Dear Brothers and Sisters,

It is with great joy that I welcome you to this first function for the Pauline Year.

At Vespers on 28th June 2007, Pope Benedict announced a special year of jubilee to the Apostle, Paul, which will last until the Feast of Saint Peter and Paul in 2009 on the occasion of the bi-millennium of his birth.

There will be special celebrations at Saint Paul’s outside the walls in Rome, where the remains of the Apostle are preserved, supported by the unanimous opinion of experts and an undisputed tradition.  The emphasis in Rome and elsewhere will be for liturgical, cultural and ecumenical events.  In Rome there will be penitential pilgrimages to the Apostle’s tomb and the whole Church is encouraged to undertake studies and special publications on Pauline texts to make even more widely known the immense wealth of teaching they contain, a true patrimony of humanity redeemed by Christ.

The Holy Father has invited us throughout the world, in places of worship and study and social assistance centres, in ecumenical activities to witness to the Christ whom Paul taught so well.

Paul was converted from ideas that were deficient, defiant and destructive.  Monsignor Luigi Giussani wrote:  “The human being in all ages of history ‘resists the consequence of the mystery made flesh’, for if this Event is true then all aspects of life including the sensible and social must revolve around it and it is precisely man’s perception of being undermined, no longer being the measure of his own self that places him in the position of refusal.”

Paul’s conversion profoundly changes his own thinking and he is constant in inviting Christians to embrace the new way of thinking, lest “they be corrupted from a sincere and pure commitment to Christ”.   (2 Cor 11:3) 

Again in Romans, Saint Paul says:  “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”  (Romans 12:2) 

Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote of Paul:   “After the encounter with the Lord on the road to Damascus Paul saw Christ in everyone, Christ in everything; nothing but Christ.” 

And from the moment that God sent Ananaeus to the house on Straight Street to lay hands on Saul in order to free him from his blindness, Paul learned to look for companions whom God placed in his path as the way to recognise Christ in his life.  Perhaps this is why Paul depended so much on several companions in his missionary journeys; Paul, Barnabas, John, Mark, Silas, Timothy, Sopater, Aristarchus, Gaius, Tychicus, Trophimus and Titus.  These friends in the faith make the presence of Christ concrete.  It is not surprising then that Paul has a special appeal to us who make our journey together into the mystery of Christ.

PAUL, THE PREACHER

His many missionary journeys show how totally his life was devoted to witnessing to Christ.  He asks in Romans:  “How can they believe in him?  Of him they have not heard.  And how can they hear without someone to preach?  And how can the people preach unless they are sent?”  (Romans 10:14-15)


PAUL, THE LETTER WRITER

Paul created the primitive Christian genre of letters.  He knows how letters bear the unmistakeable stamp of the person who wrote them better than any other documents.  The Scripture scholar, Gunther Bornkamm, says of writers:  “Breath and at the same time we are brought back very close to those to whom he wrote.  Thus carried back over the centuries we become eyewitnesses of an encounter, partners in that original conversation.  We too are addressed, questioned and appealed to.  In Paul’s letters their author’s person and work are an indissoluble unity.”


PAUL, A MAN OF SUFFERING

Perhaps the main reason why it is so easy for us to love Saint Paul is because he suffered so much.  The afflictions of our life were not strangers to him.  Here is Paul’s list:  “Three times I was beaten with rods.  Once I was stoned.  Three times I was shipwrecked.  I passed a night and a day in the deep.  In dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers amongst false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through cold and exposure.”  (2 Cor 11:25-27)    

Paul attests to the marks that he bears on his body as being his commitment to Christ.

PAUL’S LIFE

Finally, he sums up his life:  “I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me … I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.”  (Galatians 2:20)

Two thousand years after his birth we celebrate all that Paul has given us of Christ, knowing him as an articulate, strongly missionary elder brother, who goes forward to the world of today inviting us to be immersed in that mystery as he was, to love and follow Christ with a tenacity and a missionary endeavour that is vigorous, enthusiastic and constant.

As we seek to promote a re-evangelisation of our world it is of paramount importance that the Pauline message and the testimony of his life is brought to bear on our life and in it we will find Christ, the centre and Lord of our life.

With joy and hope for the future and for what it will achieve, I declare the Pauline Year open in the Archdiocese of Melbourne and I welcome Father Brendan Byrne to reflect with us in a scholarly way on the power of Paul’s great message of truth and love.  He is, like us, the first Apostle to have the experience of only the written Christ, as all Christians continue now to have through the centuries.


+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne