There is a sense of national and personal shock around Australia this week.

Six people (five women and a man) and their attacker at the Bondi Junction knife attack are dead. Each death, including that of the disturbed attacker, sends ripples of tragedy into their families and friends. Many people, including a nine-month-old baby, are badly physically wounded, and many more will be mentally scarred for years to come.

Over the same weekend in Sydney, a popular and vivid Assyrian Bishop, an assisting priest and some onlookers were stabbed and slashed by a 16-year-old boy during an otherwise calm sermon. Unbelievably, on the same weekend a bloody axe and machete fight erupted between 15 to 16-year-old hooded youths in a food court in another shopping complex in Melbourne’s West.

Added to this, outside the Assyrian Church, a riot of hundreds of angry people stomped on police car windows, punched police jaws, hurled bricks and fence palings (ripped from nearby properties) and blocked the way of emergency vehicles sent to rescue the injured bishop.

At first glance, we might be forgiven for thinking that we have woken up in another country than Australia.

We recognise that madness, violent ideological “terror”, rage and irrationality – especially when they break out in public and in the young, whether in the mundane artificial daylight of a shopping complex or in the warmer, more sublime glow of a quiet church – are a symptom of deeper societal fracture.

No army of CCTV cameras or video footage prevented this. No lines of police in riot gear could uphold or preserve what the metaphysical foundations are of civilisation. One senses that lying at the heart of some of these dreadful outbursts are confusion, resentment and despair at what it means to be a man or woman and what it means to have purpose and faith.

But these horrors did not blot out all the light.

There were and will be in the days to come small and enduring signs of virtue and humanity. The Frenchman dubbed “the bollard man” who used said piece of the shopping centre to fend off the knife attacker. The desperately wounded mother who, although dying, tossed her baby to safe hands. The elderly shoppers in Melbourne’s West comforting the frightened. The visiting Scottish priest in Bondi blessing the ambulances. The voice of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel saying calmly to his attacker shortly after the stabbing that he is forgiven, and urging his congregation to “show the face of Christ” to hostility.

This week also coincides with two anniversaries associated with that wise magisterial teacher, Joseph Ratzinger or Pope Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger was born on April 16, 1927, which was the Vigil of Easter Sunday of that year, and he was elected as Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005.

It is salutary this week to recall how much of Joseph Ratzinger’s papal and scholarly work was devoted to the development of fresh philosophical articulation and theological defence of “faith and reason” and “integral human dignity”.

In 2007, on the 40th celebration of the Day of Peace, Pope Benedict XVI gave a masterful lesson on the intrinsic links between respect for the true dignity of all human beings, faith in the truth and beauty of being (and its source in God), and a coherent and peaceful society and world:

“As one created in the image of God, each individual human being has the dignity of a person; he or she is not just something, but someone, capable of self-knowledge, self-possession, free self-giving and entering into communion with others.”

These powers, he said, are neither abstract nor merely self-generative. Rationality and authentic human dignity – like peace itself – are at the same time divine gifts and human tasks.

Benedict said: “Peace is thus also a task demanding of everyone a personal response consistent with God's plan. The criterion inspiring this response can only be respect for the “grammar” written on human hearts by the divine Creator.”

Throw away the “grammar” and ignore the “author” and the human drama descends into lawless chaos. Human beings, without acknowledging in some way their source in God’s logos and love, become reduced to disposable or fungible things.

We can find common cause for those defending the dignity of being and reason. As we mentioned last week, there are outstanding social commentators acknowledging the crucial place of Christian culture in this.

We can do this with humility because we all need our commitment to the task of living with truth and charity everyday, purified by the grace of Christ and the fire of the Holy Spirit.

As Benedict writes in his brilliant Caritas in Veritate that our humanity for all its greatness is impoverished: “Jesus Christ … reveals to us in all its fullness the initiative of love and the plan for true life that God has prepared for us. In Christ, charity in truth becomes the face of his Person.” (n.1)

This weekend, the Thomas More Centre is organising a journey through some of these weighty but vital foundations at our Albury Autumn School. Our speakers will explore such topics as virtue, dignity, faith and reason, human ecology and those things which deface the person.

Thank you for your continuing prayers, interest and support.

Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre