Opening of St Anthony’s - Outreach and Supported Accommodation, Goulburn Syd Tutton, National President, 26th March 2009
Senator Stephens, Father Bent, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It has been said in many places that a society should be judged on how it treats its most vulnerable members. For me, I will always remember these words being uttered by our former Governor-General, Sir William Deane, a man who continues to bear prophetic witness to this Gospel value. This is the principle behind the opening of St Anthony’s Outreach and Supported Accommodation today. It is an incredibly simple principle and yet it seems to be so hard for any given society to adhere to it, especially when that society is prosperous and advanced. In this, my friends, lies a stark contradiction. You would think that prosperity and progress would go hand in hand with a greater sense of compassion and protection for the vulnerable members of society. The opposite, however, is what appears to occur. 1
The St Vincent de Paul Society, along with so many other wonderful organizations in Australia today, bears witness to the radical value-system of the Gospel that turns everything upside-down. It was the wonderful Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who was, of course, martyred for the stand he took on the side of the vulnerable and marginalized, who famously said that he was called all sorts of names for challenging the values of a society that created more and more poverty and inequality but that all he was doing was bearing witness to the Beatitudes, which had turned everything upside down. In this spirit, I want to share with you another thought about vulnerability and exclusion. The service we are opening today, with the generous support of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, seeks to provide safety and stability to single women in the Goulburn-Mulwaree region with a special focus on the elderly and frail aged. This service, as with all that we do in the St Vincent de Paul Society, is not, however, content with simply supplying the immediate solution to an immediate need. We are challenged to go much further. We are challenged to enable vulnerable people to take control of their own lives. We do not accept the idea that people 2
are to blame for their own marginalization. We do, however, believe that people are able to overcome the odds that have been stacked up against them if the right resources are made available and, most importantly, if we are able to change the conditions in society that make things impossible for them. The founder of the St Vincent de Paul Society, Frederic Ozanam, put it this way: “You must not be content with tiding the poor over the poverty crisis. You must study the injustices which brought about such poverty, with the aim of a long term improvement.� Thank you, my dear friends, for joining us today for this very special occasion. Together, let us rise to this challenge with a firm hope in a better future.
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