The Fifth Plenary Council of the Australian Catholic Church has come to an end. Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth ended the meeting on Saturday after months of discussion and debate over Church administration and pastoral priorities.
“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.
Sydney hosted the last session over a six-day period.
The highest formal assembly of all specific Churches in a nation is a plenary council. It has the power to rule and pass laws. During council meetings, laypeople were asked to take part. They voted with the bishops on binding decisions that would be sent to the Vatican for approval.
An agreement was signed by all participants. Members of the council described it as a manifestation 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.
A obligation to protect the Earth as a shared home and to advance and preserve human life from conception to natural death was publicly acknowledged by the plenary council. It prompted the Church to sign up for Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si” Action Platform and create new action plans in accordance with the pope’s 2015 encyclical on protecting the environment.
The plenary council supported expanding the use of universal absolution, a substitute for private confession that is often reserved for dire circumstances. It also supported an initiative to look for a new translation of the Roman Missal from 2011.
One proposal to let lay persons to preach at Masses was defeated.
A proposal to support the ordination of women as deacons if Rome accepts was defeated on July 6, and more than 60 of the 277 members protested the loss of the motion. The proposals received support from the lay members, but not enough bishops voted in favour of them to make them law.
A proposal to rethink suggested wording on women in the Church was approved by the council following substantial debate; it was eventually approved in a 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.
Fisher stated that although while there is a whole chapter devoted to the significance of the liturgy, particularly the Eucharist and the sacrament of Penance, he had hoped to see “concrete ideas” on how the Church may find priests qualified to perform those sacraments.
Late in 2021, Fisher expressed his expectation that the council will concentrate on issues including how to address a secular culture and a decline in religious activity.
He stated to the Catholic Weekly last year that barely 1 in 10 Australian Catholics presently attend Mass on a regular basis. A vocations problem is affecting the Church in Australia, affecting not just vocations to the priesthood but also to marriage and convent life.
The Church still reacts to sexual abuse crises in addition to a secular society.
According to a 2017 royal commission report, the Catholic Church and other national institutions have long had major shortcomings in preventing child abuse.