We celebrate the Ascension of Christ and approach the Feast of Pentecost in the light of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. Truly, He is risen!
The readings in these past weeks of Eastertide have focused our attention on the appearance of the risen Jesus before the disciples, the first followers left distraught by the death of Jesus and struggling to come to terms with his rising.
The post-Resurrection narratives describe the disciples as “astounded” (Lk 24:22), “slow of heart” (Lk 24:25), “startled”, “terrified” (Lk 24:37), “disbelieving” (Lk 24:41) and “afraid” (Mk 16:8) as they grapple with this revelation – that Jesus is alive and walks among them in glory. In contrast to the authors of the Gospel who were writing decades after the Resurrection and knew how the story would end, the first disciples as contemporaries of Jesus did not yet have that same privilege nor did they possess that same confidence. Their experience of God’s revelation, of the new world signalled by an empty tomb, was far more hesitant if not uncertain. Salvation history was still unfolding before their very eyes.
As we learn from the Acts of the Apostles, it is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, promised to them by Jesus at his Ascension, that marks a new chapter in the disciples’ faith.
It is this Spirit that empowers the once frightened disciples to ‘go out’ into an unpredictable and even unknown world with courage and the conviction that life has conquered death in Jesus Christ. It is in the Risen Jesus that the promises of God had been fulfilled and it was his Spirit that made of the first disciples, and the apostolic generations to come, bold witnesses and bearers of this good news “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
As Christians of the twenty-first century we can find ourselves feeling at times a bit like the first disciples of the Gospel narratives. We can encounter Jesus and yet harbour doubts or feel our vulnerabilities in a world no more certain or secure than that of other ages.
We know from personal experience that our discipleship is a pilgrimage, that it is the work of a lifetime to grow in holiness and understanding. In the course of this time, we learn to hand over our lives ever more fully to what God has accomplished on the Cross and on the third day. The new covenant comes to us as a grace but also sets before us the life-long project of accepting this new beginning by our conversion to Christ, “in living his mysteries, in making our own his example, his thoughts, and behaviour” (Pope Benedict XVI). Today we can find ourselves “slow of heart”, “disbelieving” and “afraid” standing before this call to conversion, reluctant to make that surrender to the Holy Spirit and to take that decision for Christ that faith entails.
It happens that in these past months the experience of surrender has come to us. A global pandemic has left us dependent upon and yet strangely cautious of others, all at once. Individuals and entire communities are now vulnerable to a terrible scourge, originating on a distant horizon, that has brought life as we know it – in our homes, schools, workplaces and churches – to a collective and sudden halt. This global disruption is a striking reminder for us as Christians, and others besides, that we are not masters of our own world.
Our fundamental vulnerability to life’s contingencies can be a particularly startling experience for a culture that feeds on and even profits from the illusion of control. In this day there are no lack of techniques, products or technologies that offer, for a price, a sense of self-sufficiency or that cast self-willed autonomy as the way to personal fulfilment.
As Christians we live by a very different story. This story is one in which our origin, life and destiny cannot be imagined apart from the mystery of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen – nor can our culture, the economy or the future of the world itself for that matter. Our identity and the very meaning of our life arise from and depend upon the presence of another. It is by the Spirit that we encounter this Christ, the light of the world, with us “always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28:20).
It is our surrender to this Holy Spirit, who has been “poured out” so we can “both see and hear” (Acts 2:33), that enables us to receive God’s presence and power in our joys and our sufferings, to proclaim Christ in the face of opposition, to serve the poor with the love of Christ, and that offers us the virtue of hope for our future. In the language of Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, it is new life in the Spirit that enables “the young to see visions” and “the old to dream dreams” (Acts 2:17).
As Christians we undertake a pilgrimage of discipleship that is not simply arduous but that is good and through which we are led to be ambassadors for Christ and of service to others. What the Gospels make clear is that we cannot walk or serve as witnesses in this world or aspire to the next without the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who has been a part of the world’s story, and our story, from its very beginnings.
A Spirit-Filled Tradition
As we pray and reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit in the world, we find this life-giving presence in the opening verses of the Hebrew Scriptures. Here we see the Spirit of God at the beginnings of creation as it “sweep[s] over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2).
Through this Spirit, God brings the world into being – night and day, sea and land, every living creature, humankind in his image and according to his likeness.
Reflecting on God’s creation in the thirteenth century, Saint Bonaventure would posit that it is the love in God that is so great and fruitful that God makes a gift of this divine love beyond Himself. In other words, the love that God is spills over into creation. It is this breath of Yahweh that communicates life in the world.
However, the spirit of God does not stop at a single act of creation. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures it is the Judaic sense of rûaḥ or ‘breath of wind’ which signifies God’s power, a spirit that continuously and constantly acts in and upon human history.
This spirit of God causes humanity to act so that God’s plan in history can be fulfilled. It is God’s Spirit that empowers God’s people – persons such as Joseph, the example of faith; David, shepherd and king; Moses and Joshua, leaders of the people; the prophets and elders – to accomplish His mighty works.
This spirit-filled history of salvation continues into the New Testament where the revelation of God comes to fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Jesus’ entire life unfolds under the sign of the Spirit.
It is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the desert for fasting and prayer prior to his public ministry (Lk 4:1) and it is Jesus who will act through the Spirit, healing the sick (Lk 6:19), preaching and praying for his disciples and for the salvation of the world.
Finally it is the Risen Jesus, the glorified Lord, who gives the Spirit, the Advocate (Jn 16:7), to the disciples, to the Church, to continue and make present his truth, his Word, his teaching, his way, his life in the midst of the world.
The Holy Spirit and the Believer
If this is the ‘biography’ of the Holy Spirit, of God’s creative and redemptive power, what are the signs of the Holy Spirit in our time and in our world? What is more, what difference does the Spirit make to the world of our experience?
First and foremost the difference that the Spirit makes in our world is mediated in and through the lives of the Christian faithful and through the community of Christians, the Church.
The Holy Spirit is truly present in the world in each Christian baptised in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are confirmed in faith by the Spirit’s action and anointing, and receive the Eucharist, Christ’s body, by the invocation of the Holy Spirit.
By this sacramental initiation into the Church, we are made anew in Christ by the Holy Spirit. As St Paul declares of our Christian life, “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor 12:3).
This Spirit comes to each one of us as a gift but also as a challenge to the ongoing conversion of our heart and mind. As the source and giver of all holiness, we implore the Spirit to keep us in grace and remove those artificial obstacles, habits and ways of thinking that prevent us from living fully in and for Christ. As St Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, our baptism in Christ calls us to live no longer by the flesh, by the material things or selfish desires of this world, but to live according to the Spirit (Rom 8:5). It is for this new life that the Spirit of God dwells in us, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11).
In our Christian living, we are no longer beholden to a spirit of slavery or have need to fall back into fear (Rom 8:15). We have received a spirit of adoption, become sons and daughters of God. It is the Holy Spirit that bestows upon us the eyes of faith, the capacity to see others not as we would see them but as Christ sees them, to see the world as God looks upon the world. We appreciate what is positive in others and in the whole of creation, to welcome it and prize it as a gift from God. The Spirit teaches us to ‘make room’ for the other and to bear one another’s burdens with gentleness (Gal 6:2).
The Spirit also enables us as Christians to have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16). We are endowed with the ability to respond to Christ’s words and open our minds to the understanding of his death and resurrection. In this way the Spirit keeps us faithful to Jesus in the present, activating and guiding our discernment to speak and act as Christians in the world so that this world reflects more and more of God’s Kingdom, the “fullness of life” that God intends for us and all creation (Jn 10:10).
The Spirit is particularly manifest in the world in the gifts that have been endowed upon each of the baptised. In addition to the gifts and fruits of the Spirit outlined in the writings of St Paul, which are gifts given for us to keep, the Holy Spirit also bestows charisms, special abilities for others, that enable us to be powerful channels of God’s love and redeeming presence in the world. Whether extraordinary charisms, like healing, or ordinary charisms, like administration, these are to be used in charity or service to build up the Church for the sake of our world (免费下载知网文献方法，请低调使用~ - 酷酷de分享站:《绿洲》每日一元 现金红包 我的泰州APP答题抽红包 口罩免费抽 免费下载知网文献方法，请低调使用 ... 机场 区（包含白嫖和付费机场） Time.is精准时间校准 推荐！国内直接下载谷歌商店(Google Play)的APP的三大途径，下载干净的APP ..., 798-801).
We see the Spirit at work in the lives of the faithful, in such charisms as hospitality, of intercessory prayer, leadership and knowledge, the discernment of spirits, charisms of teaching and wisdom, and service and poverty among others. Received through Baptism and Confirmation, these charisms empower the People of God to have an impact on the world that surpasses their natural, human abilities. These are graces freely given by God, that call to be discerned among the whole People of God to actively help spread the faith, the Good News as missionary, Spirit-filled disciples.
Of course, the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit are especially manifest in the saints. These ‘bright patterns of holiness’ remind us that Christian sanctity is not just an ideal or possibility but a reality in concrete persons and the concrete conditions of the world. This cloud of witnesses, these Christian exemplars, are models of holiness who have responded to the needs, challenges and opportunities of their time. These saints allowed themselves to be filled with the Spirit. In the pattern of Mary, “full of grace” the saints give birth or expression to Christ in the world.
The diversity of their holy lives attests to the creativity of the Holy Spirit, each saint demonstrating that Christian holiness can be lived even in ‘this’ way. No doubt the Holy Spirit, agent of evangelisation and soul of the Church, is making news saints in our time who will open up new and fruitful ways for responding to the Gospel in the future, who will be new manifestations of the Spirit of Christ alive, illuminating the world.
The Holy Spirit and the Church
As evident in the communion of saints and those first disciples gathered in the Upper Room, a primary way the Holy Spirit acts in the world is to bring the Church into being.
The Church, as the third-century theologian St Hippolytus affirmed, is “the place where the Spirit flourishes”. The Church is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit animating and bringing to life and holiness its members through the Word and sacraments, the ministry of the ordained (our bishops, priests and deacons), the various gifts and charisms of the faithful of every rank, the varieties of religious orders and ecclesial movements that express the Spirit’s power and anointing.
So integral is the connection between the Holy Spirit and the Church that St Irenaeus would proclaim as early as the second century, “for where the Church is, there also is God’s Spirit, and where the Spirit of God is, there are also the Church and all grace” (Book III, Against Heresies).
A particular aspect of the Spirit in the Church is its role as principle of unity, enabling all people to be one and the unity to be a multitude. The Spirit gathers what has been scattered, overcomes division and unites difference. It brings into communion the People of God, a people of every culture, nation, tongue and tribe, in the one body of Christ.
Like a soul is to the body, the Holy Spirit binds all the members of the body of Christ to its Head and to one another. This unity is one of the ways in which the Church gives witness to Jesus Christ, through whom “God was pleased to reconcile… all things” (Col 1:20). As we have learned from our history, a lack of unity within the Church or poor witness seriously impairs the ability of the world to see the Church as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, as a source and expression of God’s love.
Therefore, to be fruitful in its evangelising mission, the Church privileges unity which will be not the product of our efforts or structures alone but the fruit of our common docility to the Holy Spirit. Just as St Paul entreated the community at Ephesus centuries ago, so too are we to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:4).
Not only does the Spirit make the Church one, it also leads the Church to be faithful, in ever deeper adherence to Christ. As identified by John’s Gospel, the Spirit guides the ecclesial community “into all the truth” of God’s revelation (Jn 16:12).
The Church Fathers of the third and fourth century were themselves conscious of a tradition or communication of the Holy Spirit that ensured the unity of the faith in the churches spread far and wide across the ancient Mediterranean. It was the Holy Spirit promised and given to the Church by Jesus that ensured the faithful transmission of the faith.
The Church remains today as it was then, ‘apostolic’ in its Spirit-inspired efforts to be faithful to the Gospel and to interpret it as Good News for the world. In this task, the bishops as successors of the apostles have a particular charism, to serve as the visible principle and foundation of unity in the particular churches and to exercise a special competence within the Church to ‘test all things and hold fast to that which is good’ (Lumen Gentium 12).
It is important to note here that the Spirit also enables the fidelity and adherence of the Church to Christ through the personal conversion of all the faithful, the reading of Scripture and immersion in the tradition, the initiative of local communities, parishes, families and groups, the teaching, sanctifying and pastoral government of our priests, the apostolate of our religious, whether obscure or well-known, and the birth of new movements and forms of evangelisation that are fresh signs of the Spirit active in the world. In the end, the Church is no less than the world as those who believe in Christ and who live by and engage this world by the influence and promptings of the Spirit.
As the Feast of the Ascension brings us to reflect on our Christian pilgrimage in this world and to the next, we do not have a choice between God and the world. As Christians, we choose Godby choosing the world as it really is in Him. We choose God by working toward the transformation of the world as disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit who inspires true freedom and furthers God’s plan of salvation.
In human lives transformed, in the works of justice and mercy that express Christ’s love, the prayer and worship that reveal his glory, in outreach to and inclusion of the poor and vulnerable that reveal his heart, the Spirit moves the world toward its fulfilment.
By the Spirit each of us are sharers in Christ’s mission and we are inspired by a constant and healthy unease in the world to make all things new in Him. As Christ himself beseeches each one of us “receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22), the spirit of truth, love and holiness that leads us home to God.
In the wake of the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and the limitations it places on human interaction and activity, the ability for Catholics to physically gather for liturgy comes under increasing threat. It is worth noting as attendance at churches thins and may well be prohibited into the future in some jurisdictions, there may be an increased appreciation for something that that has been taken away by these circumstances. Once precautions surrounding the Mass are lifted many may return to our parishes, including those whose participation has been infrequent or irregular.
As the source and summit of our faith, the Eucharist is fundamental to our Catholic faith and constitutive of our identity and our mission in the world as a sign and reality of Christ’s presence. Hence it is no wonder that the concern of many of the faithful is their access to the sacraments in this time when the coronavirus has cast a wide shadow over so many realities that have been taken for granted.
This inextricable relationship of sacraments to our faith was at the heart of a document published by the International Theological Commission (ITC) just over one week ago with the authorisation of Pope Francis. The ITC serves as a body of theologians and scholars who advise the Pope and the Church. The document they produced had a somewhat obscure name which hints at the technical nature of its content: 比较好的付费ssr节点 - 好看123:1 天前 · 比较好的付费ssr节点,免费ssr节点2021,shadowrocket官网,全网最全ssr公益机场地址,shadowrocket付费节点,ssr10元一个月,高速稳定ssr机场推荐,ssr节点慢,shadowrocket安卓下载,ssr节点购买网址.
Despite its somewhat academic character this document has significant implications for all Catholics as well as the pastoral practice of our parishes. To call it a landmark document would not be putting it too strongly. While the Catholic media focused on what the document had to say about marriage, specifically the sacramental status of a marriage between two “baptised non-believers”, the ITC acknowledged its discussion of the relationship between faith and sacraments had much broader implications.
This includes for we Australians. While the number of marriages in our Church has declined sharply over the years, the number of families and children who continue to seek the Sacraments of Initiation in our parishes remain substantial, in their many thousands.
Such demand seems like good news. But like the movement of quicksand, the longer we watch of this sacramental journey, the more likely we are to experience that sinking feeling as the promised fruits of these sacramental encounters struggle to manifest themselves in the real lives, desires and commitments of recipients. To put it plainly, despite the potent grace of the sacraments and numbers seeking them, we are not seeing a blossoming of committed disciples in the Church.
We do not see, as Fr James Mallon describes, a deluge of Catholics with a personal relationship with Jesus, who are actively sharing their faith with others, open to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, with knowledge and love of the Scriptures, and of basic Catholic theology, with a daily prayer life, the experience of real Christian community, a commitment to Sunday Eucharist and the frequent practice of Reconciliation, and who serve in ministry while seeing their lives as a mission field (Fr Mallon, Divine Renovation Guidebook, 59).
So, what explains this phenomenon which sees thousands ‘sacramentalised’ but few appearing to be ‘evangelised’, that is, become intentional and life-long disciples of Jesus Christ? It cannot a deficiency of the sacraments in which we encounter the power and presence of Christ himself.
The ITC answers this question with explosive clarity: our Church holds that without a personal faith – yes, a personal relationship with Jesus – the sacraments fail to bear their full fruit. As St John Paul II proclaimed decades ago, “It is necessary to awaken again in believers a full relationship with Christ, mankind’s only Saviour. Only from a personal relationship with Jesus can an effective evangelisation develop” (L’Osservatore Romano, Dec 23, 1992). Without this personal faith, the ITC document affirms that the sacraments are likely to appear only as an external symbol or an empty rite – or even risk “slipping into a magical gesture” (57).
The sacraments nourish a life of faith in Jesus Christ. However – and significantly – they are not meant to replace it. The sacraments are given to us to grow in the life and mission of Christ. However, for some, it is what they do instead of grow. Without personal faith, a culture of “sacramental automatism” (69) can develop, a purely ‘outward faith’ bereft of understanding and prayer, with dire consequences for the spiritual vitality and mission of our faith communities and for the salvation of those who receive (1 Cor. 11:29).
Rather than an expression of “elitist sacramental scepticism” (181), the need to raise and talk about the personal faith of those receiving the sacraments arises from the pastoral concern and experience of pastors and parish leaders ‘on the ground’. The ITC recognises “not infrequently pastoral agents receive the request for the reception of the sacraments with great doubts about the faith intention of those who demand them” (9).
These doubts are reasonable given the largely secularised social environment in which we now live, in which even the possibility of a personal relationship with God or a commitment to a dedicated Christian life, including its moral demands, is given little credence or is not even desired, even by parents who seek the sacraments for their children.
We know that reception of the sacraments can be treated as a mere social custom, a family tradition practiced without intention, or else sought for purposes other than itself. Whether it is driven by a desire for enrolment in Catholic schools, a bending to family pressure or social conformity, thousands continue to seek out sacraments in our parishes but often little else. Not only this, but the mixed motivations behind the demand for Baptism can be known, accepted or even encouraged by our silence on the matter. If this pattern persists, we risk nothing less than “a ritualism devoid of faith” (9).
It is challenging that despite the doubts held about the personal faith and discipleship of those who present for the sacraments, in practice we have often simply assumed that the sacraments will ‘take care of it’. The upshot has been a neglect of our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can actually take root and bear fruit. It is this complacency that this new document decries.
Unless people come to faith, come to relationship with Jesus Christ, the likelihood that the sacraments will bear the fruit they are intended to bear is severely diminished. Our Catholic tradition, echoed by St Thomas Aquinas, makes a distinction between the ‘virtue of faith’ (virtus fidei) which is a capacity to believe that is placed within us by Baptism, and the actus fidei, the explicit personal act of faith that is at the heart of discipleship, a ‘yes’ to that which has been given. Analogously, we might fill our cars with fuel that provides the capacity for movement, but without turning on the ignition no progress is made.
In our Australian parishes there is no lack of those who have been ‘done’ but not discipled, those who have been baptised but have never performed a personal act of faith, involving their understanding and will.
Of course, this is not to say the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the one who receives. Baptism, for instance, confers a real “sacramental character” as God’s grace is truly given. But what baptism places within us is a capacity to believe. It cannot be a substitute for an active response, the ‘act of faith’ on the part of the graced subject. A sacrament can be valid but for it to be fruitful, it must be received in faith for “God makes the acceptance of this gift dependent on the cooperation of the recipients” (32). As St Augustine put it, God ‘did not will to save us without us’.
The Reciprocity Between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy is a landmark document for all of us: pastors, sacramental coordinators, RCIA teams and those in our parishes hard at work seeking to facilitate the personal conversion of the baptised and the evangelisation of those who do not yet belong to our faith.
It encourages us to place again the sacraments in the context of living faith, nourishing not merely a belief in God in a general way but in a truly personal way in the midst of the Church. A new evangelisation calls us to nourish a Catholic faith by the bold proclamation of the kerygma, the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ who is “the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). This is the faith of our Church that the sacraments nourish.
It is now eight months since the road to Plenary Council 2020 was formally opened at Pentecost 2018. It will be the first Plenary Council that the Church in Australia has held in over eighty years and comes at a time when the challenges for and to the Catholic faith – and so the allied possibilities for reform – are multiple. Consider parish decline, the shape of Catholic education, failures of governance, and the future of religious freedom alone.
There are many who have taken up the Plenary Council with great faith, enthusiasm and hopeful anticipation. Indeed, over 30,000 people have engaged with the Plenary Council process across the country to date. In my own Diocese of Broken Bay the local response from communities has been overwhelming and the Diocese has registered the fourth highest number of responses (exceeded only by the Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth archdioceses) and the highest number of responses in Australia in proportion to the number of its parishes.
It can be acknowledged that some have lent their voice and insights to the process with reserve, with a natural scepticism borne of experience or lingering questions regarding what, if anything, is truly possible. Others will choose to be bystanders on the road to 2020, content to watch the process unfold without contribution. This non-engagement can express reticence about the value of dialogue within the Church per se, unclarity as to the purpose or implications of the Plenary Council, or a detachment from the broader Church, perhaps in preference for local concerns or resignation to the status quo.
Underlining these reactions to the Plenary Council will be varying understandings of the Church itself and of the possibilities for reform. Contrasting ecclesiologies about the best way in which the Church can exercise its mission are certainly not new. Polarisation has been an increasing mark of Catholic exchange particularly since the Second Vatican Council and intensified in the ‘phase of disillusionment’ that followed. These divisions about the way forwards for the Church have been inflamed by the Church’s waning influence in the Australian community and the search for a response to a loss of credibility and public voice over past decades which risks for the Church what Greg Sheridan has described as ‘complete strategic irrelevance’ (‘Christian churches drifting too far from the marketplace of ideas’, The Australian, 4/6/2016). The resulting ecclesial tensions and ideological rifts will inevitably spill over to shape people’s expectations and engagement with the Plenary Council as an initiative of the Church, explicitly geared as it is towards reform.
However, it is because of these ecclesial divisions and differences, rather than despite them, that the Plenary Council matters. To be clear, the Plenary Council is not an ecumenical council that will define or determine articles of faith (what we are to believe) nor can it legislate on matters of discipline which the Holy See has reserved to itself. It will not deliver an entirely ‘new’ Church which has no connection to its past, nor should it seek to do so. It is an organ of governance that can assist the Church to live God’s mission more faithfully as “a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity” (Lumen Gentium 1).
Towards this end what the Plenary Council will do and is doing is generating a significant, even if for some unsettling, conversation about the way in which the Church can best practice its mission in Christ into the future. A Plenary Council can, for example, pass legislation regulating how doctrine is to be taught, how worship is to be regulated and how governance is to occur in practice. It is to these matters that diverse input is needed for the benefit of the Church’s missionary mandate.
The Plenary Council is a call to focus as a communion of faith on the ways in which we are summoned by God through the action of the Holy Spirit to live the life and mission of Christ in contemporary Australian society. This includes those ways in which the Church is called to be a sign of contradiction in the world, to collaborate towards the common good with others of good will, and to serve as a leaven transforming the world from within.
One of the chief reservations that has been expressed about the Plenary Council is that initiating dialogue about the future of the Church in Australia will encourage false or unrealistic expectations. As the saying goes, ‘expectations can be premeditated resentments’ when reality does not conform to our hope or our views have lost connection with our tradition. This makes it even more important to clarify the nature and procedure of a Plenary Council so there are good reasons for our hope, not magical thinking that will leave us disappointed.
As already noted, a Plenary Council is not a vehicle by which dogma or doctrines pertaining to faith and morals are reshaped or changed. The purpose of a Plenary Council is to ensure that provision is made for the pastoral needs of the people of God and so, with regard for the universal law of the Church, it is ‘to decide what seems opportune for the increase of faith, the organisation of common pastoral action, and the regulation of morals and of the common ecclesiastical discipline which is to be observed, promoted and protected’ (Canon 445).
Under present canon law, the decisions of the Council are made by bishops by nature of their episcopal ordination as successors of the Apostles. However, it would be mistaken to read this exercise of authority as an isolated act for in casting their deliberative vote the bishops are required to be attentive to the counsel of the people in their dioceses and at the Council sessions themselves. The magisterium must sense with the Church as a whole where the Spirit’s inspiration is leading. Lay delegates at the Council will have a consultative vote, namely a real vote which will be written and tallied and is to be considered seriously by those with a deliberative vote. So it is that the bishops are obliged to make decisions on the basis of their careful discernment of the work of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of the People of God, recognising that the sense of the faith of the faithful – what is known as the sensus fidelium – is a source of the Church’s life and learning as it pilgrims through history.
To elaborate, the sensus fidelium is that gift of the Holy Spirit which enables the whole Church to receive and to transmit the Catholic faith effectively and faithfully. The lay faithful as living and active members of the Church contribute to this instinct of faith and are not merely passive recipients of what the hierarchy teach and theologians explain. As such it is reasonable that appropriate dispensations may well be sought from the Holy See to ensure representation of laity at the Council sessions is maximised (this matter has been discussed by the Executive Committee and Bishops Commission for the Council). Following the sharing of a sense of faith and the weighing of the issues and viewpoints raised, it is to the magisterium of the bishops to judge with authority whether opinions which are present among the People of God, and which may seem to be the sensus fidelium, actually correspond to the truth of the tradition received from the Apostles.
It is theologically important to affirm that individual views and opinions shared through Plenary Council sessions across Australia bring real perspective and insight to the Church’s situation, borne of concrete contexts. As it has been remarked, given that dialogue within the Church is not an ingrained habit or cultural norm for many of us as Catholics, some ‘will probably speak clumsily, angrily or shallowly the first time around. It is only over time that we eventually learn what we most deeply want to say.’ It is also true that the views of individuals need to be brought into conversation with the whole Church as a body of the faithful – hence the need for mutual listening and shared dialogue in the formation of an agenda for the Plenary Council. This dialogue is a requirement because it is in the lives of the faithful that the Word of God is lived and expressed. In discerning and taking decisions at the Council, the bishops are called to be a listening and learning body of teachers as well as discharging an apostolic commission to authentically interpret what is true to and advantageous for the faith.
Considering what has been shared, the concern that a Plenary Council would change Catholic doctrine under pressure of populism is unfounded and does not align with the reality, purpose or mandate of such a Council.
Nor does it represent the intent of the listening process underway until Lent 2019. The thousands upon thousands of submissions and voices they represent will shape the major themes that will constitute the agenda of the Plenary Council. Naturally in the abundance of data received will be conflicting interpretations of what has been revealed in Jesus, the Scriptures and our Catholic tradition and varied proposals on how best to incarnate the Gospel in our present situation and our future. This interpretive maelstrom is not a new experience for the Church (think of the disputes of Saints Peter and Paul, and the divergences of the Pauline and Johannine communities).
However, what is new in the submissions toward Plenary Council 2020 are concrete situations and questions of this moment of history for which we need to invoke and involve the Spirit’s gift of understanding. The preparations for a Plenary Council in 2020 require a sounding of the lived experience of faith and the Church among people today because we cannot seek to grow the Church as the body of Christ by closing the door against reality, as messy or vexed as that reality can be. Dialogue as a means of ecclesial discernment expresses the intrinsic relationship between the magisterium as a teaching office and the sensus fidei as a grace of the present. It affirms our faith in the capacity of the whole Church to attend to the Spirit’s guidance into ‘all the truth’ (Jn 16:13).
As I see it we are compelled to engage at this time in rigorous conversation about the future of our parishes, where the percentage of participation is declining to single digits across the nation; the role of Catholic education in the mission of the Church as enrolment numbers decline in a number of jurisdictions; the effective proclamation of and witness to the faith in a pluralistic environment; the quality of leadership – ordained and lay – required for the exercise of the Church’s mission in a new era and in address of social and political developments; the charisms of all the baptised which remain largely inactive and are yet to be fully engaged, and our continued development of a healthy, safe and missionary ecclesial culture. It is no secret that it is our personal and shared discipleship that stands as the deepest source of renewal across these varied aspects of the Church’s life.
As such, the Plenary Council will not give rise to a ‘church of preferences’ but rather provides the opportunity, if we take it, to better equip the Church in Australia to proclaim the unchanging Gospel in new and vital ways. Our Catholic tradition is none other than the Church’s reception of Jesus through time under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this time of challenge and opportunity for the Church it is incumbent upon us to seek out, receive and then voice what this Spirit is saying to the churches (Rev 2:7).
It was a privilege to present a workshop at the Australian Catholic Youth Ministry Convention 2018, held in the Diocese of Parramatta this past weekend. It was inspiring to be with youth ministers and leaders who are shaping the Church through their witness and initiative, from all sectors of the Church in Australia. Below is a summary of the workshop shared and I hope it’s of interest and encouragement in the ongoing work of renewal as we anticipate next month’s Synod on Youth.
This workshop will extend the theme of ‘missionary discipleship’ to consider how youth ministry can support young people to move and grow from participation in youth ministry to exercise their discipleship as adults in broader parish and community life. If youth ministry gathers for the purpose of sending out, how can our ministries best prepare young people for that future? One of the claims of this workshop is that if we can identify the issues of our moment, and we know the destination at which we want to arrive, then this will shape the steps we can take to get there. If our purpose is sending young people out into mission, into the full life of the Church and world, then how does our youth ministry best prepare them for that future?
The Discipleship Dilemma
As Pope Francis encourages, it is important to begin with a frank assessment of where we are as Church because “realities are more important than ideas” (EG 231-233; LS 110, 201). We cannot grow by holding the door closed against reality. A renewed future begins on the basis of the present. When we reflect on how best to lead young people into adult discipleship, we could reasonably ask how well our entire Church leads and makes disciples of all its members.
We know that the Church is called by God to work towards the transformation of the world so that it reflects more and more of God’s Kingdom or God’s reign. This Kingdom comes about when people encounter Jesus, surrender, and make the decision to follow – when they become his disciples and go out to transform the world. However, if this is the purpose of the Church, bringing about the Kingdom and making and forming disciples, we have to admit that we are not bearing the fruit we would like to see. More and more of our people, both young and old, continue to disengage from the Church, and we acknowledge the confronting reality that in the current climate some will question if the Church has anything worthwhile to say or be less inclined to be explicit in their faith. Another challenge presents itself in our parishes. If we were to measure how many of the hundreds who receive the sacraments in our local parishes each year, pass through our sacramental life in initiation or from week to week, and emerge on the other side as missionary disciples, the result would be less than ideal. There is something amiss. Where is the fruit?
The reasons for our decline have become clearer over time. At heart, we have a discipleship dilemma. When it comes to a personal and active relationship with Jesus Christ, many Catholic communities have taken a pastoral approach that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’ and that is simply not true. We have neglected our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can actually take root and bear fruit. To make the point, “baptisms, confessions, weddings, funerals, daily devotions, anointing, and adoration. It’s all good stuff, it’s how some Catholics grow spiritually. For others, it’s what they do instead of grow . . . For certain, the sacraments give us grace to put us in right relationship to God and his life in our soul, nourishing and strengthening us for our discipleship walk. But they’re not mean to replace it’”.[1] This is not to discount the centrality of the sacraments or to deny the place that devotions have in the Catholic life. But it is to say that people can be ‘sacramentalised’ without being evangelised. It is entirely possible to undertake a routine of religious custom and practice without a personal and responsive relationship to Jesus Christ.
The sacraments do indeed give us the capacity to believe – the virtue of faith – but without a personal ‘yes’ – an act of faith – it remains a ‘bound’ sacrament. Like a car full of fuel, if we never turn the key or press the accelerator, we do not move forwards and we are not changed. Our personal ‘yes’ is the spark which enables grace to bear real fruit in our lives. Writing of youth, John Paul II recognised this same dilemma, “A certain number of children baptised in infancy come for catechesis in the parish without receiving any other initiation into the faith and still without any explicit personal attachment to Jesus Christ; they only have the capacity to believe placed within them by Baptism and the presence of the Holy Spirit.”[2] We know that children and youth who have no explicit personal attachment to Jesus are likely to grow up to be adults with no personal attachment to Jesus, unless that relationship is introduced into their life through a process of evangelisation.
Our Catholic tradition affirms this very point – that the sacraments do not replace personal discipleship. Vatican II’s 月光ssr网址 affirms that the sacraments presume a living faith amidst its people.[3] The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us explicitly, “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church: it must be preceded by evangelisation, faith, and conversion”.[4] The Second Vatican Council and the Catechism affirm the Eucharist as “the source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324). When there is no Christian life, no trace or intention of Christian living, then in fact the Eucharist can be neither source nor summit of anything. Outside of the context of discipleship, the Eucharist can be reduced to an object of piety or mere consumption rather than a relationship that invites a Jesus-shaped life. Finally, Jesus himself gives us a Great Commission “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, [and then] baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). We could say that the mission of the Church is not sacraments but disciples which the sacraments nourish. Unless people become disciples, the grace of the sacraments bears little fruit.
It is important to recognise that the young people in our care are already being shaped and formed by this culture of sacramental routine, marked by a lack of fruit and the gentle decline in living faith. To render this concrete, take the typical experience of a Church-attending youth. They might intuit from the pews that parish participation is declining (in fact, the total percentage of Mass attendance nears single digits across the country) and will gain a quick sense that very few of their peers attend Eucharist on any given weekend (about 5% of all aged 20-34 in fact).[5] They would know too well that few of their peers’ families are engaging with the Church, and they may not witness many or any new people coming into the Church at Easter (perhaps a handful each year, while dozens more walk out the back door at the same time). They might recognise that while many receive the sacraments they are not seeing the fruit of a change in lives, that there is something missing and church attendance doesn’t seem to make a great difference to people’s lives. They may hear a little about the Church, history, or even morality, but they may not hear much about Jesus or hear the story of Jesus’ life shared clearly (when preaching is poor or misaligned). They may never have witnessed an adult actually speak about how Jesus has changed their life or heard conversations among adults about Jesus (even though a culture of testimony lies at the heart of evangelisation, for consumer churches have preferences while missionary churches have stories of how Jesus has changed their life).
These are some of the basic experiences that young people may encounter in our faith communities. The risk is unless we are casting in our youth ministries an alternative vision for what adult discipleship looks like, our young people may not receive any other image of adult life in the Church and therefore be given little sense of a positive future. We have a deep sense that we are called to do more than lead young people into adult communities which show little life in themselves, repeat the outcomes or trends of decline we have experienced in past generations of Catholics in Australia.
If our adult community and the cultures of our parish communities have forgotten what ‘normal’ looks like, it is the prophetic role of youth ministry to recover a new norm by equipping young people to move from a faith that can be customary, inherited or barren to a faith which is intentional (not routine), personal (not merely the faith of my family but a faith truly my own), and fruitful (there are signs of concrete change in our life for discipleship is not an invisible phenomenon, it shows up in the pigment of our life). In looking at change from one culture to another, we note that it is not the cultural norm in Catholicism to even talk about Jesus, let alone his fruit or work in our life, and those who do are viewed as Protestant or a spiritual pretender.[6] We have forgotten what ‘normal’ looks like. Youth ministry can play a part in the gradual transformation of our Church culture, to place again a full and living discipleship to Jesus before young people, as the heart of what we do and who we are as Catholics.
We can consider the radical difference that youth ministry can make to the Church in this way – via the analogy of what makes a good school. We know that a lack of academic opportunity is passed on or transmitted from generation to generation and, as such, students from lower socio-economic backgrounds often do not perform as well as they could. However, some education systems (e.g. those in Shanghai and Korea but sadly not Australia) are able to lift these students well beyond their statistical likelihood of poor academic performance, enabling these young people to perform and excel at their full potential. Quite simply, good schools and teachers make a difference to the capacities and lives of their students. They can break the cycle of ignorance and disadvantage. In a similar way, we know that ignorance of the faith is passed on or transmitted from generation to generation, and that many of our people start their journey in the Church ‘disadvantaged’ by low religious literacy and low or no commitment to practice, including little enthusiasm for sacrificial discipleship or evangelisation of others. The aim of good parishes, schools and youth ministries is to lift people out of this religious rut and support them to grow in faith and discipleship above and beyond what their background might have equipped them for. If our communities are not equipping our young people for living discipleship, then perhaps it is our ministry that can make that difference. I wanted to start on the note of realism, with recognition of what we are sending our young people into, and a note of possibility of what youth ministry can do within the wider life of the Church and within a Catholic culture desperately in need of renewal.
Youth Ministry
Having named the discipleship dilemma in our wider Church, which impacts upon the future of young people in faith, we now turn to focus on the reality of youth ministry itself. What is the status quo or state of play in youth ministry today?
Some of the significant dilemmas we are confronting include a ‘drop off’ after a time in parish groups and during senior high school among youth. For young adults, the decline in participation can set in during the post-school years, in the years of university or the first years of work. We sense that many of those aged between 25-35 years are being lost to the Church’s life, and other young adults are left hungry and even look back to youth ministry to serve their needs after the age of 30. These real experiences expose a gap and need in our approach to youth ministry, with many asking, ‘to whom shall we go?’ As it stands, we see young adults graduate from youth groups, a small number emerge as spiritual entrepreneurs who have learned to fend for themselves, but many more become ‘lost’ or drifters within the life of the Church, and a silent majority of young adults, I fear, slip into the routine culture of the crowd or disappear from the life of the Church altogether. Young people will continue to leave the scene as groups dwindle and their social support fades in the Church, or they will ‘hang on’ to their youth experience for dear life and risk a sort of extended adolescence well into their thirties with the crisis of vocation that can accompany being lost. If people are feeling lost in their thirties, it is saying something about how we are or are not preparing young people in youth ministry for a lasting life of faith.
The Causes of Decline
What is it about youth ministries that can lead to the disengaged, unchurched and the lost? We have an opportunity to make a real difference with those we do encounter but we do not always quite hit the mark. Some of the limited outcomes we see in youth ministry can be related to the purpose for which they exist. Take these four examples, keeping in view that a problem well recognised is a problem half solved.
The social but not spiritual group. There will be youth groups that exist for their own social value and are perhaps more an exercise in demography rather than discipleship. The parish decides it is good to have a youth group or a school a new youth team of sorts, so they establish one and the community feels better for it because we are ‘doing something for youth’. In short, the group exists for its own sake rather than for others. It will inevitably become insular, cliquey and decline, rather than outreach and grow, operating from a consumption model (‘this group is about me’) rather than of outreach and apostolic intent. It can often be marked by a sense that if the group gets any larger they will lose their intimate sense of community. The members do not intentionally reject ‘new’ people, but their present relationships are so intimate that any newcomer can find it difficult to break into the group. Especially when small, these social groups can stunt personal growth rather than enable it, especially if a group is populated with young people with nowhere else to go. Of course, the Church is there for all people, most especially the poor in spirit and circumstance, but if youth groups or ministries are not as broad and refective as the surrounding community, it can serve as a refuge from the world rather than a launching pad for faith in the world.
Youth groups as a retention strategy. Sometimes groups can be formed or used as a remedy for the declining participation that takes place after the sacraments of initiation. After all, who doesn’t want to ‘keep the kids in church’. However, such group can have short futures as they will tend to focus on behaviour modification (turning up to Mass or staying in Church) rather than discipleship. What they do not realise is that when people become disciples – encounter Jesus, surrender their life to him, and make the decision to follow – they will go to Mass for the rest of their lives. We want people to fall in love, not merely fall in line. If a group is simply about retaining members, then youth leaders will need to constantly come up with new and gimmicky ideas to retain the current membership and ‘get them to Mass’ but never address the deeper ‘why’ that might sustain them for a lifetime of faith. Groups that are established or see themselves merely as a retention strategy aim for the short-term but are unable to take the longer view with the usual outcomes of steady decline as the novelties and techniques wear thin.
Youth ministry as catechesis. Another reality for youth ministry can be an exclusive focus on catechesis, on teaching young people the facts about Catholicism and learning content, even when young people may not have a relationship with Jesus (i.e. have not even been evangelised). When we think about the word ‘catechesis’ itself (κατήχησις) as it is found in the Gospel of Luke 1:4, 1 Corinthians 14:19 and Galatians 6:6 it means ‘to sound out’ or to ‘echo the teaching’. It is like standing at the entrance of a cave and speaking out and hearing a voice coming back. When we catechise young people, we are speaking into their lives. We are giving them faith and knowledge, and what we seek is for that faith and knowledge to resound back, echo back upon its reception. However, the only way we can hear an echo is if there is a cave, if there is a space to speak into. If we were to run out and shout at a brick wall, we are not going to hear an echo as there is no space to absorb and reverberate what is being shared. So, we need to bring people to a living and transformative encounter with Jesus first, to create space within them for the Gospel, before we can teach or learning can take place. It has been pointed out that in the history of our Church, we have so often confused indifference with ignorance. People often do not care, have no space for the Gospel, but we think they simply do not have enough information so we catechise them and yet we wonder why nothing is sinking in. It is like trying to plant seeds in concrete! If we continue to prepare and form young people in this same way – only catechise – then we will continue to arrive at the same results, with young people unprepared for a life of adult faith because we never evangelised, made and formed them as disciples.
Finally, youth ministry as a process of duplicating groups. One other response to the disengagement of young adults from the Church we can see is the simple duplication of the same youth groups and structures for an older cohort. However, the question then is ‘where should that process end?’ Should we have groups for those aged 30-35 and then for those 40-45 years of age or would we presume and prepare at some stage their integration and leadership in the wider Christian community?
We can see how some of the outcomes we are seeing in youth ministry with drop off or disengagement can be shaped by our starting points or understanding of what our purpose is as a ministry of the Church. All these four models or tendencies within youth ministries miss the mark, which is to make disciples who have encountered, surrendered and made the decision of faith. More positively, if we do make disciples of young people, they will naturally yearn to be with other Christians (be social), they will live their life within the Church, even through thick and thin, because of their personal relationship and love of Jesus (they will be retained), they will be open to learning (catechesis) and be sustained as adults in older years with a genuine heart for Christ (experience spiritual conviction, not simply repeat behaviours). However, if we begin with other starting points, we cannot expect to see the fruit we are called to bring to life.
We can see the difference youth ministries can be through what are called ‘Berkana loops’ which are simply a helpful companion in thinking through how change and growth come about.
When our youth ministries first get off the ground, we can enjoy growth and excitement as the life cycle begins. Our group can be thriving, and we are good stewards of this growth. However, at some point things in the group can begin to plateau, perhaps because we have become comfortable and established, or we are not gaining new members or enthusiasm begins to wane. We start to lose significance or momentum.
When things begin to decline, we enter a ‘hospice’ stage where we are caring for a group in decline. However, as things plateau, there are some who see what is going on and what is not working, they might see what is lacking through a sort of ‘holy discontent’, and can begin to ask questions about impact or methods, and they begin to think of a new way forward. They recognise that God’s mission is greater than our existing methods which are no longer bearing fruit as they might have at other times.
These innovators might feel isolated in their hunger for a new form of engaging young people until they connect with others who have discerned a similar hunger, need or possibility. Now a network of innovators emerges, and they begin connecting on a regular basis. They begin to take action and become a community of practice, as a new possibility continues to emerge and build. With time, space, resources, expertise or by building new skills a new reality and a new way of mission or outreach comes into being.
