THE lives of people without faith have ''nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss'', Cardinal George Pell said yesterday at a Mass to install the former Defence Force chief General Peter Cosgrove as chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

''A minority of people, usually people without religion, are frightened by the future,'' Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, said during his homily at the St Mary's Cathedral Mass.

Peter Cosgrove . . . figurehead. Credit:Quentin Jones

''It's almost as though they've … nothing but fear to distract themselves from the fact that without God the universe has no objective purpose or meaning. Nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss.''

Life without God was ''life without purpose, without constraints'', he said.