, for faith, for joy. Now, on the eve of Christmas. we do so for peace. Peace is the quality that perhaps we most often associate with Christmas. It is the quality we want to surround our coming celebration – the outcome of the lights, the gifts, the carols, our Christmas Mass, our family gathering. For a few brief moments, Christmas promises us peace. We catch our breath; we glimpse innocence; we let go of the demands of our work; we rest. That peace might…
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2nd Sunday of Advent – 4 December 2022
We mark our journey to the Festival of Christmas by each week lighting a candle on our Advent Wreath. Each candle represents one of the blessings of Christmas: hope, faith, joy, peace and finally love that crowns all the rest. These are the true gifts of Christmas, the gifts given to us as those who seek the birthing of the life of Jesus more deeply in our hearts and in our world. In lighting each candle, we are reminded of how we are to be people of hope, faith, joy, peace and love. On this second Sunday of Advent we light our second candle, the candle signifying the gift of…
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33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 13 November 2022
There can be little doubt that we are living through a dramatic epoch. Pope Francis himself has observed on a number of occasions that the world is at war. It is at war, he has said, because there is no peace. Ours is a time of dislocation. So much seems to be shifting from under us. Something new is developing but what it might be we do not know. When the rate of change is intense and everything of the past is perceived to be falling apart, it is understandable that people feel insecure, they become afraid. They look for security. Some look for security by trying to restore the…
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32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time – 6 November 2022
One of my small claims to fame is that I was in correspondence with the late Princess of Wales. I should hasten to add that the full extent of the correspondence between us was a mass produced card of gratitude from Kensington Palace in response to my rather lengthy epistle to Diana in which I had expressed gratitude for a comment she made during her famous – or infamous – 1995 BBC television interview with Martin Bashir.[1] In that much publicized exchange I had been remarkably struck by the explanation of her struggle with royal politics which had rendered her particularly vulnerable. Diana put forward, “there’s no better way to…