There will be some stewards of youth ministry who are called to ‘sit by the bedside’ and accompany youth groups to their end, perhaps because that is their charism or they do not quite muster the courage or imagination to change and adapt. Sometimes youth ministries do have their time and naturally come to their end. However, others might make the transition from an old to a new way of doing things which has been led and created by others. When we recognise what is missing in our wider Church and some of our youth ministry – a focus on discipleship – we can put those missing pieces in place with the young people in our care.
Raising Discipleship
So, how do we raise discipleship among new generations that will last into adulthood? Firstly, our own witness is essential. Our witness demonstrates what a new life in Christ looks like. If our own Church attendance and involvement in the life of the Church does make a difference in how we live, if we are actively learning a style of life steered by love, it provokes a response from the young people in our care and opens a path of curiosity, trust and dialogue.
It is important to underscore that it is not our youth programs that make disciples; it is disciples that make disciples. Courses, programs and materials are only as good as the people using them. Without disciples to run a program, they do little good. It is not that we do not appreciate good materials. However, as it has been said, in the history of the life of the Church we did not have good materials. We had people. We had disciples making disciples. Right now, due to a lack of disciples, we may need the materials as a kind of crutch but we need to be careful about allowing them to replace the relationships.
Our witness enables us to then credibly proclaim the Gospel, most centrally the kerygma which is the kernel of the Gospel that centres on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The kerygma refers to the basic truths of our Christian faith, the core message of the Christian faith to which all believers are called to assent and proclaim. Pope Paul VI declared, “There is no true evangelisation if the name, the teaching, the life, the promises, the Kingdom and the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God are not proclaimed”.[7] This is the kerygma. It is explicit and focused entirely on the person and saving message of Jesus Christ.
We have to tell this Great Story of Jesus if it is to be known. The heart of evangelisation in youth ministry is to announce who Jesus is, the Son of God, the Word made flesh, the man who is God, who died for our sins and was raised on the third day. It is to announce the Good News of the Risen Christ who is with us even now and opens up for us the way to life without end. Evangelising youth ministries proclaim Jesus’ ascension, his seating at the right hand of the Father as King, and his sending forth of the Holy Spirit. It is this Spirit which reveals Christ and even enables us to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ and it is this Spirit who empowers the Church, who empowers us, to be faithful to Christ’s mission in our own lives and in this moment of the world’s history. Ultimately, this Good News of Christ calls us to conversion, to repent and believe in this Gospel, calling for a change of life in the light of what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ whose life we share by baptism, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in communion with his mystical body in the Eucharist, and by our communion with His body, the Church.
We are called to bring young people to a transformational encounter with this Jesus, connecting his story with our life. Again, the power of our initial witness and then proclamation has a lot to do with our own transformation and encounter, our own conversion. Pope Francis notes, “A true missionary who never ceases to be a disciple, knows that Jesus walks with him, speaks to him, breathes with him, works with him. He senses Jesus alive with him, in the midst of his missionary enterprise… a person who is not convinced, enthusiastic, certain, and in love, will convince nobody”.[8] Hence, how are you telling the Great Story of Jesus in your ministry? We are called to share that Jesus’ mission was to bring about the Kingdom marked by abundance and that we, as his disciples, are called to do the same, bringing the world’s limitation to divine possibility, that is, to the fullness of life (John 10:10).
This is the kind of vision of discipleship we need to proclaim. The American author Sherry Weddell remarks that if nobody talks about what discipleship looks like, it becomes difficult for people to begin to walk on that road, “Unfortunately, most of us are not spiritual geniuses. If nobody around us ever talks about a given idea, we are no more likely to think of it spontaneously than we are to suddenly invent a new primary colour. To the extent we don’t talk explicitly with one another about discipleship, we make it very, very difficult for most Catholics to think about discipleship”.[9] It is difficult to believe in and live something that you have never heard anyone talk about or that you have seen very others, including older adults, live with joy. We must witness, tell the story of Jesus, and cast a vision of discipleship, of personal and spiritual change, as the ultimate fruit of all other gifts in the Church, including the sacraments and our ministries to the young.[10]
In casting that vision of discipleship we need to be committed and resolute because other understandings of youth ministry can be cast at us (e.g. youth ministry as the social group, the retention strategy, as catechesis or duplication). A great example of resoluteness in holding and living our vision is illustrated by SouthWest Airlines, a low-fare carrier in the U.S. that seeks to ‘democratise’ air travel. Humour is a core dimension of its vision (e.g. the on-board announcements, “Would someone put out the cat?”; “We will be serving dinner on this flight and dessert if everyone behaves themselves”). Nevertheless, the airline received a complaint about their style, from a customer who regarded it as unprofessional and improper for an airline company. On receipt of a complaint, we could probably assume the line of management that would follow (i.e. a letter comes into the central office, the director of customer service rings the branch manager and asks them to ‘tone it down’, before sending the customer some form of compensation e.g. a meal voucher or a free fare). However, Southwest Airlines did not do this. Instead, they sent this customer a short letter with just four words on it. It read: “We will miss you.” The airline does not compromise on its vision and stands by the fact that there are many other uninteresting and boring airlines that customers are well free to choose. So it is with us in our vision of discipleship – it is the very reason for which the entire Church exists, is non-negotiable, and is that image of life that will support the young to live their faith into adulthood, as they come to know themselves as witnesses to the reign or Kingdom of God.
A further step in accompaniment of the young must be to assist them to actually live in that direction. Take for example the rich young man who encounters Jesus. It is not enough for this young man to meet Jesus, but he is then invited to sell all that he has – in other words to start living in the right direction (Mk 10:17-31). We can learn this principle also from the gift of marriage. We can encounter another person, get to know them, and even develop a personal relationship with them. However, to be married someone has to make the decision to ask and a decision to say ‘yes’. It is the same for discipleship – we are called to assist young people to make decisions that set them in the right direction. After all, we are all going somewhere, whether we know it or not, and will arrive at a destination in life.
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The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins developed this term ‘inscape’ for the individual structure of a living being (like a tree or a leaf), an inner structure which results from the history of this being, an inner design made by the tree through its life in the way it has responded to life. We are much the same, our life is a work of art and all the good and the bad, conflicts and sufferings, troubles and happiness in our life all add up to something, all produce this inner structure, and this is what we are judged on, our encounter with Jesus and the direction that we chose to live. We are judged not on small incidentals (eating meat on Fridays) but rather the whole structure of our life – all that we wanted to do, tried to do, our relationships. This all adds up to our identity which God knows. Hence the value of youth ministers as spiritual guides who can help the next generation to be in touch with the whole direction and meaning of their life as a whole, what it is all adding up to and to encourage them to develop in this direction and not another.
We need, in fact, to develop an intentional culture of mentorship if young people are to grow and make decisions on the way to a lasting and adult faith. Why do young people need you as a mentor? Part of the reason is because experience is a rough teacher and it costs time. As shared by a Christian evangelist, Andy Stanley, ‘Perhaps you’ve heard someone make the argument that experience is the best teacher. That may be true, but that’s only half the truth. Experience is often a brutal teacher. Experience eats up your most valuable commodity: time. Learning from experience can eat up years. It can steal an entire stage of life. Experience can leave scars, inescapable memories, and regret. Sure, we all live and learn. But living and learning don’t erase regret. And regret is more than memory. It is more than cerebral. It’s emotional. Regret has the potential to create powerful emotions – emotions with the potential to drive a person right back to the behaviour that created the regret to begin with. If regret can be avoided, it should be’. Life will throw enough hardship at us by itself. We can avoid unnecessary pain and regret by learning from the experience of others. We need to reach back to those a stage of life behind us and make it easier for that next generation to encounter Christ and to live for him because people develop best when they see what their value being lived out in other Christians. We know hypocrisy discourages faith and good witness raises it up.
In creating that culture, I also want to invite youth ministers not to underestimate their capacity to be a spiritual mentor for others, regardless of their age or history. As a Carthusian monk once penned, our years of age tell us only this, “that the earth has gone around the sun so many times since I came into this world. That is the normal measure of what the world calls time.”酸酸乳ssr网址 However, there is another ‘age’ which is measured by the time we have spent in the life of Christ, the spiritual growth and progress we have made in our time of faith. The mentorship of youth ministers for young people in their care honours our Christian faith as nothing less than a life being passed on, for our tradition of witness is ‘hand clasping hands stretching back in time until they hold the hand of Jesus who holds the hand of God’.ssr免费订阅地址
The qualities youth leaders can develop as mentors to support and nourish the discipleship of the young are well spelt out by the preparatory document for the forthcoming Synod on Youth to be held in October 2018. It helpfully shares:
“The young people of the Pre-synodal Meeting accurately detail the profile of the mentor: ‘a faithful Christian who engages with the Church and the world; someone who constantly seeks holiness; is a confidant without judgement; actively listens to the needs of young people and responds in kind; is deeply loving and self-aware; acknowledges their limits and knows the joys and sorrows of the spiritual journey’. For young people, it is particularly important that mentors recognise their own humanity and fallibility: ‘Sometimes mentors are put on a pedestal, and when they fall, the devastation may impact young people’s abilities to continue to engage with the Church’. They also add that ‘mentors should not lead young people as passive followers, but walk alongside them, allowing them to be active participants in the journey. They should respect the freedom that comes with a young person’s process of discernment and equip them with tools to do so effectively. Mentors should believe wholeheartedly in a young person’s ability to participate in the life of the Church. They should nurture the seeds of faith in young people, without expecting to immediately see the fruits of the work of the Holy Spirit. This role is not and cannot be limited to priests and religious, but the laity should also be empowered to take on such a role. All such mentors should benefit from being well-formed, and engage in ongoing formation”.[13]
While it can appear that we are looking for ‘Jesus on a good day’, all of us can bring something of our imperfect selves and the treasure of our life and experiences of the world to those in our care. However, if we are going to support young people to healthily progress through youth groups and to become adult disciples, we will also need adult or older mentors in the lives of young people. As we shared, if a young person never sees or hears an adult talk about their relationship with Jesus, how would they know this relationship is even possible? As noted by Everett Fritz, we want young people to learn to participate in the world of adults, but our youth culture has largely removed adults from mentoring roles with teenagers. “As a result, teens are growing up in a peer-dominated culture. As they grow into adulthood, they have difficulty assimilating into the adult world and into the responsibilities and expectations that come with being an adult.”ssr网站 While peer to peer ministry has its place, in clarifying our life direction, we should not only seek advice from people who share the same season of life, because it is akin to asking for directions of someone who has never been where you want to go.
We have a rich biblical tradition of older mentors investing in younger mentees including Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Paul and Timothy and Titus, and Jesus and his disciples. Adults bring a unique blend of experiences, insights, conflict, choices, health challenges, convictions, and even failures and struggles to believe. Having adult mentors and witnesses in the midst of youth ministry, and a variety of adults, is essential if talk of discipleship and the Church is going to be meaningful in real-life ways. As it has been said, our faith is ever one generation away from its silence if it is not passed on, from one generation to the next.
[1] Fr Michael White and Tom Corcoran, Rebuilt: Awakening the Faithful, Reaching the Lost, Making Church Matter (Ave Maria Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 2013), 77.
[2] John Paul II, Catechesi Tradendae 19.
[3] Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium 59.
[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church #1072.
[5] Robert Dixon, Stephen Reid and Marilyn Chee, Mass Attendance in Australia: A Critical Moment. A Report Based on the National Count of Attendance, the National Church Life Survey and the Australian Census (Melbourne: ACBC Pastoral Research Office, 2013), 2-3.
[10] A disciple can be defined as one who has encountered Jesus, surrendered their life, and made the decision to follow, or be understood by its expression as provided by Fr James Mallon, as one who has a personal relationship with Jesus, shares faith with others, is open to the gift of the Holy Spirit, has a daily prayer life, with commitment to Eucharist and Reconciliation, can pray spontaneously out loud when asked, and sees their life as a mission field. Cf. Fr James Mallon, Divine Renovation Guidebook: A Step-by-Step Manual for Transforming Your Parish (Novalis: Toronto, Ontario, 2016), 159.
[11] A Carthusian, They Speak by Silences (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1955), 38-9.
[12] John Shea, An Experience Named Spirit as cited in Robert A. Ludwig, Reconstructing Catholicism: For a New Generation (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2000), 61.
[13] Instrumentum Laboris for Synod 2018, 132.
[14] Everett Fritz, The Art of Forming Young Disciples: Why Youth Ministries Aren’t Working and What to Do About It (Sophia Institute Press: Manchester, New Hampshire, 2018), 46.
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I was grateful to be part of a workshop this week hosted by the Australian Catholic Youth Council in North Sydney. It drew together a select group of parish and diocesan youth leaders in conversation with Australia’s delegates for the October Synod on youth, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP and Bishop Mark Edwards OMI, as well as Archbishop Comensoli.
It was a great source of learning and uplifting to meet young leaders who are exercising what can only be described as remarkable spiritual entrepreneurship within the Church in Australia. Amidst the polarisations that can mark our Church these are the young witnesses bringing fresh heart to our faith, with the bold humility well described by an ancient apologist – ‘we others, we speak little, but we live’.
The fifteenth ordinary general assembly will focus on young people, faith and vocational discernment between 3-28 October 2018. The Synod and its outcomes will provide a telling insight into the Church’s approach to evangelisation at this time. This is because our commitment to reach out to the young reflects our commitment to reach out to all those who are unchurched or weighing up if the Catholic faith might still be central or relevant to the everyday project of their lives.
The reality of disengagement and even disaffiliation from the Church on the part of young people will always be a confrontation as it suggests something about ourselves – about our capacity for relationships of discipleship with young people both personally and as a community of faith.
The conspicuous absence of young people from many of our communities, worshipping life and ordinary ministries says something about our ability to enter into their experience of life, to grasp their sensibilities, and recognise their questions and searching as filled with promise and as authentic, a way of approaching God rather than an affront or the hubris of disobedience. The uneven journey of young people within the Church throws light on our ability to dialogue with those unlike ourselves and on our capacity to suggest compelling and personal forms of holiness amid a host of unsatisfying cultural placebos. Fundamentally, the presence or otherwise of young people in our Christian community reflects our ability to witness to and proclaim the Gospel as a way of life, as an invitation to fall in love rather than an obligation to fall in line.
Recognising the Reality
As the Church in Australia considers its future, it is imperative to understand the interactions and experiences that comprise young people’s lives for these provide the building blocks for renewed mission with and to young people. While the Catholic faith may today occupy less surface space in Australian culture, the rise of dedicated disciples within promises to bring new depths to our Christian living and cultural impact, and encourage the whole Church in its mission to the concrete people of each generation.
