Australian National Conference 2004

“Passion for Truth in a sometimes hostile world”

Homily for the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Conference Mass
Polding Centre Sydney, 6 March 2004
Bishop Anthony Fisher OP

Last week I saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ with several hundred university students. You could hear a pin drop: a new generation were seeing and hearing a story long denied them in our culture. Some talked for hours afterwards; others sat in stunned silence.

Not all the critics were equally impressed. New York Times reviewer AO Scott derided the film as gratuitous, sadomasochistic violence, complaining that “violence against the innocent demands righteous vengeance” (as we usually get in Gibson films), but that there is none here. Why no pay back, no vindication? he wondered.

Jesus explains it, time and again, to those who will hear: it is a message more important today than it was in 33 ad. Not a message of gratuitous violence but of gratuitous love: grace , as Christians call it, pure gift, undeserved, often unreturned, divine love. In scenes from the Agony in the Garden, the Sermon on Mount and the Last Supper the film shows us Jesus' teaching: Put away the sword… Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… No greater love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends… Love one another as I have loved you…

In a breathtaking encounter with his mother during the cruel march to Calvary, Gibson's Christ says: See Mother I make all things new. Even from the cross he forgives: no pay back; an altogether new response to evil. But hope springs up again, even amidst such candid violence. Still bearing the wounds of our sin and suffering, Jesus rises from the dead.

Were Mr Scott and his fellow critics, I wondered, watching a different film to me and my teenaged companions? In a sense they were. They speak from a perspective and for a culture that, if it wants Jesus at all, wants a nice guy Jesus who pats us a lot but makes no demands. But the unsanitised Christ contends with sin, the flesh and the Devil – our ancient enemies. That is very unfashionable in a culture that has translated sin into a psychological problem or political incorrectness. A culture that sees flesh as something to be indulged or exploited, rather than reverenced and sacrificed. That denies very existence of evil and only demonises enemy leaders. A culture that would empty the cross of its power, and substitute something altogether more tame and comfy. A culture that finds deeply disturbing Jesus' claim to Pilate that I have come to bear witness to the truth and finds itself more in synch with Pilate's Veritas? Quid est veritas?

This fellowship, of Catholic scholars both in the specialist sense of loyal Catholic academic teachers and researchers, and in the broader sense of Catholics learned in arts or sciences but applying them in other ways, is dedicated to Veritas , to searching for and formulating and communicating the truth as best we can – assisted by the teaching authority of the Church. This is a project which, as the story of Jesus so well demonstrates, is not always easy, let alone greeted with applause in this world, which is why we need the support of one another in a Fellowship such as this.

For though only the truth ultimately satisfies the human mind, it can be terribly unsettling: it exposes our unjust structures, institutions and policies; our long-ingrained and firmly-held prejudices; our self-centredness, ideologies and inhumane behaviour. Truth is confronting, disturbing, subversive: so much so, we sometimes want to flee it or even to flay it alive.

Yet as we follow that dangerous course of learning and telling truth, we have by our side, as did the One who is Truth incarnate, that woman of whom the Word took flesh – Mary, whom today we celebrate as the Seat of Wisdom and whose intercession and protection we seek for all Catholic scholars. Hers is, in many ways, the most interesting portrayal in Gibson's film: she weeps, of course, for she is the Mater dolorosa . But she is so much more than the romantic swooner or the pious simpleton of some devotions: she is here a strong and intelligent woman.

Our great litanies to Mary capture something of the complexity of her character, drawing our attention to the myriad aspects of human personality that she presents to her Son for sanctification: not just gentleness and humility, compassion and sorrow, but also human creativity and sexuality, spirituality and animality, and always, always, human intelligence. Pope John Paul II has spoken for our long tradition when in Veritas Splendor and Fides et Ratio he insisted that the Mary of our devotion is a wise woman, a contemplative, a thinker.

We don't know much about what Mary did, or what she felt, but we do know from the Gospels something of what she thought. We are told that for the nine months in which she carried him in her womb, for the thirty years in which she cared for him in her house, and for the three years when she accompanied him on the road, Mary pondered the Logos of God. What she grasped, however incompletely, was that that child that sat upon her lap was Wisdom itself, the Witness to Truth. And as she dandled him upon her knee and pondered all these things in her heart, she was the seat of wisdom, the throne of truth.

No human being who has ever lived has had more reason to be puzzled to point of confusion and despair than did Mary. For she was given things to contemplate more incomprehensible than any of us has ever been asked to contemplate: pregnancy without intercourse; God conceived in her own body; her little boy, flesh of her flesh, disappearing so as to teach the Doctors in the Temple; her boy grown into a man, dying upon a cross for the salvation of all. How much of all this she understood we do not know. What we do know is that she never gave up on pondering these terrible and wonderful things, on telling others to do as her Son directs, until she was assumed into that very Court of Truth, body and soul, to enjoy at last beatific vision.

As the Pope has taught, no human science, no art or craft, no theology or philosophy, not even – though I shudder to say it – St Thomas' is perfect: because all Catholic scholars, all human minds, have fallen. Yet one, by Christ's pre-redeeming grace, did not fall. One mind was unaffected by sin and the pall it puts over human perception and passion, imagination and memory, reason and choice. One mind was saved from the cloud over our eyes and disintegration of our character. And that mind saw, with crystal clarity, that we must dedicate all our gifts of mind and will to the story of Christ's incarnation and redemption.

Whatever we think of Gibson's attempt to retell it, the Seat of Wisdom reminds us that the story of Jesus himself, however confronting, must be heard by us and pondered by us and proclaimed by us. It is a story which has been plumbed and retold by Catholic scholars for two thousand years now and one that is handed in turn to our generation to explore again and tell anew: our testimony to the Truth, our startling good news, of God amongst even the mess of human suffering, offering us time and time again, truth, beauty and goodness, love, mercy and hope.