Principal's Reflection
Coming as I did from a Catholic family and attending Catholic schools, I learned early in my Catholic life to feel sorry for those poor kids from State schools because they were all going to go to Hell! We Catholics, on the other hand, were very convinced that we were the only ones who get into Heaven. Church teaching, at the time, would have had us believe that Catholic Baptism was your ticket! It didn’t take terribly long for me to start wondering about this teaching. To my surprise, I kept meeting Anglicans, Lutherans, the odd Atheist, Muslims and Buddhists who were really good people. They lived lives that seemed to me, that Jesus would have been pretty pleased with. A bit further on in life, I quietly discarded that particular traditional teaching and thought I would leave up to God who could enter his Kingdom rather than my Church, or any Church, taking it upon themselves to issue tickets.
I was so pleased a couple of weeks ago to read that Pope Francis and I are on the same page on this. He spoke to young people on a recent visit to Singapore, which has a much bigger Buddhist and Muslim communities than Catholic. Francis put into words what I intuitively believed. He is such a great Pope! Francis said:“But God is God for everyone. If you start to fight saying, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t, where will that lead us? There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some of are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians; there are different ways to God.”
‘Each of us has a language to arrive at God’. We have spent far too much time concentrating on what sets us apart than the so many things that we have in common. That can be said of religion or cultures and societies.
Year 12s begin External Exams today and we wish all of those young people well for the next few weeks. Others have completed all assessments for Year 12 and are off charting a future. We wished our Year 12s well at their Graduation ceremony last week. Thank you to all of them and to their families for their support for Shalom over the years.
Awards Night last week celebrated the efforts of so many young people. They all deserve the accolades received. That said, I am always aware of the many ‘unsung’ heroes at Shalom who really did their best at their studies and activities in and out of the classroom. Some missed getting on stage by a mark here or there. Others toiled heroically in difficult circumstances of which no one was aware. I wish we could celebrate them all but I hope they feel great satisfaction in ‘having a crack’ and not leaving anything in the tank.
Cost of Living is a topic with which all of us are familiar. School TV is a
https://shalomcollege.schooltv.me/wellbeing_news/special-report-cost-living-crisis-au
Mr Dan McMahon
Principal
mcmahond@shalomcollege.com