While the national survey and report findings (‘Called to Fullness of Life and Love’) produced by the Australian Catholic bishops ahead of the Synod did tend to underrepresent young people weakly attached to the Church, and overrepresent young adults who are highly involved, it nevertheless stands as a valuable and significant window into the experience of young Australians with regards faith and the Church.
Affirmed by the survey is the primary influence on young people of family and friends. These two natural influences can nurture, support and raise up faith. Each can also lead young people toward disaffiliation. This phenomenon can occur, for instance, when young people feel forced to attend Church with family members, perceive hypocrisy in the lives of those closest to them, come forward from situations which may not mirror a Christian understanding of marriage and family (e.g. a third of all births in Australia are now ex-nuptial births[1]) or when they are not supported by peers who value faith or religious practice.
Challengingly, among Australian Catholic youth the influence of Church or religious leaders in their key decisions and directions is thin, identified as significant by just 11% of those surveyed and aged between 16-18 years. This meek influence might be explained by a lack of personal relationship amongst some clergy and young people, the broader collapse of the Church’s credibility in the light of the sexual abuse crisis, and the real struggle of Church leaders to listen or ‘hold’ the questions that young people are asking of the Church. On this score, young Australian Catholics rated their experience of being listened at a modest 5.9 out of 10.[2]
A number of young people have expressed their weariness at being disregarded within our faith communities because of their youth or else being catechised without the opportunity to enter into genuine dialogue about the issues of faith and belief that are significant to them. It is certainly true that when the Church appears more concerned with behaviour modification than a personal encounter with the young in Christ, our ecclesial influence will wane and the potential for accompaniment will give way to alienation.
The reason that our influence – and therefore our listening – matters a great deal is because young Catholics are actively deciding whether faith and the Church will be a part of their life and future, and they are making these decisions from early adolescence. Disaffiliation is not a choice that is made with haste. As it has been suggested, it often mirrors the breakdown of any significant relationship – it happens one ‘chip’ at a time until one partner has had enough and ultimately decides it is ‘done’.[3] Provocations toward a final decision against the Church or Catholic faith can include a struggle with or disagreement with a particular Church teaching or teachings, a negative interaction with a Church leader or faith community, a process of steady emancipation from parents or grandparents committed to practice, and the accumulation of uninspired or wearisome experiences of the Church over time. Hence, the reported sense of relief for young people when they leave.[4]
Embracing the total picture of the reality of young people vis-à-vis the Church also means acknowledging those who remain engaged with the life and mission of the Church, of whom diversity remains a mark. Some young adults in the Australian survey passionately engage with traditional Catholic expressions of prayer and liturgy. Some want clarity of Church teaching amidst confusion and the cacophony of the blogosphere, while others seek less catechesis and dogmatism and more personal concern. Others shared their negative experiences when they have tried to promote Church teaching and practice in their own schools and parishes, and a lack of effective support in their practice of parish ministry, while others expressed their difficulty with the Church’s understanding of sexuality and relationships.[5]
Given the range of influences on young people, within and outside the Church, and their mixed experiences of faith, there is no one answer for the complexity of these situations, at least not without doing violence to the personal condition and circumstance of each young person which is the very subject of our evangelising mission.
Vocational Discernment
Positively, when Australian youth were asked how the Church can be of help to them, the responses actively invited our communities to provide guidance, to assist and counsel young people in their anxieties, personal challenges, understanding of sexuality and relationship issues.[6] As the meaning and direction of life is not uncovered in a single moment, it is incumbent upon the Church to journey with young lives in realising their own dignity and personal mission, both of which express a fundamental call to holiness.
The Synod’s preparatory document acknowledges that condescension and judgement are not helpful in this project. It also insists that mutual encounter rather than one-sided prescription will be the way in which we discover a personal form of holy living, “No vocation, especially within the Church, can be placed outside [the] outgoing dynamism of dialogue”.[7] This is because our vocational horizon is not “a pre-determined fate, a task to be carried out, a ready-made script . . . God takes seriously the freedom He has given to human beings and responding to his call is a commitment that requires work, imagination, audacity, willingness to make progress also by trial and error”.[8] Accompaniment and an apprenticeship in the life of faith are essential to growth in holiness, pursued by a state of life and also in professional life.
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has already advised “The pace of this accompaniment must be steady and reassuring, reflecting our closeness and our compassionate gaze which also heals, liberates and encourages growth in the Christian life”.[9] Accompaniment demands patience but can be sustained with the assurance that it has an immediate purpose, “To accompany them would be counterproductive if it became a sort of therapy supporting their self-absorption and ceased to be a pilgrimage with Christ to the Father . . . Genuine spiritual accompaniment always begins and flourishes in the context of service to the mission of evangelisation.”[10]
Frustratingly for many, the accompaniment urgently desired by young Australian Catholics and urged by Pope Francis cannot be found neatly contained within a package or program. It demands in fact an entire culture of ecclesial life in which discernment is a norm and in regular evidence. When genuine discernment is not practiced in our sacramental programs, leading to fruitless reception, when RCIA processes teach people about Catholicism but neglect to train them to live as disciples, when parish pastoral councils and parish groups are more focused on ‘who will do it?’ rather than ‘where are we going?’, the offer of accompaniment to young people will appear more like false advertising than the expression of a community fully open to what God wants for the Church. The preparatory document for the Synod minces no words, “We cannot expect our offer of pastoral accompaniment towards vocational discernment to be credible to young people, unless we show that we are able to practice discernment in the ordinary life of the Church”.[1]
Conclusion
If disaffiliation from Catholic faith and the Church is a process that unfolds over time, and the reasons that people leave contain the reasons they might return, then we must commit ourselves to the patient and thoroughgoing work of creating cultures in which accompaniment is not reserved for a select few or the ‘super spiritual’ but is the ordinary experience of young people in their contact with the Church.
As set out in the preparations for the Synod, it will demand of our communities mature disciples who are faithful Christians engaged with the Church and the wider world, who constantly seek holiness, can be a confidant without judgement, who actively listen to needs and respond in kind, are deeply loving and self-aware, and who can acknowledge their own limits and know the joy and sorrows of the spiritual journey.ssr网站 In confronting the challenges and listening to the hopes of the young, we pray that the October Synod will prompt this depth of conversion in each of us as witnesses to God’s mission.
[1] Australian Institute of Family Studies, Snapshots of Family Relationships 2008.
[2] Dantis, Trudy and Reid, Stephen, Called to Fullness of Life and Love: National Report on the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Youth Survey 2017 (Pastoral Research Office, 2018), 30.
[3] McCarty, Robert J., and Vitek, John M. Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics (2017), 11.
Held in Brisbane for the first time in its short history, Proclaim Conference 2018 gathered more than 600 participants from 12-14 July to discuss parish evangelisation with its theme drawn from John’s Gospel, “Make your home in me”. Keynote speakers over the three days included Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Cardinal John Dew from Wellington, Ron Huntley of the Divine Renovation network, Karolina Gunsser from Citipointe Church in Redcliffe, and Lana Turvey-Collins from the national facilitation team for the Plenary Council.
With a renewed process for workshops that encouraged shorter inputs and extended dialogue, and discussion panels on each day, the conversations were broad and, for the most part, unguarded. From the urgency of God’s mission, to the inseparability of evangelisation from the person of Jesus, and of the parish from the unchurched, to the health or otherwise toxicity of our parish cultures, and the ongoing experience of the sexual abuse crisis, participants were given nourishment and challenge for their pastoral practice.
I was privileged to facilitate four workshops and participate in a panel on ‘culture change, parish renewal and evangelisation’ together with Sally Hood of ACU Campus Ministry, Ron Huntley, and Andrea Dean of the Office for the Participation of Women. Below is a summary of my brief workshop input which looked at the connection of parish life to the unchurched.
Horizons of Parish Renewal
As a former ‘outsider’ to the Church it has taken some twenty years to learn to live as a baptised person and still the learning continues. Through my own faith experience I have come to believe that the parish is essential to Christian growth and discipleship. Indeed, if we did not have parishes we would have to invent them – local communities of faith gathered around the Word and Eucharist where faith is given shape and social support, fostered into discipleship and then enters the world through our living witness.
Together with the family and school, the parish is where the majority of people encounter the Church and it is where the vast majority of clergy will live out their life’s vocation. So the health and vitality of the parish matters to all of us, not only in respect of our common life but also for our personal faith.
However, part of the challenge is that when our parishes have not grown in roughly six or seven decades in Australia (since at least the 1950s), it is inevitable that there will be a small amount of people who love how we do things and a whole community who don’t.
The first horizon to which we can move is clarity on the mission of our parishes. Even as a brute fact of survival, we can affirm that the future of our parishes depends on those who currently do not believe. There is no future without the lost or unchurched.
Evangelisation is a necessity to maintain even what we have as local communities of faith. This is obvious enough in the struggle to maintain our ministries, our giving and even, in some parishes, our hope. More positively, when we bring others to Jesus and the Church it plants energy and life in our communities. We know this from the small trickle of people who enjoin our community through the RCIA, who come to personal faith in the midst of the Church.
More importantly, however, a focus on those who are unchurched neatly aligns with Jesus who comes not for the righteous but for sinners, who places the needs of the outcast and ailing before his own flock.
In the Gospel of Luke, we witness Jesus walking through the town of Jericho and reach out to Zacchaeus, a tax collector for the Roman establishment. Jesus steps into Zacchaeus’ house as a guest of a sinner, scandalises the watching crowd, and rejoices in Zacchaeus’ conversion, declaring “Today salvation has come to this house… for the Son of Man has come to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:9-10). We see this a pattern throughout his ministry – Jesus challenges the insiders and he comforts the outsiders.
The ecclesiology lesson we draw from Jesus’ ministry can be summarised in this way (from Sean Sears, pastor at Grace Church in Boston): the Church is not for Christians. The Church is Christians and it is for those who are not.
The Church is not for ourselves. In Pope Francis’ language, our community is called to be a ‘field hospital’ serving those who most need help now, the wounded and the lost. This is the antithesis of the self-referential Church. We are called to leave the ninety-nine to find the one, or in our Australian reality, leave the one to find the ninety-nine.
The likely challenge we can feel is that as essential as this outward focus is to our survival, as faithful as it is to the mission of Jesus himself, as urgent as this mission is to our health and growth, when we start changing things in the parish to better reach out, accompany and actively welcome outsiders (whether that’s through our Mass times, our language, our carparks, or our own position in the pews), people start to become uneasy precisely because it is not about them.
Change always sound great until people start to experience it. We can call for reform but are not always open to our own conversion. The reality for our Church is that any change will tend to be a ‘big change’ because of the weight of our Church culture toward maintaining the status quo. In our ecclesial culture there tends to always be a reason not to change, and yet we experience so little fruit on the collective vine as parish participation rates in Australia decline to near 11%.
When we proclaim that our parish is not about us but about the unchurched, some of us in community can feel a little like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The older brother has been utterly loyal and committed and served his Father’s house all this time. However, when he realises it is not about him but the one who has been lost, the older brother struggles to rejoice at the one who had not earned his welcome but whom the Father nevertheless embraces and lavishes upon with love.
We know in the mind of Jesus that the older brother is just as lost because everything the Father has is for the older brother too. What the Father seeks from his first son is a largeness of heart to rejoice when the lost are saved, a heart for his youngest son who was dead but is now alive.
In the culture of our parishes it is all too easy for the people inside the church to become a higher priority than reaching those outside the church. This is understandable to some extent as the ‘insiders’ keep things running, they lead our ministries and yes they pay the bills. However, for fear of making these insiders unhappy, our parishes tend to hold on to programs even if these seeds are bearing no fruit on account of the toxicity of the soil or culture in which they are hosted. This can keep our house small and our family brooding or even bitter rather than welcoming and marked by the charity that the Gospel demands.
In contrast, if we do as Jesus invites us to do and seek out and reach the lost and the unchurched, the life of the ‘older brother’ is also renewed. So, it is for our parishes: outward focused churches create the healthiest insiders.
In fact, inward looking churches create consumers with preferences, while outward looking churches create missionaries with larger hearts and stories to tell, stories about how Jesus has changed their life. This is the heart of an evangelised parish culture – one beggar telling another beggar how he found bread.
We sometimes think we need to go out and make people Christians and then bring them to Church. We often want to ‘clean’ the fish before we ‘catch’ them but that’s not how fishing works. What we want to do is to bring them into our community in the complexity of their situations, create environments which are compelling and faith filled, and offer accompaniment that treats their wounds with the balm of mercy, spiritual counsel and ecclesial belonging so they can begin to walk with Christ, experience in time his sacramental life and live out his apostolate as Christ’s disciples.
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Recognising God’s Mission is Greater than our Methods
The second grand horizon or vista to which we can move is recognition that God’s mission is always greater than our methods, no matter how we currently do things. If we focus anew on the unchurched for health, growth and to be faithful to Jesus’ mission, then we will need to change our practices (e.g. if we preach to the unchurched we are likely to speak to everyone).
A classic example of the need to prioritise our mission over method can be found in the story of Kodak, the photography business established at the turn of the twentieth century, with the expressed purpose of preserving memories which is a seemingly indestructible mission.
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In a similar vein, in the U.S. 90% of heart patients who are told to change their lifestyle habits or die, choose death over change! (Fast Company Report, 2005)
Parishes that choose their current methods over their mission will die, as what got us here as communities will not always take us where we need to go. If the landscape of faith has changed, and our parishes are still reading off the same maps, our parishes are going to get lost along the way.
What, then, are the methods, programs and practices that no longer serve our parish life and growth? For example, it is clear that we have been catechising and sacramentalising the unevangelised. This practice has borne little fruit over the past decades. As well, we often focus on welcome in our parishes which is certainly important. However, without a practical strategy for invitation there may be less and less people to welcome.
We need to stop setting the bar too low for ministries that matter and nurture strengths based ministry rather than engage in desperate recruitment of anyone who might be available (e.g. a bulletin notice from my own parish for musicians noted, almost as an afterthought, “It does help if you can read music and/or sing in tune and in time”!)
We might have to preach without assuming too much (e.g. that our congregations understand the gift of the Eucharist or the context of Gospel readings) and preach purposely into people’s lives (e.g. our Trinity Sunday homilies almost never touch on the Great Commission and tend to deliver flimsy abstractions that leave people disoriented or disengaged).
What no longer serves the mission of the parish and needs to be set aside so we can redirect the hard labour of maintenance to the real promise of mission? What pathway might we need to put in place to accompany people from no or little faith into an encounter with the living Christ (whether it is a five-step process of Divine Renovation or the three-step method of the parish of ssr网站)?
