On 10 Oct 2021 the 5th Plenary Council of Australia concluded. Between now and the final 2nd Assembly in early July 2022 the steering committee and the drafting committee will turn proposals from the 1st Assembly into motions to be voted on at the 2nd assembly, and the rest of us begin to digest all the input from the 1st Assembly.

The official document from the 1st Assembly is going to be a large one.

In the interim here are two documents to get you started:

The first one is the concise Tweet-sized version of the livestreamed part of the 1st Assembly. It runs to 7 pages and includes associated online comments on the whole process.
It is a good starting place to get an overview of the deliberations that took place.

The second one is a rough transcript of the livestreamed part of the 1st Assembly. It runs to 21 pages. This includes the Mass Homilies, the reports from the small groups discussing the Agenda Questions. 

What it doesn't cover are the Interventions which happened each day. These were presentations by members of the Assembly that were no longer than 300 words each. Some were read out during the Assembly, the rest will be included in the official records of the Assembly.

Some of those Interventions were published on the Catholic Weekly website. How long they will remain available online is unknown. https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/category/plenary-2020/

May the Holy Spirit bring to full completion the work He began in the First Assembly of the 5th Plenary Council of Australia.
Amen.

In a few days’ time the first session of the Plenary Council of Australia will begin. From Sunday 3 Oct to Sunday 10 Oct there will be all kinds of online meetings going on.

The timetable is here (if you scroll down a bit)
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/assembly-1/

(But as that website page has been a bit glitchy, this is the timetable as it was online as at 30 Sep 2021.)

And the YouTube channel where you can find the livestreamed Masses and ‘open to all’ sessions is here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKFmOZcjJfMQ9SfcotyZJg

The second session will happen mid-2022.

If this goes according to normal Vatican Synod precedents, the first session tends to be a bit of an ice-breaker, and sets the conversation going, and then second session is where the nitty gritty stuff happens – because the first session gives everyone a handle on where the battlelines are and what the stakes actually are.

Yes, the first session is necessary, just like a football game the first half is where you size up the strengths and weaknesses of the other team, and the second half – like the second session – is where the game is decided.

It is a process that involves real people, with their own talents, responsibilities and agendas; the prayers of the church local; national and universal, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Do not underestimate the Holy Spirit;
we know from holy scripture that He is just as adept at bringing God’s plans to fruition through the evil, the skullduggerous, the fool, even through a donkey, as well as through the well intentioned and the truly good and holy.

Obviously the Holy Spirit can do far more with willing collaborators than with the unwilling ones. The degree of willing collaboration determines whether the Father’s base plan, His better plan, His outstanding plan or His jaw-droppingly-wonderful plan is enacted.

l want to see the jaw-droppingly-wonderful plan happen,
don’t you?

Yes, there are massive forces working against this,
including the enemy of our souls and his minions as well those who independently want to shape the church in their image rather than in God’s image, and the potent zeitgeists of our era.

Yet this is the great south land of the Holy Spirit.
We have yet to see anything here that would deserve a smidgeon of that epithet.
But that’s what gives us hope, that this is the time,
among the chaos and lockdowns,
among the inability to freely and publicly access the sacraments,
when it most certainly can’t be by our doing,
that God can do it,
that He can do it in such a way that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God alone did it.

That’s why beyond all our fears that this is going to be a secular-agenda-led talk-fest and a complete waste of time,
that it will be known as the Plenary Council of the Holy Spirit.

That doesn’t mean we stop praying.
It means we intensify our prayers.

One way to do that is to join in with the full rosary (20 decades) being livestreamed through St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney from 3pm to 4.30pm on Sunday 3 Oct 2021.
https://www.stmaryscathedral.org.au/event/holy-rosary-with-the-cathedral-clergy-3rd-october-2021/
(Remember Daylight Saving starts in NSW that morning! Fix your clocks.)

Another way to pray is to do what Archbishop Polding did when times were tough on the sea voyage from Sydney to London via the bottom of South America in 1846, when they risked being becalmed for weeks.
He got everyone to pray 5 Our Fathers, 5 Hail Marys and a Memorare for suitable wind.

We certainly need the wind of the Holy Spirit in our nation Australia,
and in the people of God who reside here,
in the Plenary Council of the Holy Spirit,
and in those who are on the path to seeking Him
but don’t quite realise it yet.

It seems like a good plan,
and achievable between now and 10 October,
especially as a family or household group,
to pray the 5 Our Fathers, 5 Hail Marys and a Memorare daily;
and if you feel so led,
to continue to pray them daily until the close of the second session in 2022.
…………………………………………
Our Father
Our Father, Who art in heaven,
hallowed be Your Name.
Your kingdom come,
Your Will be done,
on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. Amen.

Hail Mary
Hail Mary, Full of Grace,
The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit
of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners, now,
and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The Memorare
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help,
or sought your intercession was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence,
I fly to you, O Virgin of virgins, my mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen

Recently I was asked by a relative to contribute to answering some of the Questions given in the Agenda for the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia 2021.

​plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Plenary-Council-Agenda.pdf
 
While I’m still very concerned that the Plenary Council process has been a waste of time, talent and resources, I did agree to attempt some answers. Here they are:
 
1.CONVERSION
 
How might we better accompany one another on the journey of personal and communal conversion which mission in Australia requires?
 
To accompany one another on any journey means that we have to get to know one another and spend time with each other.
 
The current culture of arriving just in time for Mass, and leaving as soon as it is finished (or even beforehand), does not lend itself to learning to accompany one another. What needs to be done is part of the shift that has to happen from church goers being consumers to church goers being participants in mission.
 
We know from the end of Acts 2 that it was the Holy Spirit who bonded the members of the early church together in unity, community and mission. Without the Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit there is no impetus/motivation to accompany each other and to care for each other.
 
But the wine of the Holy Spirit needs to go into fresh skins, so some kind of structural shift is needed that celebrates, rewards and makes accompanying each other possible. From experience we know that morning teas after the last Sunday morning Mass are not sufficient. Even though we sit beside many of the same people in the pews each weekend, ‘breaking the ice’ with each other isn’t easy; and the cringe factor when we are invited to say hello to each other at the beginning of Mass or during the homily is palpable.
 
But unless that ice is broken somehow, and at more than a superficial level, then the courage to join any kind of discussion group won’t materialize. Yet it is only in small to medium groups (3-20 people) which meet monthly, or more frequently, that true accompaniment takes place.
 
God must have a plan for such a structural shift, but we are only going to find His answer through assiduous communal prayer.
 
How might we heal the wounds of abuse, coming to see through the eyes of those who have been abused.
 
First we have to recognise just how prevalent abuse is; the statistics are something like 1 in every 4 women, and 1 in every 10 men have suffered some kind of sexual abuse; and that doesn’t count any other kind of abuse.
 
It is a widespread problem that so many people in society and in our pews live with the wounds from that kind of trauma and in ever present fear of that kind of abuse happening again.
 
On the other hand that means there are also a significant number of people committing abuse, some because they can, others due to various kinds of compulsion stemming from abuse that they themselves suffered. They are in our pews too.
 
Both groups need the salvation and healing that Jesus Christ freely offers.
 
But when was the last time you heard a homily about the power of Jesus to heal these wounds? When was the last time you heard a homily about the power of Jesus to help you forgive those who have hurt you – and to forgive yourself – as well? When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how to bring the most shameful things to Jesus in the sacrament of Penance?
 
These things don’t go away with an apology.
 
They don’t go away with any kind of retribution or revenge either.
 
And people with the specific God-given natural gifts and training necessary to do the kind of deep listening that is therapeutic, they are rather rare. While they are effective; that effectiveness can only deal with the tip of the iceberg of this societal problem.
 
Obviously God must have a solution. It is a God-sized problem.
But has anyone or any group even begun seriously interceding for the revelation of His solution?
 
NB. Some people have suggested that something akin to a Truth and Justice Commission would be a way to deal with this situation. But the Truth and Justice Commission in South Africa was not as effective as people hoped it would be. Not everyone wanted to publicly recount the trauma they had been through; not everyone wanted to be identified as a victim, and many perpetrators managed to obtain amnesty when they should have been charged with crimes.
 
How might the Church in Australia open in new ways to indigenous ways of being Christian in spirituality, theology, liturgy and missionary discipleship? How might we learn from the First Nations peoples.
 
