Participants in the Church in Australia’s Plenary Council in Sydney, July 9, 2022. / Australian Catholic Bishops Conference
Denver Newsroom, Jul 12, 2022 / 10:09 am (CNA).
The Catholic Church in Australia has concluded its Fifth Plenary Council. After months of debate and discussion on Church governance and pastoral priorities, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth declared the council closed on Saturday.
“There will be no renewal of the Church if we put ourselves above Christ or in some perverse way push him to the margins,” he said in his homily at the closing Mass in Sydney July 9. The plenary council, in his words, tried to “reimagine the Church in Australia through a missionary lens.” The archbishop encouraged members of the plenary council to continue to ask themselves what the Holy Spirit is saying.
The final session was held in Sydney over six days.
A plenary council is the highest formal gathering of all particular Churches in a country. It has legislative and governing authority. Laypeople were invited to participate in council sessions, and they joined bishops to vote on binding resolutions to be sent to the Vatican for approval.
All members signed a concluding statement. Council members characterized the council as an expression of synodality.
“Synodality is the way of being a pilgrim Church, a Church that journeys together and listens together, so that we might more faithfully act together in responding to our God-given vocation and mission,” the statements aid, adding that in their deliberations “the Holy Spirit has been both comforter and disrupter.”
Members of the plenary council also confirmed the plenary council’s decrees, which all Catholic bishops present then signed. The decrees will be sent to the Holy See after the November meeting of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. Six months after the Holy see receives this notice, formally known as a “recognitio,” the decrees will become law of the Catholic Church in Australia.
The plenary council formally recognized a duty to care for the Earth as a common home and to promote and defend human life from conception to natural death. It encouraged the Church to join Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si’” Action Platform and to develop existing action plans in the spirit of the pope’s 2015 encyclical on God’s creation and care for the environment.
The plenary council backed more use of general absolution, an alternative to individual confession generally only used in emergencies. It also endorsed an effort to seek a new translation of the 2011 Roman Missal.
Defeated proposals included one to allow lay people to preach at Masses.
On July 6 more than 60 of the 277 members protested the failure to pass motions on women in the Church, including the defeat of a motion to support the ordination of women as deacons if Rome agrees. The lay members voted for the proposals, but there were not enough votes from the bishops to pass the measures.
After some controversy, the council passed a motion to reconsider proposed language on women in the Church, which later passed in a slightly modified form.
“Much has been made of the division and drama of the week and that might frighten some and delight others,” Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney told The Catholic Weekly. “But I think the remarkable thing is that it did not break the Church. It did not lead to a walkout or schism or an alternative assembly being set up down the road as we’ve seen at different times in history.”
“In the end with more prayer and reflection we ended up with a much improved chapter on the dignity and roles of women,” he said.
The council decrees include the establishment of diocesan pastoral councils across Australia, diocesan synods to be hosted within the next five years, and broad consultation about the creation of a national synodal body for Church collaboration.
The plenary council’s closing statement said members “sought to be faithful to their commission to listen to and hear ‘what the Spirit is saying to the churches’.” It acknowledged the disruptions to daily life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and war.
Some moments during the council’s final week were “calm and harmonious” while others were “tense and difficult,” the closing statement said, adding, “every moment has been blessed; the entire week has been grace-filled, though never a cheap grace.” The statement praised “practices of listening and discernment” as “essential dimensions of the implementations of this plenary council.”
“They will re-shape our engagement with the world, our evangelizing mission and our works of service in a rapidly changing environment,” said the statement, adding, “the work has only begun.”
The implementation will be reviewed by the Bishops Commission for the Plenary Council. Interim reports will be published in 2023 and 2025, with a final review report set for 2027.
Archbishop Fisher reflected on the plenary council’s achievements and possible shortcomings in remarks to The Catholic Weekly.
“There’s been a direct engagement with some of the really ‘hard’ issues, like Indigenous issues, child sexual abuse and the place of women in the Church,” he said. “Those discussions were sometimes very emotional and potentially very divisive. Yet in the end there was a high level of agreement on most of them.”
“It’s much better that such matters were confronted directly rather than presenting a kind of faux unity by avoiding the hard issues,” the archbishop continued.
He praised the assembly’s work to offer “some good thoughts on liturgy, marriage catechumenate, youth ministry, formation programs for lay leaders including those in rural and remote areas, and stewardship of the earth.” He also welcomed its appreciation for the place of the Eastern Catholic Churches in Australia.
However, Fisher worried there was not enough content dedicated to the “missionary impulse” and to “a passion for bringing people to Christ, to conversion and new life in Him.” He thought there was too little attention paid to people on the margins and there were “no practical proposals” to promote religious freedom at a time when it is “clearly threatened.”
He worried that “ordinary” priests and lay Catholics, including those born overseas, were underrepresented in the assembly, and this might have had a distorting effect on the proceedings.
Still, he said, most proposals had “a very high rate of acceptance among the lay members and the pastors.”
“Everyone will find some good things in the final decrees when they come out, and people should look for those, look for inspiration and encouragement in their own missionary discipleship,” said Fisher.
People will also find gaps and subjects they think should have been addressed, Fisher said. He wondered why so little attention was given to lay men, mothers, vowed religious, or “Catholics whose principal vocation is in the world.”
“There’s very little that speaks to the crisis of vocations to marriage and parenting, and to priestly and religious life,” he added.
While there is a whole chapter on the importance of the liturgy, especially the Eucharist and the sacrament of Penance, Fisher said, he had wanted to see “positive proposals” on how the Church can secure the priests who can celebrate those sacraments.
