Blessing at Marist College Burnie
It is a great joy to be with you today at Marist Regional College for the blessing and opening of this wonderful new Technology Centre. I warmly greet your Principal, Mr Shayne Kidd, distinguished guests, staff, students, families and all who have contributed to bringing this project to completion.
On occasions like this there is a great deal for which to be grateful. There has been vision and planning. There has been considerable investment. Architects, builders and tradespeople have turned plans on paper into the impressive facilities before us. We Catholics bless our buildings because we recognise that our efforts can achieve only so much. We ask that the hand of God might guide what happens within them.
Today we began by singing the words which express the motto of this College: Diligite Veritatem — Love the Truth.
That is also a splendid motto for a Technology Centre.
Technology is about discovering what is possible. It takes knowledge and applies it. Here students will design and build. They will learn that a measurement is either accurate or it is not. A structure will stand or it will fall. There is something wonderfully honest about that.
But Diligite Veritatem asks more than that we know the truth. It asks us to love the truth.
This takes us directly to the Gospel. Jesus speaks of the person who hears his words and acts upon them. That person is like someone building a house on rock. The rain comes and the floods rise, but the house stands because its foundations are sound.
What an appropriate Gospel for the blessing of a place where things will be designed, constructed and tested.
Jesus, of course, is speaking about more than buildings. He is speaking about lives.
A Catholic school exists to help young people build lives that will stand. That is why Marist Regional College is more than classrooms, workshops and equipment. Here at Marist, education seeks truth because ultimately truth leads us beyond ourselves to God.
Loving the truth also means having the courage to face truths which are painful.
Like other institutions within the Church and Australian society, this College has shadows within its history. There have been people who were harmed when they should have been safe. We should never pretend otherwise.
Recently I had a meeting with a Marist past student. I was deeply struck by his generosity. He was able to distinguish between the great good he had received through this College and the terrible wrong done to him by an individual. He did not allow the wrong to become the whole story. But … he wanted the Archbishop to hear from him about the truth of how his life had been affected.
That, too, is Diligite Veritatem.
We honour those who have been harmed when we tell the truth. And we honour the great good of this College when we ensure that the crimes and failures of the past make us more determined that every young person entrusted to us is treated with dignity and care.
St Paul gives us another image today. “I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow.”
What a beautiful description of Catholic education.
Teachers plant. Students work with what has been planted. Yet underneath all our human effort there is the mysterious work of God, bringing to life possibilities which perhaps nobody else could see.
That is what this Technology Centre is really for. Not technology for technology’s sake. Not simply better equipment in a better building. It exists for the young people who will enter these doors and discover abilities they did not know they possessed. It exists so that imagination can become something real and useful.
Today, then, we bless more than a building.
We ask God to bless what will happen here.
May those who teach here be generous in sharing their gifts. May the students who learn here love the truth enough to seek it and be courageous enough to live by it.
And when the rain comes, when the floods rise and when life tests what they have built, may the young people of Marist Regional College discover that beneath them is something stronger than anything they could manufacture for themselves:
The foundation, the rock who is Jesus Christ.
Diligite Veritatem.
Love the Truth.
Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
19 August 2026