We can learn from their knowledge of relationship with the Great Spirit gathered over millennia;
  from the methods they developed to keep families and tribes together
  from their concept of stewardship, and temporary custody of the land
  from their methods of dealing with due punishment for crime
  from their lived experience of all things being held in common (both the good aspects, and the not so good aspects where advantage is taken of the vulnerable)
  from their balance between the need for times of community and for times of solitude (walkabout).

While there is greater openness to including First Nation cultural rituals into our community lives and liturgy, such things should only be done after very careful and thorough discernment of each religious ceremony; since not all of them arose from relationship to the Good Spirit.
 
How might the church in Australia meet the needs of the most vulnerable, go to the peripheries, the missionary in places that may be overlooked or left behind in contemporary Australia? How might we partner with others (Christians, people about the fate, neighbourhood community groups, government) to do this?
 
This isn’t something that pertains to diocesan and national leadership, except in terms of giving permission/encouragement and confirming/commissioning what is happening at grass roots (parish level)

These ministries spring up at grassroots level in response to local conditions and to local needs.

Two examples:

Mary Mac’s Place, Woy Woy
It began as a parish outreach to the homeless, with companionship, lunches, and a place of safety to go to. Over time Catholic Care and the St Vincent de Paul Society added input and degrees of oversight and funding. These days many of the volunteers aren’t parishioners and are from other Christian communities.

Food Bank, Dartmouth, Canada
Part of that parish has the lowest socio-economic levels in the region, and an opportunity opened up when a local Christian community lost their place of worship to provide not only hospitality for somewhere to gather for worship, but also to join together the two parish’s food banks into one, and become more effective together in meeting local needs.

You can’t ‘legislate’ for these things, but you can give pastors and their parishes permission and encouragement to take ecumenical options for works of mercy when opportunities arise.

Likewise you can give pastors and their parishes permission to explore how to best serve the neediest in their locality, but it will always be a matter for local research into local needs/conditions and of local response to how God is calling them to answer those needs in His way.

Thought could be given to the provision of seed-funding for new ministries and support funding for ongoing ministries from a diocesan level.

It is important to determine at a local level who the most vulnerable people are and then set up programs where we may be able to assist. But we must learn from the mistakes of the past and not impose solutions from without. To truly help means to listen with open hearts to what they need – not what we think they need. Any solutions must have significant input and ongoing guidance from those in vulnerable situations. For example: we’ve often patted ourselves on the back for putting in access ramps – but what good are access ramps if there are no accessible toilets for people to use once they’ve got inside the building?

How might the church in Australia respond to the call to ecological conversion?  How can we express and promote a commitment to an integral ecology of life in all its dimensions with particular attention to the more vulnerable people and environments in our country and region?
 
This has to be handled very carefully, and from a distinctly Christian and Catholic perspective.

For many people, anything with a tinge of Green lobby about it has become an instant turn off.
 
How do you answer people who say, ‘well I’m much better than I used to be, I am reducing, re-using, and recycling, - do you mean that’s not enough?’
 
2.PRAYER
 
How might we become a more contemplative people, committing more deeply to prayer as a way of life, and celebrating the liturgy of the Church as an encounter with Christ who sends us out to “make disciples of all the nations”?
 
This topic tends to be where pleas for the return to the 3rd Rite of Reconciliation are given.
Please consider:
 
Grace might be free, but it certainly isn’t cheap.
And we should never treat it as cheap.

Everybody loves the easy option that doesn’t really cost them any more than an hour of time. It is akin to the difference of saying with others ‘we believe in one God’ compared to saying alone before others ‘I believe in one God’.
 
There’s no risk with the former; commitment with the latter.
 
Isn’t that the difference between ‘we have sinned’ vs ‘I have sinned’?

3rd Rite also encourages the consumer behaviour that we want to replace with missionary disciple behaviour.

A shepherd watches over his flock, but he treats each sheep individually when medicinal care is needed (worming, sheep dip, shearing, hoof scraping, inspecting for ticks etc).

Our Good Shepherd is the same, individual care for medicinal needs (healing of sin) is His way.
 
All of the perceived benefits of the 3rd Rite are present in the 2nd Rite (communal preparation followed by individual confession), and the 2nd Rite, produces better fruit than the 3rd Rite.

Each of us needs to hear the ‘I absolve you (singular)’ for certainty of forgiveness.
 
…………………………………………………….
 
How many of us are actually praying every day?

Yes there are some who pray their daily rosary and chosen devotions, and there are some who pray parts of the Divine Office daily, and there are some who incorporate daily reading of the bible into their prayers times, and others who do a bit of everything

but,

the vast majority of people in the pews have no regular prayer life at all.

Once someone has begun to pray, then you have a hope of deepening it,
but the commitment to pray daily is a pre-requisite.

Even 10 minutes a day can make a vast difference in our spiritual lives.
Without prayer we can do nothing.

Sustained encouragement for everyone to pray 10 minutes a day would be a very good start.
 
How might we better embrace the diverse liturgical traditions of the churches which make up the Catholic Church and the cultural gifts of immigrant communities to enrich the spirituality of worship of the church in Australia?
 
Providing devotional space for our immigrant communities would be a good step.

An exterior shrine, or an interior chapel, for localities with a significant migrant population should be encouraged, as places where they can honour the saint/s that are so important in their country of origin.
 
The parish at Marsfield has a chapel for a statue of Our Lady of Graces donated by the local Italian/Maltese community. It is a way of sharing our cultural/spiritual partonomy with each other.
 
When WYD pilgrims visited Sydney, many of them brought images and icons of the patron saints of their localities and nations as gifts to the parishes that hosted them, enriching all of us, and visually reminding us that we are the Church universal whenever we gather to pray.
 
3.FORMATION
 
How might we better form leaders for mission - adults, children and families, couples and single people?
 
Should you happen to have active children, families, couples and non-retired adults in your faith communities count yourselves especially fortunate.
 
The vast majority of parishes no longer have age diversity in their congregations.

In a recent May headcount at a vigil Mass, only 2.5% of those present were aged under 70.

The focus should be on how to form teams, and leaders of teams for mission, from among our 70+ year olds, for there to be any kind of missionary success.
 
How might we better equip ordained ministers to be enablers of missionary discipleship the church becoming more a ‘priestly people’ served by the ordained ministry?

How might formation, both pre- and post-ordination, better foster the development of bishops, priests and deacons as enablers of the universal Christian vocation to holiness lived in missionary discipleship?
 
Guided practical experience in discerning whether something emerging in the parish is of God (or not) would be the most useful. Because if something hasn’t been initiated by God, then pouring resources into it is ultimately futile.

Learning how to support laity whom God has commissioned in the catechising, evangelizing and charitable works of the Church would be the next most useful thing. Moral support and financial support: ‘How can I and the parish help you to be more effective in your calling from God?’

Because otherwise two things happen; the priest becomes a bottleneck rather than a coach/cheerleader/enabler who with God’s authority gives permission and commissions for mission; and people forget that lay ministry is crucial for the mission of the church and begin/continue to think that ‘Father and the nuns do all of that’.

Understanding the charisms the Holy Spirit bestows upon His people; and learning how to help His people grow safely and effectively in the use of those charisms, is one of the greatest services to the Church (and to the mission of the Church) that can be done.
 
By and large ordained leadership has been guilty of ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to recruitment for ministry (eg catechists, altar servers) – if you are breathing, and seem reasonable, you’ll do – instead of taking the time and effort to find those who have charisms of teaching to be catechists and to find those who have charisms of service (helps) to be altar servers.
 
It isn’t overly difficult to work out who the naturally out-going people are in a congregation; the ones who have a genuine interest in new people, and to give them some extra training as welcomers and evangelists – because that extra training in techniques and listening to the promptings of the Holy Spirit will make them far more effective than they already are.
 
We have to comprehend that when we see parishioners we can no longer see pawns (ie. interchangeable worker bees), but we see that no one is a pawn, that they are all kings, queens, bishops, rooks and castles with very different God given callings and abilities. Likewise, we have to comprehend the double disaster of putting a rook in a castle ministry; the rook will burn out and be ineffective AND the castle that should have been there has had his/her talents unused.
 
But this goes for the ordained as well. A priest with a more than ordinary effectiveness in ministering to the sick should be placed in a position where he can use those gifts – and not moved to any position where that isn’t a major part of his regular ministry. Permanent deacons without people skills should not be put in situations where people skills are essential, but where the talents they do have can shine (eg livestreaming technology, events organisation, archivist)
 
This impacts preaching too: It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone else has the same calling that you do. That’s why we see priests gifted as evangelists in their preaching calling everyone to evangelise like them when maybe 7% of the congregation has the charism for that ministry, and the rest have charisms for works of mercy, for intercessory prayer, for teaching, for administration and other charisms. Yes, we all have the small ‘e’ calling to evangelise, (the church exists to evangelise) but some have the big ‘E’ calling. Preaching ‘let’s all be big E’ puts off and confuses everyone who doesn’t have a big E calling.
 
