
Visitors to Prague are often surprised to discover that, apart from the obvious tourist highlights—Charles Bridge, the cathedral, the castle—a further, seemingly pedestrian location is also worth a few photos: the fabled metro system.
The descent to each platform via escalator is so precipitous that, upon first experiencing the swift and seemingly vertiginous journey into the earth, I could not help but think that I was entering the opening chapters of a Jules Verne novel.
The graffiti on the metro walls is also a sight to behold. Jackson Pollock seems to have had a formative influence on the spray-can-wielding denizens of the public transport systems of Eastern Europe.
Yet it is their occasional foray into the realm of philosophy that interests us here. Upon the paint-spattered walls of the metro tunnels there appeared one morning this statement: “Jesus is the answer.”
Before the afternoon was out, someone had added a second phrase beneath the first: “But what was the question?”
A rather good riposte. And one perhaps unsurprising in a country that is noted as the most atheistic in Europe.

It also echoes the rather poignant view of the philosopher Eric Voegelin: the biggest problem with Christians today is not that we don’t have the right answers.
The problem is that we have forgotten the questions to which those answers correspond.
Our contemporaries, in their more introspective moments, continue to gaze at the stars—or into a bowl of Mie-Goreng—and pose the perennial questions of our existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of life?
A story is told of a man who wrote to a famous Rabbi, explaining that he was deeply unhappy. The letter went like this:
“I would like your help. I wake up each day sad and apprehensive. I can’t concentrate. I find it hard to pray. I keep the commandments, but I find no spiritual satisfaction. I go to the synagogue, but I feel alone. I begin to wonder about what life is about. I need help.”
The Rabbi simply sent the letter back. He had made only one amendment before re-posting the missive.
He had underlined the first word of each sentence. It was always the same—“I.”
As the Dominican Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe has explained, it is precisely that perspective which comprises, “the unhappiness of the lonely, modern Western self.”

Our contemporaries ask the same questions that men and women have always asked, but they struggle to break out of the cycle of narcissistic introspection that they are encouraged to pursue by our increasingly secularised society.
It seems to me that this is a field ripe for the harvest; a world desperate for the paradoxical Christian answers to their perennial questions.
The truth that we gain our lives by giving them up. (Matthew 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24)
That we are set free by obedience. (Romans 6:17-19)
That the death of a single man holds the key to life. (1 Peter 2:21-25)
The general malaise of our contemporaries, their general sense of dissatisfaction is—perhaps surprisingly—the perfect seed-bed for our faith, and the questions that surround it.
The Archdiocese of Sydney will be hosting the International Eucharistic Congress in 2028, and it is hoped that an especially rich harvest will result. (Luke 10:1-9)
With that hope in view, the next few years will feature a rolling series of events, symposia, and other opportunities to grapple with the questions that underlie our Catholic faith in the Eucharistic Lord.

The intention is that these various forums serve as opportunities for the seed-bed of faith to be churned up, watered, and nourished so that, when the seed falls, it will find ready ground. (Luke 5:5-15)
Cardinal Radcliffe’s characterisation of the modern Western individual also calls to mind a different Jules Verne novel and its anti-hero: Captain Nemo.
Constantly seeking, forever questing, never resting, he is perpetually dissatisfied. In Latin, “nemo” means “no one.”
If our pilgrimage through life amounts to no more than an unrelenting quest for the next opportunity to momentarily assuage our driving urge for something we cannot name, then our existence may well amount to little more than another instalment of Finding Nemo.
We will find nothing and no one.
We must instead seek the one who has a Name.
The name which is above every other name. (Philippians 2:9)
The spray-painted wall of the Prague metro spoke the truth—Jesus Christ is still the answer.
In the lead-up to the International Eucharistic Congress in 2028, let us all engage with the opportunities presented to remind ourselves and others of that fact.
For more information on the Eucharistic Congress in 2028, or to be added to the mailing list for updates, please email: [email protected]