Concerned Catholics Canberra Goulburn last August challenged the President of the forthcoming Fifth Plenary Council of Australia (PC), Archbishop Tim Costelloe of Perth, to avoid a breach of faith with the Australian Catholic community. It called on him to open the process of formulating the Instrumentum Laboris, the PC working document, to public scrutiny prior to its completion.
This gesture towards transparency did not eventuate despite several requests to Archbishop Costelloe, notably also from the Australian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (ACCCR), representing 19 reform groups. The moment has passed. Last August he announced that the process would include consideration by the Australian bishops followed by reference to the Vatican. The working document has now been completed and was sent to the Congregation for Bishops at the Vatican last week. It will be sent to delegates and revealed to the public before the end of the month. The final step has been taken before the PC Assembly in October.
The working document is among the issues to be discussed on March 5 when Andrea Dean and Peter Johnstone, co-conveners of ACCCR, will meet with Archbishop Costelloe, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, the President of the Bishops Conference, and Lana Turvey-Collins from the PC Facilitation Team.
This long-awaited meeting, at the initiative of ACCCR, is a further constructive and pleasing engagement between the bishops and the church reform movement. The ACCCR agenda set out for the bishops draws on long-standing reform issues, such as the proposal that a woman PC delegate committed to renewal be appointed as co-chair or deputy-chair, and the request that all diocesan bishops urgently establish diocesan pastoral councils and diocesan synods or assemblies with gender balanced membership as essential preparation for the Plenary Council.
The agenda also draws on newer issues which have arisen since last August. These emerging issues include the disappointingly cautious response by the bishops to the governance reforms outlined in The Light from the Southern Cross: Promoting Co-Responsible Governance in the Catholic Church in Australia, the independent report which they had requested following the recommendation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Last December the official response to the report from the bishops failed to back the key recommendation for mandatory Diocesan Pastoral Councils, designating such participatory mechanisms as a voluntary option only and leaving it to diocesan bishops rather than taking a national stand. Only a quarter of regular Australian dioceses, and none of the major archdioceses, have such pastoral councils despite them being a default requirement in Canon Law and essential to a synodal church.
Further progress with the PC itself has been the issuing of the Statutes and Regulatory Norms, which were sent to delegates late last year without any prior consultation. The document makes no mention of Canon 127 which precludes bishops in deliberative voting (restricted to bishops alone) from acting contrary to a consultative vote without what is in their judgement ‘an over-riding reason’. Further explanation of the implications of these statutes and norms for the consultative vote and free and open discussion must await the orientation and training for delegates which will take place in June-July this year.
It has also been decided that instead of a face-to-face PC Assembly in Adelaide in October the first assembly will be a mixed-mode event, combining Zoom sessions with delegates meeting face-to-face only on a diocesan or provincial level. This decision was taken because of uncertainty surrounding travel within Australia and accommodation requirements in any central venue. Further details as to how this will work in practice are awaited, but reasonable fears for any reform impetus emerging from the much-touted event are inevitable.
Lay Catholics remain seriously under-represented in the official forum. To encourage greater lay involvement in discussions of the future of the church in Australia, the business of the Plenary Council, ACCCR, on behalf of the reform movement, will hold a series of three national convocations this year, in May, August and November. The first will be addressed by Sister Joan Chittister, the American Benedictine nun renowned for her vision of the future of Catholicism. She was notoriously precluded by the Archbishop of Melbourne from addressing a national conference of Catholic educators in Melbourne.
The purpose of these convocations is not to be obstructive but co-responsible with the official church. Andrea Dean, also President of Women and the Australian Church, has said that regardless of past rebuffs, “the Coalition is committed to working alongside the bishops in respectful but assertive ways”.
As the days of reckoning approach pressure continues to grow on the Australian bishops to conduct the Plenary Council in open, inclusive and progressive ways, hearing the voices of lay Catholics and recognising their lived experience in modern-day Australia. Reasonable doubts persist within the renewal movement that this will be the case. If not a precious opportunity will have been lost and the future of the church in Australia will have been compromised.
Professor John Warhurst is Chair of Concerned Catholics Canberra Goulburn and a Plenary Council delegate from the Archdiocese of Canberra Goulburn.
John Warhurst AO is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, and was the Moderator for Massimo Faggioli’s talk. He is chair of Concerned Catholics Canberra Goulburn and a member of the Plenary Council, and a regular columnist with the Canberra Times and Eureka Street.
Comments
7 responses to “Plenary Council progress without transparency or inclusion for lay Catholics ”
John concedes the moment has passed and then attaches some hope to March meeting. At best, a faint hope. Since the close of public submissions the PC pathway has been carefully managed to arrive at a ’21 Session which will pursue a carefully sanitised agenda allowing for modest reforms to emerge – though meagre will probable be more apt than modest.