4.STRUCTURES
 
How might parishes better become local centres for the formation and animation of missionary disciples?
 
Just like each baptized person has a call to a particular mission of the church,
and just like we find that there are calls within calls among our priests and religious (some priests are more gifted at visitation of the sick than others; some religious are more gifted at being memory keepers/archivists than others; some religious are more gifted at spiritual direction than others)
 – so too does each parish have a particular call from God within the general call of being a parish.
 
For example, St Patrick’s Church Hill, understands that it is everyone’s ‘second parish’, either for Mass or Confession, or both, and that a degree of anonymity for those who walk through the doors is needed to preserve that special calling.
 
Only when a parish begins to know and come into agreement with its special call within a call from God, will it truly thrive and become a local centre for the formation and animation of a specific missionary calling (eg inner healing, evangelization of workers, promotion of the rosary etc).

NB these are long term callings, well beyond the lifespan of any pastor, and often linked in some way to the spiritual patronage of the parish.
 
For example the parish of Our Lady of Lourdes at Earlwood has long been known for its healing Masses; and is it a complete surprise that a parish under the patronage of St John the Baptist has retained 4 regular weekly opportunities for confession (when most other parishes only have one?
 
How might the Church in Australia be better structured for mission, considering the parish, the diocese, religious orders, the PJPs and new communities?
 
Most parish and other budgets only look at costs for maintenance of buildings and salaries, and existing ministries (eg sacramental programme/s).
 
Even 5% of budget set aside only for funding the start-up of new missionary initiatives would be a worthwhile beginning.

(Remembering that new initiatives often take until the 2nd year to bear fruit)
 
5.GOVERNANCE
 
How might the people of God, lay and ordained, women and men, approach governance in this spirit of synodality and co-responsibility for more effective proclamation of the Gospel?
 
How might we recast governance at every level of the Church in Australia in a more missionary key?
 
It would help a lot if what we reward and celebrate wasn’t so ‘parish building’ focused.
 
The real mission field is outside the church walls where the believers interact with the non-believers in various ways.
 
The visible ministries of choir, lector, altar server, sacristan, musician get far more regular kudos than the invisible ministries of mothering young children, caring for the elderly, taking Holy Communion to the sick, serving with the St Vincent de Paul society, facilitating small groups of bible study, and listening to the young. That has to change.
 
90% of the miracles Jesus worked happened outside the synagogue and Temple walls. Outside the parish building is where the laity should be focused on the mission to which God has called them.
 
Remember, we should be encouraging our nurses to become holy nurses; our carpenters to become holy carpenters, our shop assistants to become holy shop assistants so that they can have maximum impact in the places and careers, ie the specific mission fields that God has placed them in.
 
You’d much prefer a holy nurse who prayed for you and with you as she changed your wound dressings than a secular nurse, wouldn’t you!?
 
We have a duty to mutually encourage each other to both holiness and mission.
 
We have a duty to help each other see the missionary possibilities that are present in our existing careers and vocational callings, and to encourage and train them to act on the opportunities that arise.
 
Possibilities like taking the opportunity to pray with customers and work colleagues who are distressed, like asking the extra question (you’ve sorted out your legal/financial situation, but have you done anything towards sorting out your eternal situation?), like noticing patterns where vulnerable people are falling through the cracks of bureaucratic systems and working with others- together with prayer- to find an effective solution.
 
6.INSTITUTIONS
 
How might we better see the future of Catholic education ( primary, secondary and tertiary) through a missionary lens?
 
I honestly don’t know if the existing structures have a future.
 
Can we in all good conscience say that our schools at any level (primary, secondary, tertiary) are producing believers, missionary disciples? We see less than 5% of them inside our church walls in any given 12 month time period.

Shouldn’t we be putting our resources where there is good fruit, and pruning away that which is producing no fruit or bad fruit?
 
What we do have are secular schools with a Catholic veneer that are very good at inoculating young people from having any commitment to Catholic faith at all.
 
During this time of pandemic we have seen families cope with homeschooling their children with the ‘remote’ support of teachers and online resources.
 
We could let our already secular schools become fully secular, and instead invest in setting up hubs of teachers to support the homeschooling efforts of Catholic families. But those hubs of teachers need to be fully practicing Catholics with full adherence to the teachings of the Church. It is true that we learn as much from the character and beliefs of a teacher as we do their subject matter.
 
How might we better see the future of Catholic social services, agencies and health and aged care ministries as key missionary and evangelising agencies
 
We could look at them as current and future bastions against the evils of euthanasia, abortion, and care proportionate to the benefits of treatment vs the burdens of treatment.
 
In dire circumstances often hearts open up to the need for God. We are called by 1 Peter 3:15 to always have our answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you all have.
 
We would be derelict in our duty if we didn’t train our staff in these services, ministries and agencies to be able to do give their answers when asked.

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and would like a print-friendly version.....
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I’ve come to the conclusion that the Church the Plenary Council Agenda is talking about bears little resemblance to my pew-sitter’s view. Admittedly I’m an unusual pew-sitter, since I’ve read all the major reports issued on the Plenary Council website.

Like other pew-sitters, I’d determined that giving any more time to the Plenary Council process would be unproductive. But then someone asked me to read the official Agenda.

So I read it. One page of reading isn’t onerous.
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Plenary-Council-Agenda.pdf

Of the 16 Agenda questions, only 4 stood out as worthy of detailed deliberation, viz:

*How might we better form leaders for mission – adults, children and families, couples and single people?
*How might we better equip ordained ministers to be enablers of missionary discipleship: the Church becoming more a “priestly people” served by the ordained ministry?
*How might parishes better become local centres for the formation and animation of missionary disciples?
*How might the Church in Australia be better structured for mission, considering the parish, the diocese, religious orders, the PJPs and new communities?

(I had no idea what PJPs are: apparently they are ‘Public Juridic Persons’, entities set up in the Church for specific purposes eg Catholic Healthcare, Edmund Rice Education Australia. Hint: Church jargon of that magnitude means it wasn’t written for pew-sitters like me, but for people used to collaborating with diocesan curia – and above.)

But most of these kinds of questions mean very little until they are applied to a case study of some kind, to enable people to wrestle with possible answers to these questions in realistic situations.

What does an average parish look like in Australia?

Something like this:

It has one priest; by and large, if he is a senior citizen he was born in Australia, if he is younger he was born in another country where English was not the native language.
He has the equivalent of one paid administrative person on staff.
The parish contains a Catholic primary school with about 300-400 students.
Of those students, in any 12 month time frame, he might see 5% of the children from that primary school at weekend Mass.
The parish contains people from a variety of ethnicities.
The parish is located at least 50 kms from the diocesan cathedral, (an hour’s drive or more).
Daily Mass attendance average is 20 persons.
Weekend Mass attendance is of 550 persons spread over 3 Masses.
The parish is struggling to make even 50% of the expected annual contributions to the diocesan charitable works fund.
The parish has no resident religious orders, but perhaps has one or two retired consecrated persons of 80+.
95% of those attending weekend Mass are aged 70+, or even 75+.
The parish has at least one St Vincent de Paul Conference, and a few dedicated and overworked catechists who serve in local state-run primary schools.

From the perspective of that case study, even the most pertinent question (How might we better form leaders for mission?’) is framed incorrectly.

Because the question really is “How do we form our 70, 80 and 90 year olds for mission, as leaders, teams, and team members?”

And the follow-up question is “How do we keep our few sub 70 year olds from imploding under the weight of the regular tasks needed to keep a parish functioning and the isolation of how few people are on the same part of their life journey to share faith with?”.

In an average parish there are no able bodies with spare time to give to questions and to ministry in the areas of First Nations, ecology, wounds from abuse, ecumenism, education, health care and social services.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the current Plenary Council Agenda is like determining the precise positioning of deckchairs on the Titanic.

There are 3 very large items missing from the Plenary Council Agenda:

*No mention of the Holy Spirit. Without Him, neither holiness nor mission is possible.
*No mention of sacred scripture. Frequent personal reading of the Bible is the number 1 input that guarantees all discipleship outputs. (Read: ‘No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry’ by Daniel Im) www.amazon.com/No-Silver-Bullets-Transform-Ministry/dp/1433651548
*No mention of ministry to families. As goes the family, so goes the Church. Family is the plan of God that pre-dates scripture by millennia. All vocations (of all types!) grow in families.

