NEWCASTLEWEST

Thursday 12 October 2006

One of the things I often do as a Bishop is to attend celebrations when a school is celebrating an anniversary of its foundation – sometimes ten years, sometimes twenty five years sometimes fifty years old. Several times I have been present when a school was celebrating its hundredth birthday. Never before have I been part of a celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of a school!

When Courtenay Boys School was opened, Europe was at war – England, Holland, France and Spain were fighting a war that lasted thirteen years. When the school was opened Scotland had not yet been joined to England to form what was called ‘The Kingdom of Great Britain’. When the parish church of Newcastlewest was built, Courtenay Boys School was already well over a hundred years old! When this part of Ireland became an independent country, your school was well over two hundred years old. So this is a day not just for celebrating but for realising that the pupils and the staff and the families and all the people involved are part of something really special and extraordinary.

It is also a day for remembering the act of generosity by the Courtenay family which made this long story possible. Sometimes people say, ‘It will all be the same in a hundred years time’ as an excuse for not bothering to do anything. When we think that, three hundred years later, their gift is still doing what they hoped to would do, we realise that it is possible to make a far greater difference than we imagine.

But the real achievement of this school is not just its long survival. The real difference it has made is in what it has shared with generation after generation of young lads. What it gave them was not just knowledge. Much of what the boys learned here in the eighteenth century would seem very out of date today. It was not just various skills, because there would not be much call on many of those skills today in a world of technology and computers.

The real difference that this school made was that it shared wisdom and understanding with its pupils. It did not simply teach facts; it helped its students to understand the meaning and purpose of their lives. It helped to lead them deeper into the faith that would make sense of life with its fragility and its achievements, its pain and its joy. The reading puts it strikingly: those who have wisdom acquire God’s friendship.

‘Let the message of Christ in all its richness find a home with’ St Paul says. It was in order to receive the peace of Christ that you were all called together as parts of one body. That is why we were brought into existence. Our whole lives, everything we do, should be giving thanks to God the Father through Christ. The reality which underlies everything that exists is the unlimited, all powerful, infinitely forgiving love of God. God invites us to be his friends. That is what life is about; that is why the wise are those who have acquired God’s friendship.

Generations of young men grew to understand their lives in the light of that hope. They lived in times that today’s pupils – and indeed the rest of us – find it hard to imagine – no cars, no electricity, no radio, no television, not to speak of computers, I-pods and Playstations. Of course, those first pupils would find it even harder to imagine our world.

But the one thing that remains constant, in spite of all the changes in society and all the changes in school curricula, through good times and hard times, is that Courtenay Boys School was committed to leading its pupils to understand and accept the God’s invitation to become his friends. Many members of the Courtenay family remained faithful Catholics through times of persecution; they would have been greatly pleased by the fruit that this school has borne.

The wisdom of knowing that God wishes to be our friend and wishes us to share the peace of Christ is the rock that our lives are founded on. That is a lesson that is at least as important today as it was in times of persecution.

The young people who are in Courtenay School today are going to live in a world that none of us can imagine. It may perhaps be a world of wonderful new advances and universal peace. It might also be a world overwhelmed by our own greed and irresponsibility, with uncontrollable climate change, with increasing pollution, with wars fought using appallingly destructive weapons, with shortages of basic resources like oil and food and even water.

What today’s celebration reminds us is that in spite of all the uncertainty about what the future holds, it is possible to build on rock. The wisdom and faith that the school has fostered has carried people through wars and persecution and famine and poverty and enormous changes. It is a day for giving thanks and for renewing our determination to build our lives on the rock of Christ’s word.