Jan 3:00pm Divine Mercy Adoration

A CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

FROM THE ARCHBISHOP

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB Archbishop of Perth

On Sunday 31 October this year which was, of course, the day before the Church’s solemn celebration of the Feast of all Saints, the children of the Cathedral parish were invited by the Dean, Father Sean Fernandez, to come for the 11 o’clock Mass dressed as their favourite saint.

A relatively small group of children, assisted by their families, took up the invitation. What they lacked in numbers was certainly made up for by the level of their excitement. We had, among others, Our Lady herself, a Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), a Saint Clare of Assisi, a Saint Pedro Calungsod, and even some archangels who, though technically not saints, are nevertheless friends who support us by their prayers and presence in our lives.

At the end of Mass, I thanked the children for reminding us that God was calling us all to be saints. In one sense this might sound a little presumptuous. How can we possibly hope to live our lives with the dedication of Mother Teresa or with the courage of Saint Clare?

How can we match the radical commitment to poverty of Saint Francis of Assisi, or the love of God’s Will shown by Saint Mary of the Cross McKillop? Great holiness would seem to many of us, I suspect, to be an impossible goal, an unrealisable dream.

And yet this is what God is calling us to. Jesus himself tells us this when, in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, he sums up his teaching in these words: ‘You must be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48).

Saint Paul echoes this when he says in his Letter to the Romans, ‘If we live we live for the Lord, and if we die we die for the Lord. So alive or dead we belong to the Lord’ (Rom 14:8). Some few centuries later Saint Augustine will offer this prayer to God: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’.

This same understanding emerges constantly across the last 2000 years of the Church’s history, and it finds its most recent expression in these words of Pope Francis:

‘The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created. He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence’

(Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, par 1).

Pope Saint John Paul II also spoke of this and linked it to the long history of devotion to the saints in our tradition. There is, he said, ‘a lived theology of the Saints’.

Not all of us have the opportunity or the inclination to devote many years of our life to the study of theology. Those who do can offer us the precious gift of a deeper understanding of our faith. But that gift can also be found in the stories of the lives of the great women and men whom the Church recognises as saints. Each one of them can say to us, as Saint Paul said to the community in Corinth, ‘Be imitators of me, as I am an imitator of Christ’ (1 Cor 11:1).