Until the Plenary Council Agenda items have any hope of becoming reality in an average parish, and until these 3 very large items assume due prominence, this pew-sitter will remain disengaged from the process.

If you are a pew-sitter who agrees with me, please share these thoughts with other pew-sitters and with any contacts you may have in the rarefied worlds of curia and episcopy.
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​The Instrumentum Laboris (working document) for the first session of the Australian Plenary Council was released on 25 Feb 2021, and I eventually finished reading it sometime in mid-March.

You can read it yourself:
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/instrumentum-laboris/

It wasn’t an easy read, despite it being beautifully presented. Penitential, it was. Firstly it takes a very long time to set the scene and give a situational analysis of the Church in Australia. Many times I wondered if the document would ever get to the point. Secondly it uses lots of ambiguous language that feels like it was written by a combination of church bureaucrats and school teachers. It would be easy to decode for them, but not for me. I longed for some footnotes that gave situational examples to aid understanding.

In particular I longed for concrete and contextual explanation of this passage from 166:

“Not infrequently, Catholics and their family members find themselves in an uneasy situation regarding particular Church teachings or disciplines, not because they identify any less as Catholic, and not because their attachment to Christ has grown “lukewarm” (Rev 3:16), but because of shifts in cultural norms and expectations that they once relied on to support their Catholic faith. Very often, however, this tension between people’s lived experience and the teachings of the Church reaches the point where people withdraw from parishes or communities, and no longer identify as Catholic.”

Is this about going to Mass on Sundays, cohabitation, same sex attraction, blended families, or about some, all or even more than this? How do you even begin to discuss this passage without knowing what the original catalyst for the passage was? How do you begin to frame questions that ask, ‘prove to me how attachment to Christ hasn’t grown lukewarm despite being out of synch with Church teachings, disciplines and practices…by what other means can you show strong attachment to Jesus Christ (John 12:26, James 2:17-18)?’?

I admit I was struggling to reconcile the somewhat rosy view the Working Document paints compared to what I am seeing in the pews. Then Philippa Martyr’s article came up while I was trying unsuccessfully to find any online commentary on the Working Document which wasn’t a clone of the official press release. It is well worth a read:
https://gaudiumetspes22.com/2021/03/05/stranded-under-the-southern-cross-news-from-a-shrinking-church/

I found it a more accurate analysis of the Catholic Church in Australia 2021.

In particular I found her imagery of a carapace to be valuable, viz:

“I tend to see the Church in Australia as consisting of the ‘real Church’ and an unpleasant outer structure that I call The Carapace. The Carapace is like The Borg in Star Trek, if it helps. It attaches itself to the real Church and feeds off it. Its principal purpose is to employ people, and its mission is to protect the Church’s assets at all costs.”

What bothers me greatly is that the Instrumentum Laboris seems to be written by the carapace, and the vast majority of the delegates for the Plenary Council sessions will come from the carapace.

What else bothers me is that God seems to be a minor stakeholder among many instead of the One and Only opinion that matters.

Why else would there be so much virtue signaling about sexual abuse, indigenous issues, women in leadership issues, ecology, etc? I’m not saying that they aren’t important, just that they pale into insignificance against the urgency of saving souls from eternities in hell. Dealing with these things of necessity will be part of that primary mission, for the salvation of the people in these minorities, but they should never overshadow that primary mission.

Which matters to God the most?

What matters to God the most?

I put it to you that growth in relationship to Him (holiness), family (His plan that predates Scripture), and bringing people into relationship with Him (mission) and co-operating in expressing His love to others (service: which is the natural overflow of increase in holiness and mission) are what matter most to God.

On everything but service we are not doing well at all, and even our service is usually human powered service rather than Holy Spirit empowered service.

My view from the pew looks like this:

Everything starts from Holy Spirit inspired preaching. But for Holy Spirit inspired preaching to happen lots of prayer, study of scripture and sacred tradition, openness to the charismatic workings of the Holy Spirit and surrender to the workings of the Holy Spirit are necessary; and the preacher has to be able to effectively use the language and language idioms of those he is preaching to.

It is ‘hymns, hospitality and homilies’ or ‘music, ministry and message’ that either engages a newcomer and keeps them returning or turns them off for good. Generally we are mediocre when it comes to hymns and hospitality with the occasional flash of brilliance, but where we consistently fall down is in homilies.

When was the last time a homily encouraged you to pray?
When was the last time a homily invited you to go to confession? (and made it available)
When was the last time a homily opened your eyes to how good and great God is?
When was the last time a homily made you want to know Jesus better?
When was the last time a homily kept you awake and hanging on every word?
When was the last time a homily contained anything memorable that wasn’t a pre-prepared joke?

Every day I pray that God will use the words of the homilist that day to touch hearts. Often I wonder if God hears me because even I can only decode on average 3 words out of 5 from our overseas-born priests, and the most common question when Mass is over is ‘What did he say?’.

But a preacher doesn’t have to be in a pulpit. We pew dwellers are just as bad because we talk far more about parish politics, weather and medical ailments than we ever do (if we ever do) about Jesus, about inspiration we have found in Gospel passages, answers to prayers, and about living out the vocations we have been called to.

There is such laser focus on encouraging priestly vocations that you could be forgiven for thinking that vocations to family life, religious vocations, career vocations and vocations to special non-ordained ministries aren’t important at all. Yet apart from a very few exceptions to the rule, priestly vocations grow in strong families and in devotionally vibrant parishes.

When was the last time you saw any parish-based initiatives for encouraging and supporting marriages and families?

Did you know that Australia has no (nil, nada, ziltch, zero) Retrouvaille ministry/weekends for marriages in crisis?

Schools. Shudder. They are supposed to be places where the Catholic faith is taught and flourishes. Yet they are places where those who do teach the demanding parts of the Gospel are persecuted in various subtle and non-subtle ways. But these days no one in the parish knows anyone with children at the local Catholic primary school, and vice versa, and about the only person who visits both places is the parish priest and any assistant priest. What we actually have are non-government schools. At what point do we call a halt to the massive investment in schools that don’t evangelise, barely catechize and consistently churn out students indistinguishable from atheists and agnostics?

Families with faith have been choosing not to send their children to Catholic schools, many have chosen to home-school, some have chosen Christian schools, and the rest are sending their children to state schools partly because the cost/benefit analysis has swung the other way. In times past parents were willing to pay the extra cost of the Catholic school because it helped support the development of faith in their children.

The view from the pew can look very different from the view of the carapace.

An example may be useful…
In recent years the St Vincent de Paul Society went through a centralization process, and created regional hubs for furniture and other items. The people managing the hubs were happy. Some of the people in the local outlets were happy ‘it’s great, we refer them to the hub’. But those who knew how things worked pre-hub, and the people in need were not happy. Locally there used to be a room where furniture could be stored on a temporary basis. For the hubs to work, they were told rooms like these had to be stopped. The thing is, those rooms enabled society members to respond quickly when needs became manifest. With a hub, you have to send requests up, wait for decisions, and for action to be sent down, and sometimes have to follow-up the requests, all of which means many days, if not weeks, before needs get met. As for the person in need who had enough trouble asking for help the first time, now they have to travel to the hub to get help; and ask for help a second time. How many of them don’t take the extra step? For some the transport costs alone would be prohibitive. For others it was so hard to admit they needed help, it would be a long time before they attempted to admit it again. Or they would seek other alternatives with quicker responses to their urgent emergencies.

Even more seriously, the local outlet loses the opportunity to begin a relationship of accompaniment with that person in need, and the probability of needy people falling through the cracks increases. But the hub managers will only see the turnover of furniture and other items, and fluctuation in staffing levels, and never record or quantify these other losses, and will assume everything is going great guns.

Thankfully there have been moves towards decentralization again.

There are very good reasons why the Church values the principle of subsidiarity, and why any moves towards adding bureaucratic layers for co-ordination of smaller entities has to carefully make sure that the principle of subsidiarity is not violated.

Pope Francis has encouraged leaders to take on the smell of the sheep, to take time to be with those on the fringes and on the front lines. It is the only way to find out what is really going on.

An example may be useful…
A person serving at the diocesan curia has responsibilities for parish support. Most of this person’s time is spent liaising with parish staff and with parish members who voluntarily take on co-ordination roles. The parish support team puts together a Lenten discussion group programme, sends it out to the parishes. Some groups will meet every year regardless. Other groups will only form if there is active encouragement from the pulpit, and some recruitment and engagement of group leaders. Some parishioners will use the contents of the programme privately.

