“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God.”

– Matthew 22:21

Welcome to Term 4. We are in the final chapter of the school year, and there is a particular quality to these weeks: a sense of things coming to their fulfilment. For our Year 12 students especially, that is literally true.

Last Sunday’s Gospel placed before us one of the more disarming things Jesus ever said. The Pharisees were trying to trap him with a question about taxes. He asked them to look at a coin. Whose image is on it? Caesar’s. Then give Caesar what is Caesar’s, he said, and give God what is God’s.

The deeper point was not about coins. The coin bears Caesar’s image. We bear God’s image: every one of us, made in the imago Dei (Image of God). Everything we are, everything we have been given and have grown into, belongs ultimately back to God. As our Year 12 students come to the end of their time at Kilbreda, that is the theological frame we hold for them: these young women, with all their gifts, are being offered back to the world and to God. That is not an ending. It is a sending forth.

Year 12: Final Days and Celebrations

Last week marked the final days of classes for our Year 12 students. It is a week of lasts: last lessons, last Homerooms, last ordinary school days. And yet nothing about it feels ordinary. There is a tenderness to these days that is hard to name and impossible to miss.

Our Year 12 students have given six years to this community. They have been formed here, challenged here, loved here. They have shaped the community in return. We are grateful for every one of them.

Graduation Mass and Dinner: Wednesday 21 October

This Wednesday 21 October, we will gather with our Year 12 students and their families for the Graduation Mass and Dinner. This is one of the most sacred and joyful occasions of our year. A Mass that sends our young women forth with blessing, and a dinner that gathers their families around them in celebration.

The Graduation Mass is not a farewell. It is a commissioning. In the Brigidine tradition, formation is always ordered toward mission: we are shaped so that we can go and serve. The flame does not stay in the chapel. It goes out into the world in the hands of those who have been entrusted with it.

To our Year 12 students and their families: thank you for sharing these years with us. We are proud of who you are, and we believe in who you are becoming.

Holding Our Students in Prayer

We ask our whole community to pray for our Year 12 students as they now enter the examination period. Exams ask something real of our young people, and the weeks ahead will require focus, resilience, and trust. We know they are ready and we need them to know they do not walk into them alone.

We also pray for all our students across every year level as they bring this school year toward its completion: final submissions, assessments, and the particular kind of effort that the end of the year demands. Each of them deserves our prayer and our encouragement.

And we look forward with anticipation to Headstart at the end of term, when our students take the first steps into the year that follows. It is a reminder that the end of one year is always also a beginning.

Looking Ahead

There is more ahead in Term 4, and we look forward to sharing it with our community as it unfolds. The Brigidine value for 2027 is Wonder. It is perhaps the most quietly countercultural of the six values. In a world that rewards productivity and certainty, Wonder asks us to slow down, to look again, to be surprised. Perhaps we can carry that invitation into the final weeks of the year.

Prayer for Term 4

Loving God,

we come to the final chapter of this year

with gratitude and with wonder.

We hold our Year 12 students before you.

They have been shaped by this community,

and now they are sent forth into yours.

May they go with courage,

with the wisdom this place has given them,

and with the knowledge that they are loved.

We pray for all our students

as they carry the weight of these final weeks.

May they find in themselves

more than they thought was there.

Give us all the grace to finish well.

Not in a rush, not with relief,

but with the same care and faithfulness

with which we began.

Amen.

In Strength and Kindness,

John Riddle

Director of Catholic Identity and Mission