Seventh Sunday Ordinary Time
Mirrabooka Parish St Gerard’s Church 50^th Anniversary

Homily

By the Most Rev Bishop Don Sproxton
Auxiliary Bishop of Perth

Sunday 23 February 2020
St Gerard’s Church, Mirrabooka Parish

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How many of you were here 50 years ago for the opening of this church?

Well done! Our seniors are thinning, aren’t they?

But it is amazing that we have here today people who carry a living memory of the occasion when this church was blessed and opened.

I used to get a bit of a rise from the late Mgr McCrann, who was here on that day as well – he was Fr McCrann at that time – and he was seated here at the front. Anyway, when he left the church   he found to his surprise that he had been sunburnt, because of the strong afternoon sunlight streaming through these western windows. It was a very hot day apparently.

He always remembered St Gerard’s Church and the day his head was terribly sunburnt, and of course being bald, it was even worse for him.

There are many others here, including myself, who have been in this Parish, and we came many years after the opening of this Church. The first time I remember seeing this Church, my family was living in Dianella. As teenagers, we would come up into the hills here which were still covered with bush, to explore the many trails. Sometimes we would venture a little bit further west and once we saw this amazing A-frame structure being built.

It was obviously the tallest, most impressive building in this area, and I think it remains so today. Because it is so recognisable, many people who have never lived here, but have been to this part of Perth, will say, ‘Oh yes, I know that Church.’ It is a very important and visible sign of the community, of us, who have lived here and created such a marvelous community in the Archdiocese of Perth.

I won’t go through the earlier history - Father Vincent Glynn did that the other day. The other evening he would have spoken about the first parish priest, Fr Peter Quinn, and how that community, that first little community of the parish, was established from a group of people living in the northern part of Nollamara, and how they became the core of this new parish community.

As time went on, the suburb developed, more and more streets were being laid down extending further north, until finally, in the days of Monsignor Michael Keating, we had the parish going right up to Beach Road and even further. There were houses being built in the areas of Girrawheen and Koondoola.

It was in the 70’s, that it became necessary to establish a couple of Mass Centres - one at Majella and then a little further north in Girrawheen. The one at Girrawheen, of course, would become the nucleus of a new parish eventually.

St Gerard’s was built in 1969 and opened in 1970. It was a very joyous occasion. I’ve heard the stories of how there were the last-minute rushes to get things ready for the opening day.

Fr Eamon McKenna was the Parish priest at the time and he had inherited this project, I understand, from Peter Quinn - who had been chosen to be Auxiliary Bishop shortly after leaving the parish - and who had the joy of coming back to celebrate the blessing of the church.

From that first little community in Nollamara, to the expansion, development and the growth of that community, through Balga and up into Girrawheen, we’ve seen a remarkable change in the parish, but I think a very important and natural change.

Quite a number of those people who were the core of that parish in Nollamara, had themselves been migrants. Many of them were from Ireland or Scotland or England, but many others from Italy, Poland, Croatia and other European countries.

In the late sixties, families began arriving from Asia. This continued through the 70’s and into the 80’s and 90’s. We saw people coming and settling, and forming an ever more vibrant and rich   community, for they wanted to make their contribution to this, their new parish community.

So we had families coming here from India and from Burma, and then the Vietnamese migration came in the 1970’s after the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975, and you welcomed all those other people from the different countries of Asia: from Korea, from Malaysia, a few from Indonesia. People from Sudan have joined us.

And more and more people were coming because they found that this area was attractive because of affordable housing, but I think they were also attracted by the fact that there was this wonderful Catholic community here, in which they found friends and were reunited with people whom they had known back home.

As time went on, Fr Geoff Aldous became Parish Priest in the early 80’s, and because of all of the building and construction that had gone on in the parish, he felt the need to develop a greater sense of community and a bringing together of so many people of diverse backgrounds.

He encouraged people to work together, to find ways in which they could collaborate, to form teams, and more and more people within the community were invited to take on responsibility for the ministries of the parish.

In a very real sense, the work of Fr Geoff was very, very significant.

I think largely because of that work we have the community that we have today, of people who seek to work together, who take responsibility for and are engaged in ministry and service, and who are wonderful collaborators with their priests in this community.

In fact, I can say that in my time here, this community that really embraced me, encouraged each of the priests assigned here, and supported all of the initiatives that we undertook at that time.

I said at the beginning of the Mass, that we are celebrating our faith today above all, that we are giving thanks to God for our faith.

Our faith teaches us that we have been set apart, as a Catholic community, not to be elite, but to be a community that belongs to God and at the same time is meant to present God in a special way to the world.

Initially this was the experience of the people that he first chose, the people of Israel: they were specially chosen, they were set apart and it was their mission to be the people who would reveal the presence of God in a special way.

The work of Fr Geoff and those priests who have followed him, and those priests who preceded him, has been basically to do the same thing: to make us aware that we are a people who have been set apart for a very special reason.

We are set apart to be a people who will show, in a special way, the presence of God.

We in fact are called temples, temples of the Holy Spirit, temples of God.

As it would be sacrilegious to destroy a temple, Saint Paul reminds us that it would be equally sacrilegious to destroy the temples of the Lord that stand before us in our brothers and sisters.

So today as we celebrate, we thank God for this physical building and I hope we can look at the community that we are and give thanks for that faith that has brought us together, has brought us to a sense of oneness, has brought us to a sense of common mission together, has helped us to understand that we are the people who are called by God to present him to the world.

And how do we present him? The Gospel tells us.

The great test that we love God is when we accept and welcome and seek to work with those who are different in mentality, culture and experience. They can challenge and oppose our points of view and assumptions, which we find difficult at the best of times. If we profess love for God, though, we will look for the Spirit within them and for the path that our encounter with the other person may indicate. The greatest test of Christian love is the ability that we have, or that we hope to have, to love everyone, even those who hate us.

When that sort of love can be seen in me, then God will be made present in our world.

So as we continue our celebrations, we give thanks for the faith, we give thanks for this community and we give thanks for that presence of God among us that challenges us to accept one another, to love one another and to recognise that each of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit and we are building the Kingdom of God together.