The parish support team will know how many programmes got sent out, and have a rough idea how many groups formed and how many participated. But they don’t usually get information on how many programmes were thrown out because they were still on the display table several weeks later, nor information about why parishioners left them there, nor information about why groups didn’t form, nor why anyone gave up part way through (individually or group). The only way you get that information is by talking incognito (without them knowing what your role is) with people in the pews whom you have never met before and truly listening to what they have to say, even if it isn’t what you want to hear. (eg. “I picked it up, but I put it back when I saw you needed to download stuff. I’m not that good with computers, and there’s no one at home who is any better at it than me, no one who could help me if I got myself into computer trouble.”)

Can you see how from a curial vantage point everything could look rosy, and better than last year? And yet from a pew dweller’s view point it could look very different indeed?

That’s why I am so worried that the Instrumentum Laboris seems to be written by the carapace, and the vast majority of the delegates for the Plenary Council sessions will come from the carapace who haven’t taken on the smell of the sheep.

A few passages from the Instrumentum Laboris caught my eye:

Passage 74 page 27
Rather, Pope Francis, echoing the thoughts of his predecessors since the Second Vatican Council, insists that an authentically Gospel-inspired renewal of the Church flows from a renewed encounter with Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit and gives rise to a ‘pastoral conversion’ of the entire Church, a renewal that is expressed in a ‘missionary option’ or ‘missionary impulse’ for making the saving love of God known in every place.

Amen. Amen. What we all need more than anything is a deeper encounter with Jesus, and a deeper encounter with the Holy Spirit. Without that, nothing, but nothing changes for the better. We can’t make it happen, that is up to God Himself. But we can make the conditions and environment more conducive for those encounters to happen. Things like encouraging private individual prayer, corporate prayer (prayer meetings, public devotions, liturgy), scripture study, reconciling strained relationships, forgiveness of wrongs done to us, getting to know each other better so as to grow in unity, self-discipline, generosity to others, encouraging more frequent visits to the sacrament of penance, and asking God (individually and corporately) to grant us these precious encounters.

Passage 123 page 41
Submissions to the Council also raised what Pope Francis, among others, has identified as the danger of an unhealthy culture of clericalism within the priesthood and in the wider Church. At its most extreme, this has been identified as a significant factor in the sexual abuse crisis in the Church. It can also undermine the mission that belongs to the entire Church and discourage the exercise of gifts within it. Some fundamental questions arise in light of this concern: What are the causes of such a culture of clericalism? What are the theological, structural, psychological or spiritual influences that can contribute to it and how might the Church better equip its clergy and laity for mission today and for increasing co-responsibility in the decades to come?

Clericalism encourages an ‘us and them’ mentality, with ‘us’ being far superior to ‘them’. Sadly our seminaries are still full of it. We have seminarians visiting parishes on placement and making the assumption that no one in the parishes knows how to use incense properly except for them. That assumption most certainly gets up the noses of parishioners who have been serving at the altar and using incense for decades. Then there’s the practice of getting 2nd year seminarians and above to always wear soutanes at Mass, even if they are sitting in the congregation. That’s visibly making an ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction well before the vocational discernment process has scarcely begun. It is very difficult to get to ‘we’ and ‘team’, albeit with different gifts and vocational callings, if from the ‘get go’ seminarians are treated as heroic and special. For the mission of the Church to proceed, ie the making of disciples of Jesus, clerics can’t do it without laity, and laity can’t do it without clerics. We vitally need each other. It is one of those ‘both/and’ things. Mutual respect will get us much further in that mission than clericalism.

Passage 131 page 43
There is not a well-developed understanding and practice of the Church as a community of missionary disciples. The Plenary Council offers the Church in Australia an opportunity to consider carefully, and prayerfully, what steps must be taken to awaken this awareness of the missionary vocation of every Catholic, for all the baptised are called equally to live and proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

This is true. Although there are sub-groups within parishes that have this awareness eg catechists. Vatican II speaks eloquently of the universal call to holiness and the universal call to mission and so have subsequent papal documents. Encouraging us pew dwellers to read these texts is one thing, helping us to understand how to respond in our own lives is quite another since most of us have no idea what that looks like, nor what it feels like. A possible way forward is gathering and sharing testimonies of how God has used pew dwellers to make disciples, with particular emphasis on how pew dwellers came to understand what God was calling them to do, and how that mission developed over time.

Not everyone is going to be called to be an evangelist (nor to the same evangelistic mission field eg family, co-workers, young people, PSTD sufferers etc); not everyone is going to have a calling to specific works of mercy; not everyone is going to have a calling to accompany people through the RCIA process. So there needs to be intentionality about gathering a wide range of stories, and in presenting them with an openness to the multiplicity of God’s callings. It is really easy to unconsciously fall into the trap of ‘God has called me to be a preacher, it is so wonderful and exciting, therefore God is calling everyone to be preachers’, thereby putting unnecessary burdens/guilt on listeners who may be called to very different missions.

Passage 135 page 44
Underpinning such renewal of practices and methods within dioceses, parishes, migrant communities and movements must be the renewal of sacramental life and prayer among all Catholics for it is the encounter with Christ in the midst of the Church that rekindles hope and makes genuine renewal possible. This is seen in the Emmaus story in Luke’s Gospel (24:13-35) where, in the midst of the disciples’ difficulties and even disillusionment, the faith of the followers of Jesus is restored and a new future opened for them by this encounter.

Without prayer and the sacraments, there is no fuel for mission. We can’t give what we don’t have. What we most need to give are God’s love and access to Jesus. Prayer and the sacraments give us access to the infilling of God’s love, and to experiential encounters with Jesus. We haven’t done a good job of proclaiming this truth about prayer and the sacraments, by and large it has been a well-kept secret, when it should have been ‘shout it from the rooftops’ stuff. Again one of the best ways to renew sacramental life and prayer is to gather testimonies from pew dwellers who are living as missionary disciples. We need to share with each other what a difference prayer (personal and communal) and the sacraments (baptism, penance, eucharist, confirmation, anointing of the sick, marriage, holy orders) make in our lives. It is good news, in fact it is great news. All of them make a big impact. But again, sensitivity is needed, because some people feel and experience lots and some people feel and experience little even when God’s grace is just as active in both. It is all too easy for a focus on feelings and experiences to get us chasing them rather than God, and for this focus to make those who barely feel or experience anything to rate themselves as second class citizens of the kingdom of God. For this reason it is always wise to focus more on the fruits eg growth in patience, generosity, peace, trust, improvement in relationships etc.

Passage 197 page 67
It is this assurance that should encourage us and empower us to speak and act with that parrhesia, that boldness and courage, which are a gift of the Holy Spirit: We need the Spirit’s prompting, lest we be paralyzed by fear and excessive caution, lest we grow used to keeping within safe bounds. Let us remember that closed spaces grow musty and unhealthy. When the Apostles were tempted to let themselves be crippled by danger and threats, they joined in prayer to implore parrhesia: “And now, Lord, look upon their threats, and grant to Your servants to speak Your Word with all boldness” (Acts 4:29). As a result, “when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

It is my dearest desire that when the delegates gather for both of the sessions of the Plenary Council that they dedicate somewhere between a half day and a full day as representatives of the faith communities of Australia to imploring this parrhesia for Australia – and that they do so before they start any discussion of the Working Document. What this needs to be is heartfelt spontaneous prayer ebbing and flowing as the Holy Spirit prompts. Apart from an introduction and a conclusion, it needs to be totally unscripted. It needs to be allowing God to dredge up from the depths of our soul’s expressions of our personal, corporate and national desire for Him and for the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit in our midst, in words, songs, groans and anything else He inspires. It needs to include our leaders begging pardon of God for the ways we have failed Him personally and corporately, to include confessing our failures and our shortcomings, and asking God to step in, to take control, to take leadership and give us sure guidance and the courage to respond with an active Yes to everything He wants us to do.

Without this, nothing else will really matter.

Come Holy Spirit, Come!,
and through this Plenary Council
make of this nation Australia
the promised great south land
in complete synch with You.
Amen.

...........................................................................
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​A printer friendly version is available below, 6 x A4 pages:

During the month of August, a lot of good, thought provoking content came my way. It was my intention to complete a blog-post about one of them, but that’s still in process. So instead I will share the rest of the thought provoking content with you now.