In late 2021, Fisher said he hoped the council would focus on priorities like responding to a culture of secularism and declining religious practice.
Last year he told the Catholic Weekly that currently only 1 in 10 Catholics in Australia regularly attends Mass. The Church in Australia is experiencing a vocations crisis, not only to the priesthood, but also to marriage and religious life.
In addition to a culture of secularism, the Church continues to respond to sexual abuse scandals. A 2017 royal commission report found that the Catholic Church and other institutions in the country showed serious failings for decades in protecting children from abuse.
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The person who writes statements for Papa does a commendable job. The one who writes the homilies he delivers, also does admiral work.
As we examine the “Religion of Peace”, some might say it has a hollow ring to it! Yet, different people have divergent views of what peace is! Jesus is the Prince of Peace, this is how we are to be guided:
John 16:33 I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
2 Thessalonians 3:16 Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in every way. The Lord be with you all.
Isaiah 26:3 You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.
Matthew 5:9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Philippians 4:6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
I request you call these criminals terrorists instead of calling them “Islamic terrorists.” As you can read in your own story, the Pope did not use that term. As a matter of fact, your entire news text above does not use that term which appears only in your headline.
From NPR:
The al-Shabab extremist group is Islamic, not Methodist or Amish or Scientologist.
Dear Abdul:
First, I praise God that you are reading CWR. It may be your first introduction to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed it is no accident that God sent you to this site.
Regardless of how one labels these men, does it bring favour to Islam?
Psalm 34:14 Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.
James 3:18 And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
2 Thessalonians 3:16 Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times in every way. The Lord be with you all.
It would be a pleasure to dialogue with you.
God’s richest blessings.
Brian
“I request you call these criminals terrorists instead of calling them “Islamic terrorists.”
The perpetrators of this violence in Somalia, and indeed in other parts of the world, are followers of the Islamic faith, which calls for their actions found in the Quran and Sunnah. To claim otherwise would be disingenuous.
Islam has one agenda to “proclaim Islam over all religion” QS 48.28 which pious Muslims have been acting upon, up to the present day.
When the group claiming responsibility for the attack releases a statement describing its target as an “enemy” that is “committed to removing Somali children from the Islamic faith”, it’s fair to label it an Islamic terrorist group. That Pope Francis, for predictable and discreditable ideological reasons declines to do so, does not mean the rest of us should join him.. The headline is accurate, and Mr. Olson defends it well.
Do you dispute the motive of the terrorists?
Yours truly poses a question in the spirit of dialogue and fraternity….
What if, instead of the term “Islamic terrorists,” we used the term zealot? Or, better yet, the term “terribles simplificateurs” (terrible simplifiers), a term coined by historian Jacob Burckhardt, in reference to ideological simpletons in the West, also set on destruction?
Regarding which, this question:
While in the Qur’an the “law of Moses” is respected throughout (as in Christianity), why are explicit references to this law (known in Western thought as our baked-in Natural Law) limited to the first four (affirmative) of the Ten Commandments, and (I ask) not to the prohibitive final six (e.g., Though shalt not kill)?
Yes, Western history does not have clean hands either, but authorization (by omission) for terrorism is not found in the Gospels, because all ten of Moses’ Commandments are included. Ideological terrorism is a violation of the “the Word made flesh,” but is not prohibited under the Islamic “word made book.”
Where in the Qur’an might we find explicit recognition of the prohibitive commandments? As a non-credentialed researcher I have looked, but possibly not thoroughly enough? Instead, unrestrained incitements to terrorism—as followed by Islamic/cross-cultural (!) “terrible simplifiers”: e.g., Q 9:123; 8:34; 2:187/191, 9:5, 47:4.
If you’re going to call this Islamic terrorism maybe you will call the numerous attacks on abortion clinics, doctors and staff – always done by pious Christians- as “Christian Terrorism”? How about the mass bombings by American troops as “American Terrorism” or the fact that they are blessed by Christians as “Christian Terrorism” also?
No?
Back on September 11, 2010, the Jesuit scholar Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian scholar of Islam who spent most of his life living and teaching in Muslim countries (and who also taught at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome), was interviewed by Edward Pentin and said the following:
In his excellent book 111 Questions on Islam (Ignatius Press, 2008), Samir makes the following statement:
Yes, many Muslims do reject and denounce terrorism. But, as Samir rightly notes, they cannot point to the Qur’an or the Islamic tradition for support. Which is completely unlike Christianity.
Though this happens infrequently, the focus is to save lives! If Christians don’t stand up against this slaughter, who will? Christ advises us to respect life, not to take it.
On the other hand, the Prophet of Islam advises the follower to wage war on the non-believer. The marked difference here is that Jesus calls us to peace, Muhammad calls his followers to war and violence. Christians may fail individually, however Christ’s way is always the best path for all men. Let us respect all and strive for God’s peace.
Psalm 4:8 In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
Hebrews 12:14 Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
God bless you.
Islam has a political agenda, Christianity does not.
Jesus never called His followers to use violence in His name, to gain political control over countries, because the combat is against sin not people..
Islam inverts this call to be combat against people not accepting Allah as the only god with Mohammed as prophet, proving the god of Islam is not the God of the Bible, but a counterfeit.
Maybe your focus should be on your own faith first, before condemning others.
America’s interest is to prevent or stop war. Islam is war to its core. Jihad and migration are core beliefs. To stop war, peace minded countries have to engage warmongers, thereby opposing the enslavers.
If a Muslim had the choice of migrating to America or another Islamic state, what would be his choice? Yes Islam likes to be accorded peaceful dealings, they have little interest in reciprocating, unfortunately.