Why this will be so is an analysis awaiting examination – but it is a necessary task if the reform movement is to achieve meaningful reform. Good ideas compatible with the Catholic tradition are one thing, but without effective tactical interplay they are doomed to be just the latest addition to a millenium of reform movements which had their brief moment in the sun and then were relegated to dusty shelves of obscurity.
‘It’s the culture stupid.’
The sickness in Australian Catholicism at present is cultural. We had a culture once. I grew up in it. Catholic then used mean a whole lot of things like fearful and anxious, has an Irish surname and probably a saint’s name or two (Bernadette is a giveaway) , went to a Catholic school, knows whose feast day it is today, doesn’t eat meat on Fridays, can recite the Hail Mary and stops the Our Father at ‘but deliver us from evil’, and if he went to a Marist Brothers’ school can sing the Sub Tuum Praesidium and will even if drunk, bobs her head if someone says ‘Jesus’, knows very little about sex but is expected to have as many kids as possible, and so on. In Victoria they probably followed Collingwood. If you are old enough you can add to this list. But that culture has long since gone. A whole lot of things killed it, Humane Vitae for one, multiculturalism for another. The inability of our leaders to admit the great changes made the problem worse. And the attempt to solve it all by political moves didn’t work; choosing restorationist and inadequate bishops was a disaster for example. As Sean Kelly points out in today’s Sydney Morning Herald (22nd February) ‘genuinely significant cultural problems can never be contained by political management – or not for long.’ Kelly is talking about the mess our prime minister is in at the moment but he slips in a shot at us too, ‘It is what happened to the Catholic Church on child abuse’.
I feel little hope for the Plenary Council. Though in my better moments I feel some hope for the Church I can’t see it being realised in my lifetime. Whether I am right or wrong I agree with Kelly’s conclusion for the rest of Australia and apply it to the Church, we have to begin my acknowledging the actual problems now, and stop playing politics.
Hello Graham: I think John Lennon has won the next generation: they imagine a world without religion. Maybe we overcooked the Rabbi Jesus story. Maybe Jesus died trying to be a half decent human being.
That might be enough.
Hello John: About a year ago many articles appeared about the PC. Perhaps you wrote some. The rebels said it will all come to nothing. We were a bit wrong. Lay Catholics will pew-sit via Zoom. That’ll be about it! You seem reluctant to ask the obvious question: why no change? Can I suggest that to seek an answer we need to ponder the psyche? During lockdown, I read Suzanne Smith’s “The Altar Boys”. My conclusion is the ninety five percent are not the only ones to walk out on the Church – if that’s what it is. God has too: if there is a God? Given that the current bishops are protégés of the generation in Suzanne’s book, where do you see change coming from? The devout will say the Holy Spirit. Will it be present via mixed-mode?
Thanks John for the update.
Certainly not much discussion at a local level . Deafening silence from the ACBC. Fastest release I read last week says little. I get the feeling that it’s business as usual in the Australian Church. Personally I have given up on any thing effective coming out of the Plenary Council .
Gavin O’Brien writes in response to John Warhurst “Personally I have given up on any thing effective coming out of the Plenary Council.”
I confess I feel much the same. I’ve lost faith in the “leader representatives of Jesus” that anything effective will come out of the Plenary Council.
As Graham English suggests: it is fundamentally a “cultural problem”. I think it is connected to everything we’re observing going on in the world at present – from the rise of Trumpism to the current controversy over facebook and social media and the “tech giants”. They (our leaders) have basically all worked out that the vast majority of the population – the “hoi polloi” – are more interested in entertainment and distraction than critical thinking and real news and personal advancement. Collectively and culturally we are in a phase of DEvolution and reverting back to the “flight or fight” emotional responses of our Lizard Brains. Some worked out a long time ago, led by the Murdoch’s, that this is an easy pathway to enormous power and personal wealth. Never over-estimate the intelligence of the ordinary Joe and Sally who are addicted to the “endless and mindless” Tabloid media and, more recently “the new kid on the block: social media!”
Hello Brian: Have you been following the journey of the German synod, where lay people have got the vote? Our German sisters and brothers could be going somewhere. If it ends in a split, so what: the “thing” is dead anyhow. Can a Thomas Sternberg and the all-powerful Central Committee of German Catholics be replicated here? I do not know because I know nothing about lay organizations. I walked out decades ago, and it was one-way. To be honest, I do not think the so called church is ready for reform: it is not yet sufficiently dead.