If you haven’t read many of Pope Francis’ recent speeches and homilies, you have been missing out. I went searching through them for excerpts suitable for meditating on the Joyful and Glorious mysteries of the Rosary, and found some gold. You can find those edited excerpts on the Resources – Prayer 2 page, about half-way down.

Then there was the discovery of ‘The Letter’ produced as the fruit of the 2016 Synod from the archdiocese of Detroit. Please read it: https://www.unleashthegospel.org/the-letter/
Truly it is everything I ever hoped our Plenary Council would produce. Do you want a road map for the new evangelization? Well, this is about as close and as clear as you are going to get.
(#PlenaryCouncil)

Related to that is a small article by Fr Stephen Pullis of the same archdiocese on practical and doable pathways of evangelization for people in the pews. https://www.unleashthegospel.org/2020/08/three-key-ways-to-be-missionary-at-your-parish/

After that, recommended to me was Bishop Barron’s presentation to the 2019 USCCB’s Conference on Reaching Out to the Religiously Unaffiliated, available on YouTube. It is 1 hour 24 mins in length, but the beginning is a video presentation, then Bishop Barron speaks and following that the Q and A session is sufficiently interesting. https://youtu.be/bUmg-DLBa1E

The bit that interests me the most starts about 12.5 mins in,
and here is a basic transcription of it:
‘Young people, the people that we are interested in reaching, they have so many questions that have remained answered for them, I hear from many of them every single day in my internet work: What’s religion? It’s stupid, it’s irrational, it’s pre-scientific nonsense, it’s bronze age mythology, they use all the phrases of the new atheists. Of course, it breaks your heart. Yes, we have a beautiful tradition, but we have a very smart tradition, but we have not it seems to me communicated that effectively to our young people. And it leaves a lot of their questions unanswered, which is causing them enormous difficulty. You know, I use the language of (Pope) Francis again here, to my mind this is simply one of the key ways that we accompany young people. Anyone who accompanies young people know that they are filled with questions. I hear them every day in my work. I’ll give you a recent example, I think last June I mentioned this to you, Reddit is a very popular website, one of the most popular in the world. And it is a forum for the exchange of ideas. So think of like Hyde Park corner, or the Areopagus, now updated to the internet. So you can exchange views. It is a very popular website. There’s something on it called the Reddit A.M.A., which means Ask Me Anything, so it is like a quodlibetal question from the middle ages. It’s just, here I am, ask me anything. So I did one about a year ago, and I just did a second one a few months ago. My first one was the third most popular Reddit AMA of the previous year, this last one was number two. I was just after Beto O’Rourke and ahead of Bernie Sanders. Now I say that not to say, O aren’t I famous, because I’m sure 98% of the people on it had no idea of who I was, but you announce yourself, I did it this way, I am a Catholic bishop who loves dialoguing with atheists, agnostics and non-believers, well 15,000 questions later, that’s in about 2 hours, 15,000 questions came through. And it’s very interesting, to go on Reddit you need galoshes and rubber gloves, I mean it’s a pretty messy space, you have to get through a lot of silliness and obscenity and all that, but once you’re past that, some very clear patterns emerge, and I’ve seen it in my own work, but, Who is God? How do you know there’s a God? Can you possibly prove there’s a God? Doesn’t science disprove God? I mean, just thousands of questions along those lines. Secondly, to no one’s surprise, the problem of evil, how can there be a God is there’s suffering in the world? Third, typolitic of our time, How do you know your religion is right? Aren’t there a thousand different religions, how could you get up and say yours is right? Fourth issue, sexuality, especially homosexuality and trans-genderism. So I mean, 15,000 questions, and you can discern very clear patterns. Well, we’ve got a smart tradition, and I think providing good answers to honest questions is a major part of accompaniment. Something we brought up a lot at the Youth Synod last year was the Emmaus image. So here’s Jesus walking with the disciples, and doing all these wonderful things like walking with them, even as they walk in the wrong direction, listening to them, yes indeed, what are you talking about as you go on the way?, non-judgmental accompaniment, all those wonderful things and then at a key moment Jesus teaches and then their hearts caught on fire. Were not our hearts burning within us as He explained the scriptures to us on the way? So to my mind, that’s all just part of a process of accompaniment and presenting a smart version of Catholicism is key to it.’

I highly recommend that you watch the whole presentation.

Which leads to https://www.reddit.com/. If there are young people out there asking honest questions, the least we can do is go and have a look see. So I spent about a week lurking, and then bit the bullet and joined. After about a week in the trenches I can confirm that there are indeed many young people asking good questions, and not enough well-educated-in-the-Catholic-faith people around answering them. The sub-reddits r/Catholicism and r/Christianity are good places to start.
Consider yourself challenged to do likewise.

If you are intrigued enough to investigate Reddit, here is a guide for beginners.

On Pentecost Sunday 2020 the Reports from the Plenary Council’s six Writing and Discernment Groups were released. I have read Philippa Martyr’s and Fr John Miechels’s commentaries on these Reports. Both commentaries are well worth reading. But they do make a person reluctant to read the Reports themselves.

But read them I sadly must.

Before I do that, I wish to outline the lens from which I am approaching these documents.

From the start I thought that the process was flawed, because we know what God wants us to do – it has been outlined in Novo Millennio Ineunte and in Evangelii Gaudium. The question is how to do it authentically in an Australian context.

While the phases of the Plenary Council up till now have had paperwork reminding us to ‘Listen to what the Spirit is saying’ and ‘What do you think God is calling us to do’, in practice people have been answering very different questions, viz ‘What do you think the Church ought to be doing?’, ‘What would you like to see change in the Church?’, ‘What could we actually, concretely do, towards these themes at diocesan, deanery and parish level?’. Notably absent has been any question about what God wants me to do to contribute, and likewise absent any consideration about where all these mythical people and unlimited resources who are going to make it happen are going to come from (and how to motivate them). In practice people have been told, ‘This Plenary Council is your chance to change things, speak up for what you want, the more vocal you are, the more likely something will happen’.

In such a climate, consensus is not a reliable indicator of the will of the Holy Spirit.

Further absent, and most disturbing, is how often God’s action is left out of the deliberations: it’s a kind of, ‘He can join in if He wants to’ mentality, instead of seeking His input, guidance and power first and foremost. How strange it is when we say we are guided by the Holy Spirit, and then act as though only more committees and layers of hierarchy are needed to achieve anything.

God’s will and purposes have not changed. Always He calls us back to the original blueprint. Even before the Bible existed, family was the foundation of God’s plan. The Bible is the story of the family of Abraham, and it contains the accumulated wisdom about how God wants that family to live in fulness of life. As the family goes, so goes the Church. Where do we get the power to live as members of the family of God? From the Holy Spirit. A new evangelisation is not possible unless there is a new Pentecost, and there is no Pentecost without the Holy Spirit.

Thus for me, Scripture, Family and the Holy Spirit are the non-negotiable essential keys for discovering what God wants us to do in this Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit. However none of them were referenced in the titles of the 6 Themes of the Plenary Council, and this continues to disturb me greatly.

So as I read (plough through) the 6 Reports, I am going to tally up any references to Scripture, Family and the Holy Spirit, and if I come across any ideas worth pursuing, I will list them.

Obviously it was not an easy task for the Writing and Discernment Groups because they had so many answers to the wrong questions to sift through.

Scripture references are counted when they occur in the body of the text (not in the footnotes) and are recognisable quotations (not cf.’s). Family has to be specifically referenced, references to parts of families eg women, children, elderly etc do not count. All too often we do not view families holistically, which is strange if we believe that each family is a domestic church, and when there is plenty of evidence in the Scripture for God entrusting specific ministries to specific families in perpetuity. Recently during the pandemic lockdown without the usual institutional church structures, we had to live church as domestic churches and began to rediscover this ancient reality. Both ‘Spirit’ and ‘Holy Spirit’ are counted.

Please take these as ‘about right’ numbers and not as exact tallies. Your own tally is likely to be different to mine, but definitely similar.

Theme 1: Missionary and Evangelising
Scripture references: 23
Family references: 6.5
Holy Spirit references: 10
(from page 6) The renewal of our world begins with personal renewal of our lives lived according to the Gospel which invites us to a personal encounter with Jesus, who offers us the gift of God’s love.
(from page 12) For our sacramental initiation to bear fruit, our journey will be one of growing in our relationship with Jesus, the community of His followers and our wider society. This growth is facilitated through the family, the school and the parish community.
(Prioritised Question 6) Given the importance of the family for the missionary and evangelising activity of the Church, how can we best promote a Catholic vision of marriage and family?

