Editorial: Asking for a little help

Sydney
14 April 2002

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Editorial: Asking for a little help

Archbishop Pell brought St Thérèse – a 19th century, middle-class French girl who gave herself up to the convent at 15 – bang up to date when he welcomed her relics to St Mary’s Cathedral last Sunday.

One way of viewing this most popular of saints is as a saint for the rest of us – the little people, the people who find big, heroic saints too much. We could never aspire to imitate them, but we can aspire to being perfectly good in little, everyday ways, as St Thérèse did.

What Archbishop Pell did was to offer to St Thérèse – and those who came to venerate the saint’s relics – the smallest of the small, the unborn, as being in need of protection.

He asked for her help in trying to persuade those who believe otherwise, or are not sure, that all human life needs protection, even the smallest of lives at their very beginning.

And he asked the congregation of 2000-plus to be modern Christians, too, to educate themselves about the stem cell debate and why it is wrong that human embryos should be destroyed in the process of stem cell research.

He asked them to pray to St Thérèse for help so that they might not only come to fully understand what is at stake, but also become eloquent enough to persuade others of the importance of all human life, however small and insignificant it may seem.

Those who must be persuaded include Australia’s politicians who must decide – in a series of free votes in their various state parliaments – what will be done in this area.

Archbishop Pell said St Thérèse, who died in 1897, was a modern woman because she knew the void of unbelief. She faced this in her last year of life as tuberculosis, the disease that was feared as much then as we now fear AIDS, eroded her young life. She came through her dark night of the soul with her faith in Jesus restored, but not without a struggle.

The archbishop views her as an appropriate saint for our age when so many do not believe. He recently spoke of how many Catholics belong to the Church but do not believe.

Thérèse came through her crisis of faith. Those who doubt should consider, as she must have, what faith means.

It must surely include an understanding of our humanity in all its vulnerability. This, in turn, must lead us to compassion which calls us to protect the most vulnerable in our society. These include the sick, the elderly and the very young, including those not yet born and those who never will be.

The latter are the embryos in IVF storage whose fate is undetermined, but who deserve more respect, as the smallest and youngest of us still living, than death in a laboratory.