A third horizon we can move toward in forming evangelising parishes is structures that support the mission. We want to grow but many parishes are not necessarily structured to grow. There can be literally “no room in the inn” for change.
Take for example the ministry of the priest. A priest can certainly maintain a parish largely by himself, conscripting lay leaders to fulfil the basic functions of community and to keep the wheels turning. However, if the parish wants to go out in mission and reach the unchurched the priest will have to learn to lead with and alongside others. This is because one priest can only have so many meaningful relationships, perhaps a hundred at most. If a parish wants to go out and reach the lost and unchurched, then this realistically demands a team of lay leadership with whom the mission and methods are proclaimed, structured and taken forwards.
So, structure affects mission by default or design. Like a trellis, it will encourage growth and provide room for change and adaption, or like a small pot it will restrict the size to which a sapling can grow.
As a practical parish example, in walking alongside a priest in another diocese, he had inherited a well-resourced parish but also a structure of staff that made mission and outreach difficult.
The parish team consisted of a parish priest, two assistant priests, a three day a week secretary, a two day staff member for accounts, two days for a sacramental coordinator, two days for a pastoral care coordinator, two days liturgical preparation, and two days youth ministry (the equivalent of almost four full time staff).
You can guess how many of these staff reported directly to the parish priest – all eight. The structure of parish staff was keeping him somewhat boxed in, tied to the order of maintenance.
However, if we consider a structure with three teams – an operations team (with a secretary and a report of finance), a newly created evangelisation team (with a four day a week parish evangelisation coordinator working on Alpha, engagement and formation of ministers in the parish, with direct reports of a sacramental coordinator and the youth minister, and accompanied by an assistant priest) and a communications focus (actually integrated into the youth role, so not requiring a paid employee but remaining an area of focus) we could reduce his direct reports from eight to a more manageable five. The previous paid liturgical role was made voluntary and the pastoral care coordination role was integrated into the new evangelisation coordinator role.
This structure empowers lay leadership, and gives back time to the priest for the core work of setting parish vision through his weekly homilies, and to drive and support the evangelisation of adults from which all else flows.
We cannot address the renewal of parishes without looking under the hood or checking the fuel gauge, whether that is our staffing arrangements, our budgets or ministry structures. It is one of the hardest things to do but it is the right horizon or direction in which to move.
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The fourth horizon we can move towards is putting mission into action, perhaps the hardest pilgrimage of all. As a friend once shared, conferences can sometimes be a bit like this: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” and when we get home, it is more “… as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”.
I want to acknowledge that in suggesting a comprehensive focus on the unchurched, methods and strategies to support this kind of evangelisation, and renewed structures to enable growth, we can be tempted to feel overwhelmed.
However, I believe we can make change at every level of the Church, even in our own individual parish ministry groups. Parishes need ‘lighthouse’ ministries that show the way, to show that evangelisation is urgent, possible and can bring about personal and spiritual change.
Whether it is a music ministry or a form of service like a St Vincent de Paul conference, it is possible to shift toward a dedicated outward focus, a culture welcoming of outsiders and challenging of insiders, with a commitment to elevating mission over old methods and to revisit current structures to support the goals we want to achieve. Ultimately, our plan is our people, not programs, and leadership is essential to our cultural transformation. What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.
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As Christians, people of the Incarnation in which the Word was made flesh, we know that the medium is the message. Jesus not only proclaims the Kingdom of God but embodies it in his person.
I believe every parish can grow in its outreach and move towards an evangelising culture but it demands our intent and conviction to bring it about. We are being called to reclaim our primary mission, to bring the nations to a living faith in Jesus who is, as the Church describes, “the light that knows no setting”.
With the commencement of a new year, one of the immediate priorities has been preparations and planning for Plenary Council 2020. It has been helpful in these early days to gather thoughts, recollect on where we have travelled to date, and look ahead.
First face-to-face meeting of Bishops Commission & Executive Committee for Plenary Council 2020, St Joseph’s Retreat Centre, Baulkham Hills, 19-20 Oct., 2017.
In September 2017 an inaugural forum was hosted by the Broken Bay Institute at Mary MacKillop Place in North Sydney. It gathered leaders in Catholic education, social support services, and other agencies and religious institutes of the Church. The forum reflected on the meaning of ‘synodality’, a deepening of the Church’s communion as a means to faithfully interpret the living voice of God in this time and circumstance.
In my own view, with the cultural reform of the Australian Catholic Church on the table, a key task will be to identify those systemic or gravitational forces that move the tides if you will, that lift up or otherwise upend the boats in our exercise of Catholic life and mission. If a culture is constituted by behaviours and relationships, unspoken assumptions, a universe of ideas, a material reality and language, then it will be important to name the underlying issues raised or highlighted by particular concerns (for example, talk of renewing or eschewing parish pastoral councils invites us to confront the current limitations of lay-clergy relationships and of priestly formation for practical leadership). The process of dialogue with all of God’s people will be essential to discerning these fundamental themes and I have great hope that this coming year will present a first and significant step toward the task.
In October 2017 members of the Bishops Commission for the Plenary Council and the 酸酸乳ssr网站 then gathered to learn and discuss the opportunity that this national ecclesial council presents for our Church. I have to say I left the gathering greatly encouraged and more hopeful than I had (admittedly) arrived. With planning meetings scheduled for the Executive Committee in the weeks ahead, there is still much yet to be clarified but the infrastructure and practical matters are fast becoming clearer and more concrete.
In the closing days of 2017 I was able to sketch some of the ways in which our own Broken Bay Diocese might meaningfully and substantially take part in the national process, for the benefit of the Australian discernment as well as for the vitality of our local diocese. Local processes and opportunities in Broken Bay will be announced at Pentecost 2018, providing enough time to organise the diocesan journey with formation, resources, training for dialogues and assemblies.
In the meantime, in order to make sense of Plenary Council 2020 I have gathered together an outline and reflections on the Council that might also be of help to you and your communities. I would be grateful for any feedback you might have on these initial thoughts and proposals!
As the year slowly gathers pace, I wish you and your communities a blessed and happy new year, Daniel.
Walking the Path of the Plenary Council
“Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev 2:7). Since 2001, in the wake of St John Paul II’s apostolic letter from at the turn of the millennium, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has been giving consideration to a national ecclesial event, involving all Australian dioceses. St John Paul II’s 2001 apostolic letter 一元机场网址ssr called for new energy and depth, what it called a genuine ‘spirituality of communion’ within the Church, a spirituality which ‘by prompting a trust and openness wholly in accord with the dignity and responsibility of every member of the People of God, supplies institutional reality with a soul’ (Novo Millennio Ineunte 45). It called for nothing less than the conversion of the Church in spirit and structure.
This call led to growing discussion within the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference in 2006 about an event of ecclesial communion within the Australian Church, with Archbishop Philip Wilson (Archdiocese of Adelaide) a leading voice. In time this conversation developed into the decision to hold a Year of Grace which began in Pentecost of 2012 and was dedicated as a year of discernment and prayer, of ‘contemplating the face of Christ’ in order to renew our self-understanding as a Church of Gospel faith and mission.
Then in 2013 came the surprise election of Pope Francis. By his papal exhortations and by his convening of the 2014 and 2015 synods on the family, the Pope placed a clear emphasis on the Church’s need to journey in discernment together with closeness to the people unified in baptismal faith and informed by the Holy Spirit.
In the same year and month of Pope Francis’ election the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse commenced, following its announcement in November of 2012. A searing grace for the Catholic Church, the Royal Commission makes it clear that ‘business as usual’ is not possible nor even desirable for the Church whose culture has failed and even betrayed on a spiritual and institutional level the very Gospel for which it is intended to be a clear sign and witness.
It was these collective currents or combination of factors that I understand influenced and moved the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to announce a Plenary Council of the Church in Australia to be held in the year 2020. The Bishops Conference has formally sought the approval from Pope Francis for this Council, official endorsement which is expected in due course.
Put simply, a Plenary Council is the highest form of communion between the various local or particular churches of a nation. The Plenary Council will be, then, not simply a meeting of bishops as individuals but a meeting of local churches and a process that calls for the participation of the entire Catholic community. It invites the whole Church, through dialogue, to discern how its communities can live the Gospel with renewed vitality amidst new questions and challenges. The Plenary Council itself will feature representation from among the laity, religious and ordained ministers, together with the bishops of Australia, as the culmination of a sustained pilgrimage in faith.
As such a Plenary Council is an expression of the ‘synodality’ of the Church, the nature of the Church as a communion of persons ‘walking together’ in faith as disciples of the Lord. The Plenary Council recognises that all the baptised have received a common vocation to be a ‘sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with God and of the unity of all humanity’ (Lumen Gentium 1) and upholds with faith that it is by our mutual listening to the Holy Spirit – who guides the Church ‘into all truth’ (John 16:13) – that we can realise our mission most deeply as a community of faith.
As set out in Canon Law, a Plenary Council has legislative power with the final decisions reserved to the bishops by nature of their episcopal ordination as successors of the Apostles. The bishops are obliged to make decisions on the basis of their careful discernment of the work of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of all the People of God, recognising that the sense of the faith of the faithful – what is known as the sensus fidelium – is a source of the Church’s life and learning as it seeks to fulfil its Gospel mission.
This means that the Plenary Council is more than a single event to be held in the year 2020 but an extended process that invites the entire Catholic community, even now, to ‘walk the path of dialogue’ and interpret what God is doing today and how God is calling the Church to live the Gospel into the future. It calls the Church to undertake a pilgrimage of listening and learning, to be a synodal and receptive church that engages in honest speaking and mutual listening to the Holy Spirit, to share insights and also hear insights shared.
We are invited by the announcement of a Plenary Council to develop together a culture of dialogue and discernment to determine how best to ensure the pastoral needs of the people of God are provided for and with regard for the universal law of the Church, ‘to decide what seems opportune for the increase of faith, the organisation of common pastoral action, and the regulation of morals and of the common ecclesiastical discipline which is to be observed, promoted and protected’.[1]
Following their listening to and discernment with the whole Church the members of the Plenary Council will convene in 2020. This will include all active bishops, vicars general, episcopal vicars, some major superiors of religious institutes, rectors of major seminaries and Catholic universities, and deans of faculties of theology and canon law. Others that can also be called to the Plenary Council include lay persons, retired bishops, other priests, and religious. The bishops will have a deliberative vote (that is, cast a ballot to determine outcomes) while other council delegates will have a consultative vote (the right to speak about the issues under discussion). The Plenary Council will then enact laws which, subject to approval of the Holy See, will bind the Catholic Church in Australia.
In calling a Plenary Council the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has recognised that the patterns of change confronting the Church and the wider community impel the Australian Catholic Church to review, analyse and discern the signs of the times and interpret them in the light of the Gospel (Gaudium et Spes 4). It has opened up a pathway for dialogue, for the exchange of faith and ideas, and to encounter the Holy Spirit and the Church in one another.
Pope Francis himself has encouraged the need to prayerfully discern together what the Spirit is saying to our Catholic community at this time, remarking “A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realises that listening ‘is more than simply hearing’. It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he ‘says to the Churches’ (Rev 2:7).”[2]
In addition to the call of Pope Francis for a synodal and discerning church, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has also raised the critical need for reform within the Church and its manner of governance, themes with which the Plenary Council will also wrestle. As a way of being Church ‘synodality’ promotes a form of governance that involves all the People of God, with governance referring to those processes for making and implementing decisions so that each of the baptised can fulfil their personal calling as well as our shared mission as a communion of faith.
Plenary Council 2020 will be the fifth plenary council in Australia’s history with the last plenary council held in 1937, some eighty years ago. There is likely to be more than one session, one for summative documents to be discussed which reflect the discernment of the Australian dioceses through dialogue, then a period of authoring pastoral decrees and legislation, and then a second session of the Council at which the Australian bishops will vote on these statutes. As such the Plenary Council will be a decision-making council and bear significant and lasting consequence for the life of Australian Catholics.
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has now established a Bishops Commission to oversee, plan and prepare for the Plenary Council which will have three phases: preparation, celebration and implementation. The Chair of the Bishops Commission for the Plenary Council is Archbishop Mark Coleridge (Archdiocese of Brisbane). Other members of the Commission include Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB (Archdiocese of Perth), Archbishop Philip Wilson (Archdiocese of Adelaide), Bishop Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFMConv (Diocese of Parramatta), Bishop Michael Kennedy (Diocese of Armidale), and Bishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay OLM (Maronite Diocese of St Maroun).
A Facilitation Team was appointed last year including Ms Lana Turvey-Collins, Fr Noel Connolly SSC, and Mr Peter Gates (Catholic Mission) together with an Executive Committee for the Plenary Council which includes people with particular expertise related to the holding of a Plenary Council. The Executive Committee members have a range of backgrounds, are diverse in their experience and will offer advice and guidance to the Facilitation Team and the Bishops Commission throughout the Plenary Council journey.
As a local Church, the Diocese of Broken Bay will enter into this national process of dialogue and discernment beginning with a year of listening in 2018, followed by discernment throughout 2019 and the sharing of proposals to the Plenary Council in 2020. This local dialogue will not only inform the national Plenary Council but also the discernment of our Bishop, parishes and local communities, our schools and agencies in the Broken Bay Diocese on how best to express the life and mission of Jesus at this critical juncture of our life as Church.
It will be an opportunity for us to name those issues that are important to our faith in charting a course for the future of the Catholic Church in Australia, and to share perspectives and practices that God can use to touch ordinary lives. Dialogue on the faith and mission of the Church will be encouraged across our Broken Bay parishes, school communities, migrant communities, and social outreach services, these constituting “the Church living in the midst of the homes of her sons and daughters” (Evangelii Gaudium 26). All people are welcome and invited to engage in this process locally. Support, guidance and resources for this process of dialogue will be provided by our Office for Evangelisation, our Catholic Schools Office and CatholicCare in collaboration with the national Facilitation Team. As intimated, means of participation, training and resources will be announced around Pentecost 2018. Still much work lies ahead.
Material Considerations
It is obviously a difficult time to be of Catholic faith and the Church has been rightly dislocated and unsettled on account of its own shameful past and yearnings of its present culture. With disappointment an experience for many Catholic people, for a variety of personal and ecclesial circumstances, cynicism toward a national ecclesial event such as a Plenary Council is understandable. Reactions point to what lies within. However, pessimism need not be our final post.
A Plenary Council might indeed call some of us to ‘hope against hope’ (Rom 4:18). It will certainly call Catholics to engage in conversation about the Church and world with the eyes of faith, with patience and forgiveness, with openness and boldness, and above all the Spirit-filled expectation that more is possible than the current experience of limitation.
