The first is a contemporary of mine, a man I knew in my university days. He was president of the student union and a stalwart of the Catholic society, the Newman Society. Each New Year’s Eve there was an all-night party at his home. Academically he was a star, taking four degrees and becoming a notable teacher in the engineering faculty at the University of Sydney. He married his university sweetheart and they had a family of six. In her early thirties, however, his wife began to exhibit signs of schizophrenia – that mysterious, lonely disorder characterized by withdrawal from reality, hallucinations, delusions, social apathy and emotional instability. What to do? Put his wife in care and send the children to boarding school? No. He decided that the family must face this challenge together, as a family. He became father and mother, shopped, cooked, got them to school and sport, took them on outings and remembered their birthdays. Oh, he also expected the older children to play their part, to share the load. And so it went for 30 years. Afterwards, they remembered him as a patient man, one who hoped they would learn values from his example rather than from what he said.

The second person I want you to meet today was also a university graduate, her university being Adelaide, and her main subjects English and French. She was a teacher with the Sisters of Mercy for five years before seeking a release from her vows. Next, she had three years in a state high school; but she was unhappy there. In 1971, a letter came from a friend in Vietnam. The friend was running an orphanage but she needed help. And so the former teacher found herself in Vietnam. In a country where French was still the second language, her very good French was an asset in dealing with public servants, politicians, policemen and volunteers needing a translator. As the Vietnam War clattered to its conclusion – it would end in April 1975 – her friend decided to relocate orphans through international adoption. Suddenly a plane became available. Quick. To the airport. Strap the children in, 250 of them with escorts, one of them being the Adelaide graduate. Take off. But a cargo door has been left unfastened. It blows out. The plane crashes. Dead: one-third of the children and seven of their escorts, including the Adelaide graduate. She was 35 years old.

The next person I want you to meet died at the age of 95. A Count of the Holy Roman Empire, graduate in law from Warsaw University, a reserve officer in the Polish cavalry, he seemed destined for a diplomatic career since his father was a diplomat, one uncle was the Foreign Minister and another the Polish ambassador in Rome. The Second World War changed all those plans. Arrested by the Gestapo, he was sent to Auschwitz, later being relocated to a concentration camp in Germany. Before he went in, he had compiled a small anthology of biblical texts about God’s justice and how we must pray for our persecutors; and he hid these texts in his clothing. He also took a vow that, if he survived, he would honour the Blessed Virgin Mary in some special way.

He did survive. He, his wife and their two sons applied for admission to Australia as refugees. Their ship arrived in Melbourne on the first Tuesday of November 1950 – Melbourne Cup day – and they had to stay on board because there was no one working the wharves. It was a sudden insight into the culture of their new country. Other insights would follow. His law degrees weren’t recognized here and, anyway, he had to fulfil his refugee contract of two years manual labour. He put his family into migrant camps and went to work for the Water Board. Later he would qualify as an accountant and find employment in the Taxation Office. I was at his funeral two years ago, when one of his sons said:

‘He went from having money, property, status and servants in Poland, to being a slave in concentration camps, a day labourer for the

Water Board in tent housing at Hornsby, and then living modestly in Double Bay. Rather than spend his days clawing his way back up the material ladder, he built a life rich in family, faith and intellectual treasures.

Yes, rich his life certainly was. Once helpless in a kitchen, he became a notable cook. He mixed easily with artists and painted watercolours. He came to love the Australian bush, each year loading up the Kombi van and heading for North Queensland, camping in national parks on the way. He loved opera and filled the family flat with music. His intellectual life was wide-ranging and profound. And the vow he took in Auschwitz? Yes, he fulfilled that: he wrote a life of the Virgin Mary, using Jewish rabbinical sources to depict her as a Palestinian woman 2,000 years ago. His book is unique in Australian scholarship.

Well, I wonder what you make of these three lives. Each of them was once where you are tonight, new graduates. That is, they had taken the talents given them by God and formed and fashioned those talents by study, discipline and the necessary asceticism of university life so that they could serve the needs of men and women. That’s right, isn’t it? We are not given our talents for our own fame or fortune; we are given them to serve the needs of others. Another way of putting this is to say that we don’t write the music we try to play. He writes the score and he communicates it through the talents he gives us.

A second thing about tonight’s stories seems to contradict that first comment. When tonight’s three – the Warsaw law graduate, the Adelaide arts graduate, the Sydney engineering graduate – when they were where you are tonight, their future seemed settled. All they had to do was play the music that had been put in their hands. But then the music was ripped up – by war, by failure, by sickness. They had to start again, on new musical scores. People say, don’t they?, that the way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans for the future. Well, whatever about that, our three graduates faced up to sudden, unexpected change and found new, unexpected talents; and in the finding they became new, different (perhaps better) people than the ones who had graduated in Warsaw, Adelaide and Sydney. And so I tell you their stories tonight.

Edmund Campion