ACU HONORARY DOCTORATE, PAUL STENHOUSE MSC
On September 29th, the Australian Catholic University conferred an Honorary Doctorate of the University on Fr Paul Stenhouse MSC.
We publish the citation from the University. We also publish Paul Stenhouse's occasional address.
CITATION
Father Paul Francis Lester Stenhouse MSC, has made distinguished contributions to scholarship in the area of Semitic languages, especially in Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Arabic.
His international academic reputation has enabled him to build strong relationships with other scholars working in these fields and in doing so he has deepened Catholic intellectual and cultural engagement in interfaith circles.
Fr Stenhouse is familiar with many languages relevant to his field of expertise. He has contributed to our knowledge of Middle Arabic grammar from his work on Samaritan Arabic MSS held in universities around the world, and has thrown light on many of the complexities of Samaritan history, culture and language.
His doctoral thesis presented to Sydney university was a critical edition of the Arabic text of the Kitᾱb al-Tarῑkh by the 14th century Samaritan priest Abū ‘l-Fath. He also published his first complete English translation of this much neglected key text. His translation of the important 16th-century Arabic text of the the Futuh al-Habasha (The Conquest of Abyssinia) was well-received when it was published some years ago. Father Stenhouse has presented various learned papers at international colloquia organized by the Société d' Études Samaritaines, which is affiliated with the Collège de France.
He was born in Casino, New South Wales, grew up in Camden, south-west of Sydney, and had a local education that was greatly influenced by his mother.
As a teenager he was employed on the local newspaper – the Camden News – and in 1953, at the age of 17, felt called to become a priest. He began the long years of seminary study with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart at St Mary’s Towers Douglas Park, NSW and then at Croydon in Melbourne. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1963.
His first and only appointment as a priest was in the area of journalism. In 1964 he was appointed Director of the Annals of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a monthly Catholic magazine that first appeared in 1889 and has been published by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart ever since. He was appointed Editor in 1966. For almost 50 years he has edited this publication, which was later called Annals Australasia, a journal of Catholic Culture that continues to flourish and enjoy a faithful readership not just among Catholics but throughout the wider Australian community.
In the 1960s Fr Stenhouse was a leader in the Catechetical Renewal in the Church which followed the Second Vatican Council, and in the efforts to communicate new ways of passing on the Catholic faith. The catechetical supplements that were published each month in Annals were in the vanguard of the Church's outreach to young people from the late 1960s until the mid- 1970s when he went to Rome as private secretary to the Father General of the Congregation..
Fr Stenhouse’s priestly service includes decades of generous and devoted pastoral care of many communities in Sydney, including journalists and writers, the deaf community, overseas university students and many migrant communities, especially the Lebanese, Croatian and Chinese communities.
He has combined the pursuit of knowledge with his devoted care for everyone he serves as a priest and a constant concern for the common good and the dignity of the person. His life and contribution exemplifies the living out of the mission of the University.
Chancellor, I request that you bestow on Father Paul Stenhouse MSC, BA (Hons, SYD), MA (Hons, UNE), PhD (SYD), HonDLitt (UNDA),the highest honour of Australian Catholic University, Doctor of the University (honoris causa) in recognition of his significant contributions to knowledge and the life of learning in Australia and internationally, to higher education, to journalism and Catholic culture, and to priestly service and pastoral care of the Catholic community.
OCCASIONAL ADDRESS
Response to Conferral of Honorary Doctorate
Chancellor, the Honourable John Fahey, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Anne Cummins, Members of the Senate, Associate Vice-Chancellor Professor Marea Nicholson, Graduands, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen - I thank you for the honour you have paid me today, and for the opportunity you have offered me of saying a few words.
My entire life as a priest has been spent in an environment that today would be called Media and Communications.
So, as I am nearing the end of my rather long life it is a joy to see serried rows of young people who have satisfied the requirements of this Catholic University for their respective degrees in Theology, Education and Arts, graduating with justifiable pride after three or more years hard slogging.
Tonight we celebrate an end to your more formal study, and a beginning to your life’s work.
Many of you will be contemplating a career in Catholic education.
We all are rejoicing, I suggest, because you graduands have succeeded in laying solid foundations for what we pray will be long lives spent in a constant search for knowledge; a constant search for – and defence of – Truth.
Religion is the noblest instinct in man: like fish that swim immense distances up river to reach their spawning ground, or migratory birds that fly half-way around the world to reach their hatcheries, human-kind has a homing instinct.
St Augustine, in his Confessions, [Bk I, c.1] put this longing for heaven and for God – for our true homeland, and for our Creator – into words that for centuries have been echoed by Catholics:
‘Thou has made us for thyself,
and our hearts are restless
until they rest in Thee’.
The Latin is exquisitely unambiguous and insightful: Thou has created us ad te : like an arrow flying true towards its target. And our hearts are unquiet until they rest in te: like a child in its mother’s arms.
Evil in its myriad forms is the antithesis and the bane of Good, of Truth; it is a spiritual virus that re-programs our natural direction-finders, that re-sets the inbuilt coordinates of our ultimate destination, and turns us back on ourselves, offering us the tempting idea that it is we who are God, and that all things seek us, and flow towards us.
Catholicism survived from its origins in the hill country of Galilee into our own time, says Hilaire Belloc,[i] because it appealed to the general sense of mankind; because it fitted in with what mankind knew of itself and its own needs and what it lacked if these needs were to be satisfied; also because it confirmed itself every day in the lives of those who embraced it; but most of all because it maintained unity.
The unity of the Catholic Church is being maintained in this room this evening; it is being maintained every time Catholics meet in a spirit of genuine Faith, to celebrate or attend Mass, to receive Holy Communion, and to pray for one another.
Catholics arethe largest religious group in the world. But even if they were the smallest, provided the continuity of priestly orders, and communion with the successor of St Peter were to be maintained, the seed of salvation would still be there, waiting for soil willing to let it take root.
The Faith may be driven underground by persecution; its popularity may wane, it may remain dormant for years and then somebody discovers or rediscovers it, and it shines as brightly as a priceless jewel; as the ‘pearl of great price’ that it is.
There are those here this evening whose Faith and lives reflect the truth of those words of Maurice Baring[ii].
The Tide of Faith is rising, not ebbing; it remains a constant challenge to fads and fashions in belief and morality. Hilaire Belloc quoted above has alerted us to the need for unity, and for respect for the authority of the Church and the Pope; and the consequences of the neglect thereof.
I should like to conclude with a challenging insight offered to all of us – whether we be parents, teachers or students – by Monsignor Ronald Knox in one of his many short sermons preached in the 1940s, during the bleakest days of World War II, and printed each week in the Sunday Times:
‘Old landmarks seem obliterated, and … the world seems to have exhausted itself and has no vigour left … We are so engrossed in our own plans, five years’ plans and ten years’ plans, and the rest of it, that we assume they must be God’s plans too. … But for all we can tell, God may be working out a five thousand years’ plan or a ten thousand years’ plan of
[i]Survivals and New Arrivals, London, Sheed & Ward, 1929, pp.265-266.
[ii] Lost Lectures, Maurice Baring, London, Peter Davies, 1932, p.148 [mutatis mutandis].