ZimCatholics Australia & New Zealand Annual Congress
Friday of Week 27 of Ordinary Time

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Friday 10 October, 2025
Swan Valley Adventure Centre, Swan Valley, Perth WA
 

Download the full text in PDF

As you all gather together to celebrate 12 years of your movement, ZimCatholics, the coming together of the Zimbabwean Catholics of Australia and New Zealand, you do so in this Jubilee Year of Hope.

As the Archbishop of Perth, I am particularly grateful that you have decided to celebrate this important anniversary here in our Archdiocese, and I want to assure you that you are all very welcome.

As you would all be aware, it was Pope Francis who decided to celebrate this Jubilee Year of Hope and of course, it was also Pope Francis who just ten years ago also invited the Church to celebrate another jubilee year, the Jubilee Year of Mercy.

If we reflect on each of these two initiatives of Pope Francis, we can begin to see how they are closely tied together. At the very centre of the Jubilee Year of Mercy was the wonderful insight of Pope Francis that in Jesus we see the face of the Father’s mercy. I will remember speaking to a large gathering of our secondary school students during the Year of Mercy and suggesting to them that we could express the idea of mercy with the word large-heartedness. In Jesus we catch a glimpse of just how much God loves us; of just how much room there is in the heart of God, in the heart of Jesus, for all of us. One of the last documents which Pope Francis left us before his death was his encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Dilexit nos. In that encyclical, Pope Francis tells us that “the heart of Christ, as the symbol of the deepest and most personal source of his love for us, stands at the origin of our faith as the wellspring that refreshes and enlivens our Christian beliefs” (DN32). Later in the same document he tells us that “Christ’s love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been lost”.

It is this which links the Jubilee Year of Mercy, the jubilee year of God’s large-heartedness, with our present Jubilee Year of Hope. In announcing this Jubilee, Pope Francis returned again to the theme of the heart. “Everyone,” he says, “knows what it is to hope. In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring” (SnC1). The Pope goes on to say that “hope is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross” (SnC3).

When we see the connection between the Jubilee Year of Mercy and the Jubilee Year of Hope we can understand why today’s gospel has been heard so often during this year. It presents us with one of the very first things Jesus is recorded as saying as he begins his public ministry – it is all about mercy, about hope and about God’s desire to fulfil our deepest hopes. Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah to explain why He has been sent from His Father in heaven: He has come, He tells us,  to bring good news to the poor; to proclaim freedom to those in captivity; to bring sight to those who are blind; to set free those who are oppressed; and to announce a year of the Lord’s favour, a year of Jubilee, a year of God’s openhearted invitation to all of us to enter into a relationship of love and forgiveness with Him.

In saying all this, Jesus is making His own someone else’s words, the words of the Prophet Isaiah. But then Jesus says something that Isaiah could never have said. “Today,” He announces, “this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing”. Today, Jesus insists, this promise of God is fulfilled for you because I am with you and I am inviting you to unite yourself with Me, to come and follow Me”.

We are still living in the “today” of Jesus. As surely as it was true for those who first heard Jesus say these words in the synagogue in Nazareth it is also true for us who hear Jesus say these words as we gather together for this celebration. This is the reason for our hope: He, Jesus, is the reason for our hope. Through the life of his Church to which we are so privileged and blessed to belong, and especially through the Word of his Gospel and through the sharing of his body and blood in the gift of the Eucharist, we come to know his love for us, the love of his Sacred Heart. We encounter Him as one who loves us and longs for us to love Him.

As you all gather for your conference this year, my prayer for you is that through your fellowship with each other, through your listening to God‘s word, through your sharing of your faith and your hope, through your openness to the grace and power of the Holy Spirit at work within you and among you, and most especially through the gift of the Eucharist, you might encounter in an ever deeper way the love of Jesus, the face of the Father‘s mercy, and the source and guarantee of your Christian hope, a hope that will never disappoint you because it is a hope which is based on Him.