PERTH, WA: April 13, 1995
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mu la, elu la "May the Risen Lord fill your hearts with the surge of confidence that comes from acknowledging His victory of evil and death" Easter message from Archbishop Hickey:
He has done so again in the strongest possible terms in his most recent Encyclical "Evangelium Vitae" (the Gospel of Life). ISHARE with you the joy of Easter. May the Those who insist on immoral measures to conARisen Lord fill your hearts with the surge of trol population, such as sterilisation, contracepconfidence that comes from acknowledging His tion and abortion, have lost faith in God's provivictory over evil and death. dence. Easter is the greatest affirmation of hope. DurThey see solutions in purely pragmatic terms, ing Holy Week we walked with the Apostles and claiming the moral autonomy to do so. They are with the crowds that followed Jesus as He made unable to believe that God cares for the world His way towards His death on Good Friday. We and that God has given us the proper means for saw Him being crushed by evil, treated unjustly population control - social development and the and cruelly, being jostled inevitably to His death. sharing of resources, international respect for We saw evil triumph. Or appear to do so. human dignity, education, and the elimination of His rising to new life on Easter Sunday mornwar, greed and exploitation. ing was the triumph of God over the forces of A commitment to the sanctity of life implies a evil. It was God's promise to all humanity that if belief in the providence of God. they follow Jesus and accept Him as Lord and In the light of the Resurrection our own trust saviour, they too would receive the gift of eternal in God's providential care can become comlife. plete and childlike. Easter is about hope. If we seek first the Kingdom of God, everything Hope is about trusting in God's providence. else will be added. As our society moves more There is a caution though. and more away from God it While Jesus promises inner loses all sense of God's provipence, love and eternal life, He dence. does not promise that we will be free of suffering. Suffering is As it claims complete autonstill very much a reality, howomy over its own affairs, it ever much we trust in God. demands moral autonomy also. Once a society rejects proviWe will still have to encounter dence in favour of its own complete moral autonomy it will inevitably in our lives the effects of sin. We will still come up against greed, envy, hostility and accept immoral practices. injustice.
ere's ho
The Holy Father has been insisting for some time, almost shouting This is the real world that needs to be redeemed continually by Christ and by the message to the whole world, that we are subject to God and may those who carry His light into the world. What Easter has shown is that God leads do nothing that is not God's will. one through suffering to joy and new life. He did so in his Encyclical Letter "Veritatis Splendor" in 1993. He To the Easter proclamation "The Light of Christ" we answer with all our hearts did so through his delegation on the world's stage of the UN Conference on Population and Development at Cairo in 1994. "Thanks be to God." 9
We wish you a holy and happy Easter