Theme 2: Inclusive, Participatory and Synodal
Scripture references: 16
Family references: 4
Holy Spirit references: 7
(from pages 6 & 10 ) Inclusion recognises that every person is a doorway into the mystery that is the Body of Christ.
(from page 9) Our society has become increasingly indifferent, sometimes even hostile, to family life in all its stages, and to those who make family a priority. At each stage of the growth of their children, families experience unique joys but also struggles which, if left unattended, can lead to disengagement and rift, both with each other but also the Church.
(from page 16) Catholics must tirelessly and fearlessly affirm the unique dignity of each and every child, and the inestimable value of the labours of every parent.

Theme 3: Prayerful and Eucharistic
Scripture references: 15
Family references: 6.5
Holy Spirit references: 11
(from page 7) The family is the usual birthplace of faith and the Church recognises that parents are the first and foremost educators of their children (Gravissimus Educationis
(from page 12) When we are formed in the Gospel, God’s people recognise Jesus in daily life.
(from Proposals for Change 1b) Equip each of our Church communities and organisations to support the creation of small communities of faith and life, centred on prayer with Scripture and sharing heart to heart. Encourage these small communities to gather regularly for the development of faith, the sharing of life over a meal and for spiritual nourishment.
(Are not families also small communities?)

Theme 4: Humble, Healing and Merciful
Scripture references: 13
Family references: 1.5
Holy Spirit references: 5
(from page 11) We are invited to witness the wounds of Jesus in those who have been wounded by the Church.
(from page 12) God is asking us to recognise it is restoration to the family of God that brings true wholeness, and that all the faithful have a role to play in the healing of the wounded.
(from page 12) We cannot separate Christ from the wounded: “just as you did it to one of the least of my family, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).

Theme 5: Joyful, Hope-filled Servant Community
Scripture references: 3
Family references: 5.5
Holy Spirit references: 1
(from page 5) Australia is a land that prizes freedom, equality and egalitarianism, a ‘fair go’ and mateship. However, mental illness, sickness, loneliness, family or financial pressures afflict many Australians.
(from page 8) “the joy of love experienced by families is also the joy of the Church.” (Amoris Laetitia)
(from Challenge 1, page 11) Particular attention should be given to the reasons why so many young people and their families are absent from our parishes, and how schools and parishes might address this concern.

Theme 6: Open to Conversion, Renewal and Reform
Scripture references: 5
Family references: 3.5
Holy Spirit references: 3
(from page 5) “...if the parish proves capable of self-renewal and constant adaptivity, it continues to be ‘the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters.’” (Evangelii Gaudium 28)
(from page 11) The consultation highlights the importance of a personal encounter with Christ as the basis of the life of faith, and the need for a supportive and faith-enriching Church community in which to deepen and live out our Catholic identity. Catholics sense a call for greater integration of faith and life, for discerning ways of discipleship — at home and at work, online and in local communities.
(from Question 2a on page 15) How can the structures and ministries of the local churches reach out and be more connected to today’s Catholics in their family life, communities, workplaces, culture and leisure?

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If we believe that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, and the goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit (St Seraphim of Sarov), then is it not exceedingly strange that the charisms of the Holy Spirit were not referenced in any of the Theme Reports? How can we possibly do the work of the Kingdom of God without prophecy, healing, intercession, discernment of spirits, words of knowledge, words of wisdom, miracles, deliverance, signs & wonders, and those with anointings from the Holy Spirit to preach, teach and evangelise? Working out how to make room for them in normal parish life, and normal family life, is what we need. Because without God all of our efforts will be fruitless, and utter wastes of time.

It is said that where you have been under the greatest attack from the evil one is the very place to expect the greatest victories. All aspects of family life, from conception to the grave, have been under extreme attack. Is not this where we should no longer be on the defensive, but positively placing our resources to assist the growth of families as domestic churches and households of grace?

And neither can happen without returning to the Scriptures and sincerely studying how God relates to families, and how to co-operate with the Holy Spirit.
  
To focus on family, on the Holy Spirit, and about what God has to say about them in the Plenary Council deliberations, with those two aforementioned papal documents for guidance, now that would be truly worthwhile.

#plenarycouncil  #plenarycouncil2020

​A few days after the last blog post I was driving home from something and as I reached the garage a stray thought appeared, 'You know those monthly small steps, it would be a whole lot easier to do them as a group, and a whole lot likelier that they would happen'.

My guess is that Saturdays between Morning Mass and Vigil Mass is a good time because it would suit those who work Mon-Fri, it would suit retirees who no longer like going out at night, and theoretically would be easier for parents with children to take turns at attending.

Your circumstances will be different, so adjust accordingly.
We have a 9am Saturday morning Mass, and a 5pm Vigil Mass.
The 9am Saturday morning Mass is preceded by the Morning Prayer of the Church and followed by a short time of Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament that culminated in Benediction around 10am. During Exposition, the Confessional is open for business.
After Benediction the Rosary is prayed.
We also have a large meeting room equipped with Audio Visual stuff, in the same building as the Church.

For our circumstances, that means morning tea starting around 10.25am in time for the Monthly Plenary Council Steps to begin at 10.45am should work. Start with a prayer calling upon the Holy Spirit and a prayer invoking the aid of Mary, Help of Christians.

Part 1: Missionary and Evangelising (30mins)
Either get a past graduate of an RCIA program in the parish to come and tell his/her conversion story in 15-20 mins with the remainder of the 30 minutes filled with question time or general discussion time. However it is going to more likely be question time, since apart from the conversion story itself, you will want to ask questions about what helped or hindered that 'journey home' and what were the catalysts that started opening up his/her heart and mind, and what they think would have been helpful to them as a newbie at Mass.

Alternately find one of the first Monday Journey Home programs from the Coming Home Network. They have the first half hour as testimony and the last half hour for question time. Find one of them and together watch the first half.

Part 2: Inclusive, Participatory and Synodal (30 mins)
In every parish there are people with hearing aids, low vision, walking sticks, wheelchairs, others recovering from surgery, or who have special needs children, or who are battling depression and treatment for cancer. Ask one of them, or two of them with the same set of difficulties to come, and to talk about their regular routine in getting to and from Mass, any struggles they have during Mass, anything they think would make access and participation easier for them. Use any remaining time of the 30 minutes as question time or discussion time.

Over time this should lead us to a greater awareness of the needs of others, a deeper compassion for each other, and maybe some simple practical improvements.

Part 3: Prayerful, Sacramental and Eucharistic (10 mins)
Send everyone off into the parish church for 10 minutes of personal prayer.
(Since not everyone is going to make it to the time of Exposition before Benediction)

Lunch Time (30 mins)

Part 4: Humble, Healing and Merciful (30 mins)
This is alone time with God and the aid of a notebook and pen.
Think about the people in your life with whom you are not at peace, write down their names, and ask for God's help to forgive them, and then seek forgiveness from God for holding onto resentments. Then pray a prayer for each person on that list, asking God to bless them and bring them closer to Himself. If there is anything practical that God prompts you to do for one or more of them, write it down, and make it a priority to do it.

If any time remains, make a list of everyone you know who is sick, seriously ill or suffering, and then pray for each one of them individually.

Part 5: A Joy-filled, Hopeful and Servant Community (30 mins)
With the same notebook and pen write down three blessings of the past week or month that you want to give God thanks for, and then write a paragraph about a time in the past month where you knew God was active in your life (eg saved from an accident, a chance meeting with someone who had the exact answer you had been looking for, an unexpected supernatural peace after hearing disturbing news). That should take no more than 10-15 mins, then share it with 2 or 3 others in the group, and listen in turn to their blessings and stories.

It is only when we stop and look back that we can more clearly see where God has been active in our lives. Gratitude leads us to joy, and sharing our reasons for gratitude increases our trust in God – which leads to hope.

Afternoon tea break (20 mins)

Theme 6: Open to Conversion, Renewal and Reform (1 hour)
From the Gospel passages for the next 4 Sundays, select a single chapter, and have copies of that Gospel chapter printed out. Give everyone a copy, and then direct each one to find a place to be alone with God, to slowly read through that Gospel chapter and then ask God what dreams He has for you, what things He would like to see happen in your family life, work life, ministry life, community life, and write down any ideas and out-of-the-blue thoughts that come, and write them down in your notebook. You may need to start by writing down your own dreams, and then ask God if they align with His dreams, or if they are big enough to match the dreams He has for you. Towards the end, place all the dreams in His hands and ask Him to confirm for you which ones come from Him and which you should work on, and which ones are not from Him and which you should gently let go of.

