Graduation Mass [The University of Notre Dame Australia]
Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Thursday 20 March, 2025
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth

Download the full text in PDF

In whom are you going to put your trust? On what are you going to base your life? From where are you going to choose your values?

These are very challenging questions. They can certainly unsettle us, especially if we have not yet given them much thought or have not yet asked ourselves whether the answers we give to them really matter.

Tonight, as we gather here in the Cathedral, I want to take the risk of putting them to you all. We are here to celebrate your graduation, to honour you for your achievements, and to entrust your futures, yes, into your own hands, but much more importantly, in this sacred place, to entrust your futures to God.

You are graduating from the University of Notre Dame Australia. It is, as you all know very well, a Catholic University. In this day and age it is rather unusual to graduate from a Catholic University. Most people graduate from universities which are public and make no claims to any religious affiliation. Those of you who know a little history, however, will know that, at least in the western world for the last thousand years or so, everyone graduated from Catholic universities because the Church was the only provider of what we today call tertiary education.

The situation has changed dramatically, of course, but the motivation for the Church to continue to establish and support Catholic universities has not changed. The Church, has in its very DNA an absolute conviction that a life lived without any recognition or understanding of God, and God’s place at the very heart of every human life, is a life which is missing something vital.

Not everyone believes this, of course, and it may well be that even some of you here this evening are not convinced. Those of you who are in this situation are no less welcome than anyone else. Notre Dame does not exist as a tool for forcing people into religious belief - for “Bible- Bashing” its students or staff. Jesus did not act in this way and nor should we. But just as Jesus was always ready to speak of what He believed, and invite people to listen to Him, to consider what He was saying, and to then follow Him if they wished, so Notre Dame exists to do the same.

This is not, of course, the only reason for Notre Dame’s existence. It exists to be a Catholic university, and it certainly cannot be that if it is not a good university, with all that this implies. After all, who would choose to study at a religiously based university, or work in such a university, if it was quite simply not a good university. Notre Dame continues to be a centre of academic excellence, a place for the free exchange of ideas, an institution which is open, tolerant and respectful, where important and challenging questions can be asked. But precisely because it seeks to be all these things, Notre Dame also seeks to be a place where the most fundamental question of all - what we might call the “God question” - is welcomed, examined and embraced.

The “God question” is really a life question. If God exists, and is engaged with creation, and particularly with human beings, then the “God question” inevitably leads to a question about the meaning of our existence. If the “God question” is and should be at home in a Catholic university, then life questions will also be at home there. And so, again, I dare to out these questions before each one of you: In whom are you going to put your trust? On what are you going to base your life? From where are you going to choose your values?

The answer the ancient Jewish scriptures propose is very clear: we heard it in the first reading for tonight’s Mass. Those who put their trust in God are like trees planted beside flowing water; when the heat comes they feel no alarm, and when the drought persists they still bear fruit. Those, on the other hand, who put their trust in someone or something else are like dry scrub in a wasteland, a salt land, uninhabited. So make the choice to trust in God, this reading says, and do not be so foolish as to trust ultimately in something else.

The theme of this reading continues in the psalm we prayed after the first reading, which concludes in this way: the Lord guards the way of the just, but the way of the wicked leads to doom. It is, of course, not God who leads us to doom, to unhappiness, to the frustrating of our deepest and highest dreams - we do that to ourselves, and we do it by the choices we make when we push God aside and replace him, as the ultimate meaning of our life and source of our happiness, with someone or something else 

To choose God, then, is to choose life. But what does this look like in practice? It looks like choosing the very thing which the rich man in tonight’s gospel failed to choose. He chose himself over a person in need. Indeed, perhaps even worse, he was so self-absorbed, possibly with his own wealth and his own importance, that he did not even notice a man in need whom he passed every day as he went in and out of his property.

In this parable of Jesus this self-absorbed rich person ended up in torment while the poor beggar, Lazarus, ended up in paradise. For Jesus, and therefore for Notre Dame which is founded on the life and teachings of Jesus, this is what it means to choose life, to choose God: it means turning our gaze away from ourselves and our own concerns and becoming alert and responsive to the needs of others. If during our years at university we do not grow in our realisation that life should be about what we can do for others more than it should be about what we can do for ourselves, then we have perhaps failed to learn the most important lesson of all.

Because Notre Dame makes room for the “God question”, and because Notre Dame, without ever imposing, is confidently proposing Jesus and his teachings as the answer to that question, Notre Dame, is offering you some answers to the basic questions of your life:  In whom am I going to put my trust? On what am I going to base my life? From where am I going to choose my values? Tonight, as you prepare to move on to whatever awaits you in your future, I urge you: choose life, choose God, for the Lord surely guards the way of the just but the way of the wicked, the way of self-centredness, leads to doom - and we all want you to flourish like the tree planted beside the flowing waters which yields good fruit and gives shade to the weary in the heat of the day.