MacKillop College Graduation 2026

Tonight there are sixty-four young women and men sitting here as the Graduands of MacKillop Catholic College.

Sixty-four different personalities. Sixty-four different sets of gifts. Sixty-four different futures beginning to open before us.

And I suspect sixty-four rather different answers to the question: “What are you going to do next year?”

Some of you have a very clear answer. Some have several possible answers. Some may have an answer prepared simply because it stops people asking the question.

But tonight’s Gospel asks a rather different question.

It is not: What are you going to do?

It is: Who are you called to become?

St Luke tells us that Jesus went up into the hills to pray. He spent the whole night in prayer to God. Then, when daylight came, he summoned his disciples and chose twelve of them.

Before there was a decision, there was prayer.

Before there was a mission, there was a calling.

That is a beautiful Gospel for a Graduation Mass because you are standing at precisely that sort of moment.

Much of school life has been decided for you. Someone else decided when a bell rang. Someone else set the timetable. Someone else said when assignments were due. Someone else decided what you could wear to school.

There may be some rejoicing that those days are almost over!

But freedom brings something much more serious than being able to choose what you wear on a Monday morning.

Freedom means that increasingly you will shape the person you become.

And tonight Jesus reminds you that your life is not simply a blank sheet of paper upon which you must somehow invent yourself. You are already known by God. You are loved by God. You have been called by name.

That does not mean that God has secretly written down whether you are to study engineering, enter a trade, become a teacher, work in business, travel, or discover something you have not yet imagined.

It means something deeper.

Wherever you go, your life has a purpose.

Saint Paul says something similar in our first reading. He tells the Ephesians that they are no longer strangers or aliens. They belong. Their lives are being built upon a foundation, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

A cornerstone gives direction to a building. Everything else is aligned from it.

During your years at MacKillop, other people have helped lay foundations in your lives. Your parents and families have done so. Your teachers have contributed, sometimes when you appreciated it and perhaps sometimes when you did not. Your friends have shaped you. Your experiences here have shaped you.

And somewhere among all of that stands the remarkable woman whose name your College carries.

Mary MacKillop understood something about calling.

She did not begin with a grand blueprint for her life. She saw children who needed education. She saw families who needed support. She saw something that needed doing, and her faith gave her the courage to respond.

Graduation does not mean that at eighteen you need to have your whole life worked out.

Thank goodness for that.

It means that you have reached the point where you can begin to notice the needs around you and ask what you might do about them.

And notice something else in tonight’s Gospel.

Jesus chooses the Twelve, but then they come down the mountain with him.

They do not remain on the mountain admiring the view.

They come down into a great crowd of people who are carrying all sorts of needs. And St Luke tells us that people were trying to touch Jesus because power came out of him and cured them all.

Christian faith always brings us down the mountain and into the lives of other people.

So, Graduands, take with you from MacKillop more than your results, your memories and the friendships that will survive the end of Year 12.

Take with you a faith that gives you hope. Take with you the knowledge that you are loved. And let that love become visible in the way you live.

In a few moments, around this altar, we will give thanks. That is what Eucharist means: thanksgiving. There is much for which to thank God tonight.

I thank God for you, the sixty-four Graduands.

Your families thank God for you, even if getting you to this point has occasionally required heroic patience.

Your teachers give thanks for you. Fr Ben, Fr Kasun and Fr Nibu join me in praying for you tonight.

And perhaps, quietly, you might thank God too: for what has been, for those who have walked beside you, and for a future which you cannot yet completely see.

At the end of this Mass the College song will go with you with its message that the melody of faith does not end tonight. Nor does hope. Nor does love.

You simply begin to sing them somewhere else.

So, to the sixty-four Graduands of MacKillop Catholic College in 2026: Know Jesus who goes with you.

Remember the cornerstone upon whom a good life can be built.

And wherever life takes you, keep listening for the One who calls you by name.

Then go down the mountain.

There will be a world waiting for you there.

Most Rev. Anthony J Ireland
Archbishop of Hobart
27 October 2026