Chaplaincy - Spirituality, Faith and Meaning
Mr. Chancellor, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, members of Council, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
It gives me great pleasure to be present in the University on this particular occasion.
For hundreds of years, from their earliest days, universities in our Western tradition, among their many activities, included two which it may be appropriate to recall today:
- the first is that they took seriously their pastoral responsibilities toward their students, and that meant providing for their religious needs, and specifically for a place of worship;
- the second is that they regularly regarded religion, be it in the form of Christian theology, or other historical and comparative studies, as worthy of serious investigation.
We meet this morning to continue the first of these traditions. Whether it be in the college chapels of Oxford and Cambridge, or in the church buildings chiefly associated with universities across Europe, the place provided for worship has frequently been of architectural merit and considerable historic interest. You have entered very fully into that tradition today. This building speaks of a past, going back to the pioneers in the Sutherland’s Creek district; and it is a building of character and beauty.
It also has, however, been erected on its present site to meet contemporary needs, and those of the foreseeable future. It took the authorities in some of the European universities a long time to recognize that the religious needs and convictions of their members varied considerably. It was only in the 19th century that Oxford and Cambridge recognized the rights of what the Established Church called Dissenters; and the same story can be told, with a changing dramatis personae elsewhere. So much so that some of the universities founded in the 19th century decided to exclude all religious provisions and the study of any religion. You share in what I believe is the wiser attitude of later foundations: a certain inclusiveness, as befits a university worthy of that name.
Here you expect men and women to come, or laudably in this university you go out and reach them, and you expect them to develop a certain integrity and discipline in their ways of thought. So, too, in this chapel I hope that you will welcome groups of varying outlook, of diverse religious background and conviction, to strengthen and deepen the integrity of their worship. I hope, too, that to this multicultural state of ours in Victoria, students and staff, members of this univesity, will bring a new respect for each others ways.
Mutual suspicion between religions and cultures has not got us very far. We might see whether mutual respect would get us a little further.