Conclusion: Come back together and pray a simple prayer, (eg Our Father) as a conclusion, and then invite anyone who would like to take the option to stay and talk, or who would like someone to pray for them to remain.

In more condensed form that looks like:
Morning Tea 10.25am
Conversion Story + Q&A 10.45am
Disability & Inclusion Story + Q&A  11.15am
Personal Prayer 11.45am
Lunch 11.55am
Praying for Relationships in tension 12.25pm
Sharing our Blessings 12.55pm
Afternoon Tea 1.25pm
Dreaming with God 1.45pm
Conclusion 2.45pm (prayer requests and having a chat might take that to 3.30pm)

A monthly period of recollection is something the Church encourages with a partial indulgence, and a monthly day like this would qualify.

Of all these things, if you could only do a few of them, make Dreaming with God and Praying for Relationships in tension the priorities.

If you wanted something like this to form the backbone of your parish response to the Plenary Council, go for it. You wouldn't even need to wait for the first session of the Plenary Council to begin. It is something that could start quickly and with not much to do for set up (pray, find speakers, set up meeting room, arrange tea & coffee, provide pens & paper, print off Gospel chapter, work out whether BYO lunch or a tray of pre-prepared sandwiches would suffice)and not much by way of cost.
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Small do-able steps inspired by the 6 Themes, like the ones above, can have a very big long term impact.

​The discernment part of the Plenary Council is supposedly in full swing, although it seems only group submissions are being accepted. Since I don't have a group, and it would be a dishonesty to submit something from a group of one, I will blog it instead.

My catalyst for writing is reading through some 20 pages of a group submission a relative of mine has been involved in. Those some 20 pages cover the 6 themes, with a reasonable amount of overlap between the themes. Having actually read other submissions from the consultation stage, online and offline, it is substantially representative of what the discernment groups have been receiving.

The other catalysts are the recent message from Queen Elisabeth II that repeatedly mentioned small steps as necessary on the way to greater good, and some videos from Dr Henry Cloud on YouTube about leadership: in particular the notion about focussing on what we can actually control, and giving people permission to work on those things they can actually control even if it is as seemingly small as smiling at your customers.

As I see it, there's a problem with all the 'we should do this', 'we should have that', and 'we need/must do this's that form the backbone of most submissions -
a) it all sounds like it is going to be done by an eager group of nameless people with infinite resources, time and talents
b) it doesn't take account of the already depleted/overextended people currently trying to hold together all that the parishes are already doing
c) by and large it lets 'me' off the hook.

So I am going to do something novel and look at the 6 themes from the angle of what small step or steps could someone in the pew actually do towards making the vision of those 6 themes a reality. Lots of people doing one small step, and encouraging each other to do that one small step, could make much more of a difference than we ever would have thought possible.

All of them need to be, 'Hey, yes, I could do that!'

Just choosing one step from each theme would be a very good start.

Theme 1: Missionary and Evangelising
•Take the time to think about and write about a time where God was very active in your life; what was the situation, what did God do? how did you know it was Him? what changed in your life because of this. 1 Pet 3:15
•Pray a short prayer every day for a friend or relative to be given a life changing encounter with Jesus
•Simplify your life so that there is room in it to take up a hobby that brings you in to interaction with people outside your parish community
•Once a month sit down and watch an episode from The Journey Home programme produced by the Coming Home Network https://chnetwork.org/about how God brought someone home to the Catholic church. Doing that will teach you that God is active in everyone's lives, and give you some simple ways to explain why Catholics do what they do if someone asks you.

Theme 2: Inclusive, Participatory and Synodal
•Be connected to what is going on at diocesan, national and global level by adding feeds from your diocese, Australian Catholic Bishop's Conference and Pope Francis to your favourite social media platform.
•Do something intentional once a month to learn about the actual experiences of people with disabilities. That could be online learning: http://disabilityandjesus.org.uk/ is a good place to start, as is the #actuallyautistic hashtag. Or it could be offline learning: having a chat to someone is the parish with low vision; or who wears hearing aids; or who comes to Mass with a walking stick; or visiting (with permission) a family of a special needs child.
•Once a month get to know someone's full name at church, and something about them, because to a certain extent most of us don't feel like we belong unless someone notices those times when we are missing.
•Understanding increases participation. Once a week read a page from the Catechism of the Catholic Church from the section on the Sacraments https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM, or a page from the documents of Vatican II or a page from a papal encyclical.
•If you are not already contributing to the parish community in some way (eg. choir, church cleaning, St Vincent de Paul society, counting team, taking Holy Communion to the sick, welcomer etc) seek God seriously about what how He would like you to contribute your gifts and talents, and then act on it.
•Smile at everyone whom you come across at church, particularly anyone who seems to be struggling or who seems uncertain about the responses and when to stand, sit and kneel, or at anyone who has made the extra effort to bring their children to church.

Theme 3: Prayerful, Sacramental and Eucharistic
•If you do not already have a regular daily prayer time, commit yourself to 10 minutes of prayer a day.
•If you do already have a regular daily prayer time, increase it by 5 minutes.
•Find 5 minutes to spend quietly with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament every week. That could be before Mass, after Mass, or a special visit during the week to an open church or Blessed Sacrament chapel.
•Find a prayer of Spiritual Communion that you like, and pray it once a week, or more frequently if you wish.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/devotions/act-of-spiritual-communion-339
https://www.ourcatholicprayers.com/spiritual-communion.html
•Do you have a holy water stoup at home? Keep it filled with holy water, and bless yourself with it every time you leave home. If you haven't got one, get one, and use it.

Theme 4: Humble, Healing and Merciful
•Make a commitment to listen whole heartedly to anyone who wishes to share their burdens with you, and to only offer advice if they ask for it.
•Start a regular practice of contributing to the lives of those less fortunate than yourself. It might look like putting some money in to the St Vincent de Paul poor box each Sunday, or finding a worthy charity and setting up a monthly direct debit donation, or volunteering to regularly do grocery shopping for an elderly neighbour.
•Once a month to take a few minutes to think about the people in your life with whom you are not at peace, and to ask for God's help to forgive them, and to seek forgiveness from God for holding onto resentments.
•Choose a short prayer you like that you could pray every day for all those you know, or have been told, who are sick or seriously ill or suffering from mental illness – and pray it daily.

Theme 5: A Joyful, Hope-filled and Servant Community
•Make a list every day of at least 3 things you are grateful to God for eg. quality time spent with a friend, being able to hear the birds sing, an answer to prayer.
•Go looking for a story every week about how God has been active in someone else's life. You might find that testimony on a video or blog, in an autobiography or over a coffee with a friend; and let that story nourish the hope within you that God is just as active in your life.
•If you are in leadership, start regularly asking your team members the question, 'What can I do to help you reach your ministry goals?' It might mean getting a light bulb replaced, or recruiting a helper, or diffusing an issue of conflict, or similar. And do it to the best of your ability.
•If you don't already know them, find out the dates of your baptism, confirmation, first Holy Communion and do something intentional to celebrate them every year; and make special effort to celebrate and acknowledge the wedding anniversaries, ordination anniversaries and religious commitment anniversaries of those God has placed in your life.
​
Theme 6: Open to Conversion, Renewal and Reform
•Read a passage of the Word of God every day, or two chapters from the Bible every week. Soaking our minds in God's truth will gradually show us where we are out of alignment with His ways and strengthen our wills to get our lives into alignment.
•Make a commitment to going to confession (Sacrament of Penance) monthly.
•Find a prayer to the Holy Spirit that you like, and make it part of your daily prayer time.
•Make a commitment to setting aside an hour every month to ask God what dreams He has for you, what things He would like to see happen in your family life, work life, ministry life, community life, and write down any ideas and out-of-the-blue thoughts that come, and share them with someone you trust who can help you sort out which ones have God's touch on them.

Towards the bottom of this blog-post is the 43 x A4 page document that contains the combined reference material from the Plenary Council Theme 6 cycle of blog-posts.

The links for each part of the cycle of blog-posts are here
Vision, Interview List and Pre-Requisite Reading
Open to Conversion
Open to Renewal
Open to Reform
Topics of Controversy
Sample Response re Women in the Church
Sample Response re Women in ministry and leadership 

A few of the blog-posts prior to 12 Aug 2019 also refer to the Plenary Council and Theme 6.

My hope is that this gathering of reference material may assist those working on the Plenary Council for Theme 6: Open to Conversion, Renewal and Reform at national, diocesan, deanery and parish levels. 

This particular part of my Plenary Council journey is now done.
I place whatever happens next in God's hands.