College of Catholic Educational Leaders Mass No 3 – August 2026
Mass of St Augustine celebrated in Launceston
There is something wonderfully appropriate about celebrating this Mass for Catholic Education leaders on the feast of St Augustine. Augustine was a bishop, a theologian, and a saint. But before that, he was a teacher. He knew the classroom. He knew the intellectual world of his day. He knew the attraction of ideas and the danger of mistaking cleverness for wisdom.
Perhaps that is why his most famous sentence still speaks so powerfully to education: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” ¹
This is a remarkable starting point for Catholic education. We educate young people who are restless. They are searching for who they are and what their lives might become. They live in a world offering them countless answers before they have even discovered the questions that matter.
The Catholic school must never be frightened of that restlessness. We should recognise within it the movement of the human heart towards God.
This is close to the vision of the Second Vatican Council in Gravissimum Educationis (Declaration on Christian Education). The Council says that the school has a particular importance because it develops the intellectual faculties and forms “the ability to judge rightly.” ² That phrase deserves our attention. Education is not simply the transmission of information. Our students have more information available to them than St Augustine could have imagined. The challenge today is learning how to judge rightly: how to recognise what is true, how to distinguish what matters from what merely attracts attention.
Then the Council says something beautiful about those who undertake this work. Their vocation demands “special qualities of mind and heart.” ³
Mind and heart.
Augustine would have understood that immediately. Catholic education cannot choose between intellectual excellence and formation of the heart. We want our young people to think deeply because we want them to live deeply.
This is where today’s Gospel becomes particularly striking.
Ten young women are waiting for the bridegroom. All have lamps. All become drowsy. The difference is that some have brought oil and some have not.
Augustine actually preached on this very Gospel. He asked what the oil might mean. His answer was caritas — love. ⁴ The wise virgins carry within themselves something that cannot simply be borrowed at the last minute.
This, too, seems to me a powerful image for Catholic education.
We can give our students lamps. We can provide knowledge, qualifications, and opportunities. We can prepare them for further study and employment. All of which matters enormously.
But the question posed by the Gospel is deeper: is there oil in the lamp?
Is there something within them that will keep burning when life becomes difficult? Is there a faith capable of surviving disappointment? Is there a love strong enough to move beyond self-interest?
That is why paragraph 8 of Gravissimum Educationis goes further than any merely secular understanding of schooling. The Catholic school, it says, is to create an atmosphere “animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity.” ⁵ It seeks to ensure that the knowledge students acquire of “the world, life and man is illumined by faith.” ⁶
Notice that faith does not replace knowledge. It illuminates it.
Christ does not make the classroom smaller. He opens its windows.
And this places an enormous responsibility upon those of you entrusted with leadership. The Council says that teachers should “by their life as much as by their instruction bear witness to Christ, the unique Teacher.”⁷ This applies with particular impetus to principals and leaders.
Young people notice what we love. They notice what excites us and what disappoints us. They notice whether prayer is something added to the timetable or whether God matters to us.
There is something of the call of Samuel in every Catholic educator’s vocation: a willingness to say, in effect, “Here I am; send me”. Not because we imagine ourselves to be indispensable, but because the Lord has entrusted these young lives to us for a time.
And our schools need that witness now. There is plenty of light around our young people, but not all of it illuminates. Screens glow late into the night. Opinions flash across social media. Yet a person can live surrounded by brightness and still be searching for a light by which to live.
Our task is to point beyond ourselves to Christ, the light no darkness can overcome.
Augustine discovered that truth after years of searching. He eventually realised that the God for whom he had searched so widely had been nearer to him than he realised. “You were within me,” he wrote, “but I was outside.” ⁸
This may be true of many young people in our schools. God is already at work within them before we begin to teach them. Our privilege is to help them recognise his presence.
So today we ask St Augustine to intercede for Catholic Education in Tasmania. May our schools be places where minds are stretched and hearts are formed; where lamps are lit and filled with the oil that lasts.
And when the Lord comes through the door of a classroom, through the questions of a student, or through the needs of a family, may he find us awake.
May he find the lamps burning.
And may he find us ready to answer as we sang: ‘Here I am, Lord.’
Most Rev. Anthony J. Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
28 August 2026
Footnotes
- St Augustine, Confessions, I, 1, 1: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
- Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Christian Education Gravissimum Educationis (28 October 1965), no. 5.
- Gravissimum Educationis, no. 5.
- St Augustine, Sermon 93, 4–5, on Matthew 25:1–13: Augustine interprets the oil carried by the wise virgins as caritas, charity, or love.
- Second Vatican Council, Gravissimum Educationis, no. 8.
- Gravissimum Educationis, no. 8.
- Gravissimum Educationis, no. 8.
- St Augustine, Confessions, X, 27, 38: “You were within me, but I was outside.”