Life. It’s a celebration. This was the message proclaimed loud and clear at St Mary’s Cathedral last weekend at the Archdiocese’s inaugural Day of Life Mass led by Archbishop Costelloe.
The celebration began with a candle procession undertaken by five leading archdiocesan groups as a sign of their unity and commitment to upholding the gift of life. These consisted of the Respect Life Office, Catholic Marriage and Fertility Services, Pregnancy Assistance and natural fertility providers, Billings and FertilityCare.
In a moving homily, Archbishop Costelloe shared his personal experience of “sitting in a hospital room in Melbourne as my mother lay dying”. He spoke of how his only brother, in a different hospital in another part of Melbourne with his wife, “was due to give birth that day to their first and only child”. He conveyed how he then received a message from his brother announcing that “his wife had given birth to a daughter and that both the baby and her mother were fine”.
“I leaned over mum and told her that she was now, for the first time, a grandmother to a beautiful baby girl,” he said. “Mum could not speak or move, but a tear welled up in her eyes and ran down her cheek. Within half an hour mum had died.”
This experience, the Archbishop noted, formed him to understand “by personal experience, what my faith had always taught me: that life is precious, beautiful and sacred from its very beginnings to its end.”
“Above all else” the Archbishop went on to say, “life is a gift and a mystery which properly lies in the hands of God rather than in our own. We must receive this gift when it is given, cherish it while we have it, and surrender it trustfully to God when he calls us home.”
He then stated that “so many others, perhaps even members of our own families or circles of friends, do not share our faith and do not have the same sense of the divine mystery and beauty of life that is so foundational for us”. However, he proposed that “it is our task to allow God to re-shape us, and to re-shape the world through us” so that we can “become people who are so attuned to the work of the Spirit of God in our lives that the beauty and dignity of human life shines through all we say and do”.
Archbishop Costelloe reminded those present to follow in the footsteps of St Mary of the Cross Mackillop and ‘never see a need without doing something about it’. “There is a great need in our time,” he said, “to celebrate, protect, welcome and promote God’s foundational gift of life.”
“It is only by learning from the one who is meek and humble of heart, and by being living images of him as we seek to do something about this great challenge of our times, that God will be able to bring about, also through us, a renewal in the minds and hearts of the people of our time” he said.
At a festival in the cathedral parish centre that followed the Mass, a varied cross-section of people gathered to learn more about the work and service of life-related organisations from across the Archdiocese.
“My hope,” the Archbishop concluded, “is that we would be able to have a specific celebration of life within the Archdiocese every year, where the beauty and dignity of human life is honoured and upheld.”
Should anyone wish to be involved with the planning of next year’s celebration, please contact the Respect Life Office at 08 9444 5320 or respectlife@perthcatholic.org.au.