The Plenary Council demands above all, then, a spiritual conversion of the whole Church as it moves through history striving to perceive how the Gospel calls to be applied to new situations. As shared in Novo Millennio Ineunte in 2001, ‘Let us have no illusions: unless we follow this spiritual path, external structures of communion will serve very little purpose. They would become mechanisms without a soul, ‘masks’ of communion rather than its means of expression and growth’ (Novo Millennio Ineunte 43)
This conversion will not be an easy task as it will ask of us – all of us – a genuine change of heart, outlook and witness or behaviour. We can intuit the difficulties in implementing synodality in the Church from our everyday experience of parish and diocesan life as well as from the difficulties that all human communities encounter in the desire to walk and change together. When authority is exercised in local communities without accountability to the people it serves, when local empowerment is sought but problems and issues are habitually bounced upwards, when clericalisation is rightly condemned but passivity among the laity endures, we are confronted with the concrete challenges of becoming the ‘church of churches’ that the Catholic Church is in principle but not always in expression.
While we have in hand a rich theological heritage and can, for instance, affirm the sensus fidelium as an active capacity by which all the faithful are able to receive and understand what God has revealed, or similarly uphold ‘co-responsibility’ of the laity as a gift to the Church’s life, our experience tells us that these theological principles are not so easily translated into pastoral practice, even at the level of the local parish. Our ability to listen to one another, to stretch our imaginations beyond our own enclave, to propose with charity and not aggravation, to resist colonisation by secular political models and to be genuinely open to what the Spirit ‘says to the churches’ (even if this is not to our own preference!) – these are the real world challenges which our communities will experience through the Plenary process.
In truth, the gap between our theology and practice is never completely overcome but it is my hope that the national Council will encourage and challenge local communities to look to the Gospel and then to their own life to discern the change that needs to be brought about in their particular context for the sake of a more effective evangelisation.
In considering the potential for a synodal Church, I note Pope Francis’ consistent call for a healthy and sound ‘decentralisation’. By itself, this term makes clear what the pontiff seeks to move our Church away from (Evangelii Gaudium 16). What Pope Francis is prompting the Church towards is subsidiarity, well described by the theologian Richard Gaillardetz as the principle that ‘the primary responsibility for the realisation of the individual Christian vocation and the fulfilment of the mission of local communities lies with those individuals and local communities themselves.’[3]
The Pope has expressed his commitment to subsidiarity in a number of ways, from retrieving the Second Vatican Council’s theology of the local church (of the diocese, shepherded by a local bishop, and not a branch office of the Holy See) and by encouraging their local initiative, his convening of synods and exercise of collegiality in discernment on the family in 2014 and 2015, and in his motu propio 月光ssr网址 which effectively shifted the responsibility of liturgical translations to episcopal conferences. Pope Francis’ regard for these national ecclesial structures, established after the Second Vatican Council, has already been evident in his frequent citation of the teaching of episcopal conferences in his magisterial documents to date (e.g. Laudato Si’), a habit which expresses the collegial way in which Pope Francis views and exercises his Petrine ministry.
In the Pope’s repeated emphasis on a ‘sound’ and ‘healthy’ decentralisation there is an awareness that increased agency and responsibility at a local level can lead to division if communities cut themselves off from the larger or universal, mistake agency as unaccountable autonomy. Hence, even in the reform of processes regarding liturgical translations there remains a role for the Apostolic See, which will review and evaluate the adaptations put forward “in order to safeguard the substantial unity of the Roman Rite”. It could be said that Pope Francis is encouraging the Church to be increasingly episcopal without being ‘Episcopal’. Our own Australian Plenary Council will in the same way call forward the voices of the faithful in response to the Gospel experienced and lived in our context but with regard for the universality of the Church, to recognise that we are a part of a universal Catholic communion and called to be ‘a church of churches’ in unity.
Ahead of our Plenary Council, I also think we learn from Pope Francis that ecclesial leadership and subsidiarity of local communities need not contradict one another. Indeed, he shows forth subsidiarity as a way or manner of exercising leadership. It is a well-recognised fact that Pope Francis has strengthened the influence of the papacy as a global authority while at the same time promoting its decentralisation. What he has sought to do, in alignment with his magisterial teaching, is to ‘initiate processes’ rather than to ‘occupy or possess spaces’, to enable initiatives without the need to control their outcome (Evangelii Gaudium 222-223; Laudato Si’ 178; Amoris Laetitia 3, 261). Pope Francis exhibits genuine trust in the speaking and guidance of the Spirit and intervenes only when the realisation of goals appears unattainable or if proposals threaten the faith and unity of the Church universal. He governs in such a way that involves the many. I think this is the gift and challenge of the Plenary Council not only for the bishops of Australia but also all those who exercise leadership or ministry within the Church, from parish pastoral councils to ministry leaders in service of others. A synodal Church is precisely a growth in the capacity of local communities and baptised persons to practice faith in fruitful dialogue with others, by listening, and as a communion reach out to humanity in Jesus Christ through the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.
This shift in culture should be the underlying, or even better the overriding, goal for the Plenary Council. Again, we know through experience that while articulating sound structures and processes within the life of the Church is paramount, these cannot alone secure the health and vitality of Catholic communities. As Pope Francis has noted, ‘even good structures are only helpful when there is a life constantly driving, sustaining and assessing them. Without new life and an authentic evangelical spirit, without the Church’s “fidelity to her own calling”, any new structure will soon prove ineffective’ (Evangelii Gaudium 26). It is with this hope of new life and a reformed culture that we enter into a new year and take steps toward a Plenary Council, all so that we together might better live the life and mission of Jesus in contemporary Australian society now and for generations to come.
References:
[1]Code of Canon Law, c.445.
[2] Address of His Holiness Pope Francis Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, 17 October, 2015. The full text is available online at: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ speeches/2015/october/documents/papa-francesco_20151017_50-anniversario-sinodo.html.
[3] Richard R. Gaillardetz, An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Renewal of Catholicism (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015), 126.
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Tagged Australia, Catholic, Church, ecclesiology, plenary2020, Pope Francis, synodality, Vatican II
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In the previous session, we acknowledged those factors impacting upon parish life today – a new and unchartered context for faith, the presumptions of our pastoral practices and questions of fruitfulness that invite change, as well as the biblical and magisterial foundations for reclaiming discipleship as our central commission.
It is clear that the missionary conversion of our parishes to which we have been speaking bears implications for the ministry of the ordained, in particular the priesthood which is that Order most commonly lived within the parish and which remains the most familiar to the ordinary Catholic Christian. There is no need to rehearse at great length the way in which ordained ministry is situated within the context of the Church. Suffice to say that the ‘communion ecclesiology’ of the Second Vatican Council recovered baptism as the primal sacrament of Christian life and brought about a renewed appreciation of the Church as an icon of the Trinity, a relationship that promotes a mutuality of exchange between believers in their various charisms, vocations and office as an expression of the unity-in-diversity of God’s own life. It is by our baptism into this Triune life that we are brought into communion not only with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit but also into communion with our fellow believers and the worldwide community of the faithful, into communion with those who have gone before in faith, and with the generations of the faithful yet to come.
In regrounding the life of the Church, including the ordained, in shared baptismal faith, the Council also promoted the mission of the Church as the responsibility of all, a task to which each of the baptised is commissioned, and I quote from Lumen Gentium, ‘by the Lord himself’. The source of apostolic courage for this project as Christians is our common regeneration and anointing by the Holy Spirit, our consecration into a spiritual house and into the one priesthood of Christ, in its priestly, prophetic and royal dimensions.[1]
What, then, of the unique charism of the ordained set within this baptised and missionary people? It is first important to acknowledge that the understanding and practice of ordained ministry has undergone significant development and refinement – from the apostolic ministry found in the New Testament, through the age of the Church Fathers, the impact of the medieval theology of order (the effects of the eleventh and twelfth century Gregorian Reforms e.g. shift from patristic emphasis in Holy Order on God’s action upon the believer to its definition in terms of the sacred character imparted), and the baroque theology which followed the Reformation, to the insights of the Catholic revival (cf. John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement), leading to the eventual 一元机场网址ssr achieved at Vatican II.
It is enough to trace the various emphases that have shaped the theology and practice of the ordained ministry through this history to appreciate that, in speaking of the ordained vocation, ‘God-given’ is not the same thing as ‘set in stone’. There are a variety of ways in which the priestly life can and has been lived. To borrow from the thought of Fr Aidan Nichols, the ‘pattern’ of the presbyterate has in fact a variety of key elements that open themselves to the evangelisation and disciple-making we have discussed.[2] Within this ‘pattern’ of priestly life, developed and clarified over centuries, we find at least nine elements, each of which informs the other:
Evangelising those who do not believe
Teaching sound doctrine in faith and morals to those who do
Forming others to be apostolic
These constitute dimensions of the prophetic office, the exercise of teaching that leads the faithful to God in the Spirit and truth.
Celebrating sacraments and other rites of the Church
By the celebration of Penance and Eucharist in particular bringing the Paschal Mystery to bear on the lives of the faithful (to die to sin and live with Christ)
In the Mass, acting as intercessor for the Church and for all creation
These are aspects of the priestly office, the cultic or liturgical work of the presbyter.
In union with the bishop to build up, as pastor, the communion of the Church, gathering the faithful and opening them to the fullness of the Church’s life
Visiting, and so counselling and encouraging, individual members of the Church community, especially the sick and the poor
Overseeing the community’s wider attempt to meet the needs of its members, and of the wider realm in which their lives are set
Last but not least the royal dimension of the presbyter, his pastoral government of the local community of faith.
We see here in these prophetic, priestly and pastoral offices distinct elements that nevertheless inform one another in a unity. For example, the pastoral government that the priest exercises over the whole community – a form of rule that can never be exercised by the non-ordained in the sense of which a cleric does – supplies his teaching mandate with its proper form or modality, while his teaching is to be undertaken in such a way that the people committed to his charge (under his pastoral government) live ever more deeply in communion with the Church, with one another and with holiness in the wider communities and contexts in which their lives are set.
Needless to say, the sacramental and liturgical assignment of the priest informs all other aspects. As Cardinal Henri de Lubac observed, the gift of the Eucharist in the hands of the priest is not merely the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ but, ultimately, the conversion of God’s people by its reception.[3] Here we see the connection between the liturgical presidency of the priest and the responsibility to form others for the apostolic life, enabling the faithful to live Eucharistic lives in self-donation to others.
We see in this broad outline the ecclesial nature of ordained ministry, in service of the Church’s communion and its mission. In the language of the Letter to the Hebrews, the priest is in Christ a ‘pioneer and perfecter of faith’, shepherd of the faithful and is to equip the saints, particularly by his teaching, for building up the body of Christ in the midst of the world (Heb. 12:2; 13:20; Eph. 4:11).
Key Opportunities
I would like to focus in particular on how the priest’s teaching office and his responsibility for pastoral government can best be lived today in order to serve the growth of discipleship in our parishes and evangelisation beyond the pews (sets one and three of that tripartite pattern of priestly life).
Evangelising Those Who Do Not Believe
It is sufficient to note that by ordination the priest does not cease to have a commitment to the evangelisation of those who are not gathered in Christ. The priest, as for the bishop and deacon, is included in the orientation of the entire Church toward mission in the world and so is called to reach out to not only those who might present with faith or form part of the existing parish but all those in their neighbourhood who do not yet know their home is with us. When priestly ministry becomes disconnected from the real experience of meeting and ‘breaking bread’ with the poor in spirit and circumstance – those without faith, those who those are existentially homeless and even those who oppose – then the call and instruction of the laity to reach beyond their boundaries of the parochial and the familiar can lack transparency and relevance. Acting in Christ the Head, the priest is called to be a pioneer in finding the lost, shepherding even those who are not yet part of the flock, and bearing his own dedicated witness to Christ in the unvarnished circumstances of people’s lives and dilemmas. We know that the future of our Church is always connected to those who are not yet believers. This calls the labour of the priest to extend to the harvest field, well beyond the confines of the ecclesiastical ‘barn’.
In teaching sound doctrine for the ongoing conversion of the faithful, the priesthood demands not only disciplined training in the content of faith, but also an acute recognition that teaching, to be effective, implies that there is in fact some learning taking place. In the terse words of Richard Gaillardetz, a mere “commitment to the epistemic objectivity of Church doctrines” does not mean subjective appropriation has followed.[4] In other words, much like the sacraments, teaching is not magic, a blunt tool applied without regard for the disposition of those who are being taught. When there is little or no understanding of the faith, we are challenged to do more than just say the same thing a little louder.
As the lives of laity can change at a pace (their lifestyles, social and material circumstances), the act of teaching on the part of the priest will also mean receiving into one’s own faith and knowledge that insight of ordinary believers as they attempt to apply doctrine or practice belief in the concrete conditions of their life. In short, I would suggest that the priest teaches best by drawing not only from doctrine, as an abiding expression of faith, but also by attending to and learning from the narratives and daily practices of Christian men, women and families, which supplies genuine theological insight for the art of teaching a perennial faith in new times. The Church is not faithful to its apostolic roots merely by presenting doctrinal statements, as if there the matter rests. Effective teaching leads people to a Jesus-shaped life by connecting the meaning of doctrine, which is the Gospel, with the hopes and trials of the learner. The primary challenge for the homily, as a primary form of teaching, is not poor oratory or exegesis but the need to bring the insight of Scripture and tradition into conversation with the deepest experiences of daily life, especially for post-modern people who are intimately aware of the pain of their own past but struggling towards a coherent future. Expressed in Evangelii Gaudium as the need for synthesis, not detached ideas, this form of inculturated teaching and preaching is the work which our era demands of us and is the path which the Church has followed for twenty centuries.[5]
Forming Others to Be Apostolic
Of course, even in the case of sound and effective preaching, the priest cannot be expected to carry the responsibility for the missionary conversion of our parishes alone. As we have acknowledged, it is not obvious in our day that the hearts of laity are burning with the fire of Jesus’ mission in the Church and the world, as evidenced by our gentle decline and the culture of maintenance or immobility we can sometimes encounter in our parishes.
