28 April 2009
The ANU Catholic Society
We live in a culture which often regards what the Catholic Church believes and teaches as puzzling. There would even be some who would regard the Church as the last bastion of a benighted obscurantism. Yet the Catholic Church has been the great defender of both faith and reason, seeing in them not mortal enemies but a kind of conjoined twins, the separation of whom means the death of both. Faith without reason withers into superstition; and reason without faith withers into rationalism. Neither superstition nor rationalism makes for the flourishing of the human being. The wisdom which does make for human flourishing is born of the marriage of faith and reason. It is to that truth that I would hope the ANU Catholic Society will bear witness as heir of the Catholic intellectual tradition. To do so in a great University like ANU seems to me especially important at this time.
In the Lord Jesus,
The Most Reverend Mark Colerdige
Archbishop of Canberra & Goulburn
Patron of ANUCS