How can we best move people beyond a closed culture towards a culture of apostolicity, from a routine of comfort to the boldness of mission? As leaders it first demands a shift in our own outlook and approach, from engaging our people to build up the Church to becoming a Church that builds up people. When we routinely engage people to build up the Church, the focus inevitably falls on our structures, maintenance and functionalism. For example, a parish calls people forward to maintain its own life, its ministries, functions and tasks for which there is never enough human labour. We engage people, in other words, to ‘fill the gaps’ and out of a mindset of deficiency, with the best of our energy, dedication and resources flowing into the upkeep of our established groups, ministries and schedules. However, our parishes are not called to be factories, to keep the cogs turning over at any cost. We cannot confuse our means with our end which is the abundant spiritual life and personal change of our people. As it has been expressed, ‘If you build the Church, you rarely get disciples. If you make disciples, you always get the Church.’ Parishes begin to change their culture towards mission when all forms of its preaching shift from a focus on what it wants from people to what it wants for them.
In experience, our tendency to focus on deficiency and ecclesial need rather than vocation and personal calling can stymie our work, including in the raising up of young leaders. When youth leadership is recognised as the call to equip young people to lead within their life, in the context of their personal and professional relationships, this opportunity takes on a different hue that goes well beyond our parish need for more ministers. The model of a youth leader for a parish group on a Sunday night is one reality, the model of young Christian leaders in our culture is quite another.
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In turning to the pastoral governance of the priest as whole – including building up the communion of the Church and overseeing the parish’s attempts to meet the needs of its members – there are practical steps that can be taken to lead parish renewal in a focused and also a sustainable way. To bring these practices and principles to real life, I will engage the parish of Saint Benedict in Halifax, Canada, as an example of best practice.
Exemplified by this example of Saint Benedict Parish, are four practical steps that we can take forwards to nourish a culture of discipleship and evangelisation in our own parishes, steps that are scalable for communities of different circumstance. Even if a community is not prepared to undertake such a process as a whole, it can be taken up by a parish ministry group, movement or association seeking direction and to focus its outreach. The four steps include:
Vision – Why
Priorities – What
Strategies – How
Actions – Who, When and So What?
As we have said, a first point of renewal for growing parishes is to clarify vision, the why or purpose of community life. We have seen the vision cast by Saint Benedict Parish, the image of a preferred future which the parish seeks to pursue at every turn: “Saint Benedict Parish is a healthy and growing faith community that brings people to Christ, forms disciples, and sends them out to transform the world. Our members commit to worship, to grow, to serve, to connect and to give”. Again, this ecclesiological vision helpfully combines welcome with expectation, as Jesus did in John’s Gospel when he expects the vine to bear fruit, and even prunes and expects more from those vines already producing. In working with parishes, some helpful prompts to prayerfully discern and form community vision can include the following questions:
What spiritual fruit do we want to see in our people?
What kind of disciples do we want our parish to make?
Ideally, the parish vision will focus in some way or another on discipleship. It will in some way cast a vision that centres itself on the spiritual change of its members.
Priorities, Strategies and Actions
Having established a parish vision, a parish can then identify the priority areas where it intends to live that vision most immediately within a given time frame, say three to five years. Returning to the ‘Game Plan’ of Saint Benedict Parish, there were five priorities discerned by the community as areas for focus. The parish proceeded to identify those core systems of a church, which like the systems of a body, are essential to the growth of the ecclesial body.
Saint Benedict Parish arrived at the five priority areas of evangelisation, community, ministry, discipleship and worship. It was these priorities that then informed the development of the ‘Game Plan’. Special interest groups such as youth or family are noticeably absent from this list of priorities, as it is trusted that if the core systems of the parish are renewed, this rising tide in the parish will float all boats.
For the ministry in the priest in particular, I am mindful that when a community has a vision but no particular priority areas in which to achieve it, it will tend to simply ‘add on’ new programs and activities to an already busy routine hoping this will affect a difference. Yet we know, even implicitly, that addition is not synonymous with increase; that ‘more’ is not always tantamount to ‘better’. We are learning on a national, diocesan and parish level that a ‘spaghetti’ approach to Church life, over-programmed with a splattering of disconnected activity, tends to encourage silos rather than unity or strength of mission. This is because events, programs and groups compete for space on the common calendar, rivalling one another for the same pool of finite resources, increasingly busy people and limited attention. If we become content with the unrolling of copious activity, without heed of the fruit these initiatives bear or otherwise, we in fact succumb to the “spiritual worldliness”, or busyness for its own sake, of which Pope Francis warns.[6]
Given that all parishes have limited resources – time, energy and personnel – there is a need for the priest to discern those priority areas which will best serve its local mission for discipleship, naming what gets done first and what is done later. Prioritising ensures the best use of constrained resources, improves the speed of decision-making as we have something to assess any new initiatives against, it can bring order to the chaos of a ‘spaghetti’ approach when there is a lot of activity but it is disconnected or not relating to a bigger vision, and reduces parish stress.
We know from experience, even if it is not always named, that no one parish can ‘do it all’ and so we must choose the ssr免费订阅地址 things to do even over good things to do, recognising that whenever you set some priorities in a parish some people will be disappointed with our choices. We need to resist the temptation to try and meet every possible need as this will not only be impossible and impractical, or lead to burn out for your own ministry, parish pastoral council or parish staff, but responding to particular ‘needs’ does not necessarily serve the greater vision of the parish, especially when the loudest voices tend to dominate and are not necessarily the most important.
How can we best determine our own parish priorities in prayer and reflection? We can examine the current life of the parish. Our local demographics and observations can reveal urgent and significant areas that call for our response as a parish. We have tools for this self-understanding including the National Church Life Surveys conducted by many Australian dioceses. We can also consult our people for these priorities, though it is worth noting from experience that consultation processes typically surface similar and predictable priorities including youth, family life, adult faith formation, and outreach. This approach can help grow engagement within the community though it demands time. Alternatively, like Saint Benedict Parish we can examine core systems of a healthy church, systems which like those of the body contribute to the working of the whole.
Once parish priorities are identified, the parish can then conduct a simple SWOT analysis – identifying its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in each area of priority. This assists a parish identify its areas of strategic action. We can narrow these strengths and limitations that call for a response to a limited and workable number, by asking questions such as:
What strength in this area can your parish most easily build upon?
What weakness in this area would be the easiest one to fix?
What is the greatest opportunity in this area we could seize upon with the least amount of time and resources?
What is the most immediate or greatest threat we need to address, and how?
The result is that a parish has a manageable number of focus areas to address, enabling it to move forwards in areas of priority. Finally, having established a vision, prayerfully discerned key areas of priority, and identified specific strategies through a look at its strengths and weaknesses, we can then select appropriate actions to bring our strategies to real life.
Awakening the Priestly Charism
This form of intentional planning in priestly governance has been shown to be essential to growth and cultural change in a parish, and requires dedication, the holding of nerve and apostolic courage. However, I believe it is no more demanding than the labour of maintenance which, to draw from the imagery of the Cappadocian Fathers, can resemble toiling up sand dunes with much movement but very little progress. The often disheartening alternative in the parish is to ask ‘What should we do next?’ without the clarity and motivation of a coherent purpose or vision for ourselves in ministry and for the people in our care.
In this context, it is important to say that casting vision and discerning strategies for the growth of discipleship are not meant to be undertaken alone. Christian governance in its deepest sense does not imply leading alone but leading out of a team, in relationship to others. Indeed, the unique charism of the priest, who acts in Christ the Head, is to discern those of the laity with whom the baptismal, Eucharistic and missionary unity of the parish can best be advanced.
What is more, the flourishing of the laity and their involvement in the pastoral plan or initiatives of evangelisation and mission is critical to 月光ssr网址. When discipleship and conversion are unleashed in Christian community through vision, priorities, and strategies that support cultural change, this rich spiritual life will organically evoke or call forward the governance of the priest. Such flourishing of the People of God will draw out the fullness of teaching, sanctifying and governing from the ordained. When community faith and charisms abound, it demands the office of pastoral government, expressed in the priest’s cooperation with laity in mission to the world, listening to and recognition of lay expertise, awakening and deepening the priest’s call to co-responsibility, to entrust to and invite initiative of the lay faithful, and for the priest to explore and discern with them lay vocations and apostolates.[7]
In the absence of active discipleship in the parish, little governance needs in fact to be exercised by the priest. The parish routine does not invite laity to discern and actively live their call and so the priesthood itself does not flourish as God intends it to. In contrast, Lumen Gentium announces the type of pastoral governance that the Church wills for its priests,
It is not only through the sacraments and the ministries of the Church that the Holy Spirit sanctifies and leads the people of God and enriches it with virtues, but, “allotting his gifts to everyone according as He wills,” He distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank . . . Those who have charge over the Church should judge the genuineness and orderly use of these gifts and it is especially their office not indeed to extinguish the Spirit but to test all things and hold fast to that which is good.[8]
We have here the legacy of Congar and the school of ressourcement at the Council, the firm insistence that the Spirit is not monopolised by hierarchical office as though it were a kind of reservoir dispensing gifts from above. The laity too are subjects of the Spirit’s action as persons of baptismal faith and that this calls forward the unique pastoral government of the priest to order those gifts toward mission. As affirmed at that same Council:
While testing the spirits to discover if they be of God, they [the presbyters] must discover with faith, recognise with joy, and foster diligently, the many and varied charismatic gifts of the laity, whether these be of a humble or more exalted kind . . . Priests should confidently entrust to the laity duties in the service of the Church, giving them freedom and opportunity for activity and even inviting them, when opportunity offers, to undertake projects on their own initiative.[9]
In total, this sets forth a vision of the Church in which the priest exercises his ministry in service of the gifts and charisms of the laity, given for God’s mission in the world, and through this exercise of governance fulfils the pastoral dimension of his office. It is worth sharing the reflection of Fr Michael Fones OP, cited by Sherry Weddell, on this often untapped potential of the priesthood,
I often wonder what it would look like if a pastor intentionally focused on this aspect of his priesthood; how would parishioners respond if they were challenged to consciously discern their gifts and call (and given help to do so), and then intentionally supported by the parish in living that call? I also wonder if a whole set of young men aren’t being drawn to the priesthood because their call is most closely associated with the royal (or governing) aspect of a priest’s office. I know priests whose priesthood is most deeply felt when they’re celebrating the sacraments, and others for whom teaching and preaching are the cornerstone of their lives. Might there not be men who would respond to an invitation from Christ to be a priest if they saw the royal function expressed more clearly and powerfully?ssr购买网址
The priest exercises leadership in parish evangelisation by forming and ruling the priestly people through his discernment and empowering of God’s gratuitous gifts, given to the whole Church for the sake of God’s mission.
Conclusion
Whether proclaiming and teaching the Word of God, sanctifying through the sacraments and acts of worship, or building up the Church and calling out the gifts of the laity through his pastoral governance, the priest is a privileged presence of Christ’s life and mission. The riches of the priesthood are needed now more than ever, to call and awaken the charisms and gifts of the faithful through a teaching office in tune to the lived experience of those who learn, through a sanctifying office that mediates grace, a grace that calls to be received and bear real fruit among active disciples, and through a royal office or pastoral government that marshals those gifts and charisms of disciples to bear witness to Christ in the Church and the world. Divinely ordained and living in history, graced and building upon the gifts of nature, God-given and yet not set in stone, the priesthood, as much as the episcopacy and diaconate, will flourish to the extent it is expressed in faithful and effective living. Thank you for your dedication to Christ’s priesthood and mission here in the Archdiocese and in a wider world that cries out for God.
References:
[1] 一元机场网址ssr 10, 31-33.
[2] Aidan Nichols, Holy Order: Apostolic Priesthood from the New Testament to the Second Vatican Council (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1990), 142-143.
[3] Cf. Henri de Lubac, 酸酸乳ssr网址, translated by Michael Mason (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999). There are echoes of de Lubac’s thought in St John Paul II’s 2003 encyclical, Ecclesia deEucharistia.
[4] Richard Gaillardetz, “Power and Authority in the Church: Emerging Issues”, A Church with Open Doors (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015): 93-94.
It was a great pleasure and privilege to speak at the recent clergy conference of the Archdiocese of Sydney, held at the Liverpool Catholic Club on 25 October, 2017. Thank you to Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP, Bishop Randazzo, Bishop Umbers, Fr Paul Monkerud and Fr Kelvin Lovegrove for the generous invitation to share a few words on the nature of the ‘new evangelisation’ and ordained ministry within a changed landscape of faith.
A ‘Critical Moment’
Amidst the unfussy pews of the parishes we know and love the grace of Christ continues to move and mould hearts to his own. The local parish, even in its ordinariness, remains a privileged location of God’s transforming grace in the world.
It is also a perennial insight of our Catholic tradition that we cannot grow as persons by holding the door closed against reality. This is also true of the parish.
In this respect I’d like to begin with a few observations on the current situation of the Australian parish before suggesting implications for our pastoral practice as communities of faith and, following, to consider the implications for the ministry of the ordained.
Researchers have described the Catholic parish as having reached a ‘critical moment’ in the life of the Australian Church (and here I am indebted to the work of the Pastoral Research Office).[1]
We know that of our 5.4 million Catholics in Australia only 662,000 or 12.2 per cent join us for Eucharist on any given weekend.[2] Almost a third of these Mass attenders (some 220,000) are aged between 60 and 74 years of age while of all Catholics aged between 20 and 34 in Australia, only 5-6% attend.[3] So what we are seeing is an ageing congregation in our pews with fewer among younger generations to replace them as we move into the future. Interestingly, Mass attendance peaks in Australia at around the age of 75, proving the rule that ‘the closer you get to God, the closer you get to God’!
Migrants, of course, account for over 40% of our Mass attenders.[4] We are indebted to and sustained by the participation of diverse ethnic communities. However, we also know that second generation Australians, that is, the children of Catholic migrants, are far less likely to practice than their parents. In total, some 13,000 Catholics stop attending Mass each year, and across all age groups more than 20,000 Australians every year are ceasing to identify themselves as Catholic at all (a dis-identification of some 100,000 Catholics over the last five years).[5]
The prospect that this situation raises in our lifetime is that of ongoing Catholic institutions – including schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, nursing homes and aged care facilities – but fewer parishes where the worship of God enjoins a community of believers.[6] The related concern is that the Church in Australia will be reduced to a form of non-government organisation, a provider of services – including healthcare and education – but whose religious dimension is associated more strongly with their historical origins rather than their existing or continuing spirit.
It becomes clear that we need our Catholic parishes to grow because they are integral and indispensable to our spiritual identity as a Church. Together with the family, the local parish remains a primary venue where faith is given shape and social support, fostered into discipleship and then enters the world. In all these ways, the future of the Australian Church relies on the vitality of the Catholic parish. Indeed, if we did not have parishes we would have to create them – local communities gathered around the Word and Eucharist.
A New Landscape for Faith
As the mainstay of ecclesial life, the parish is, however, undergoing a process of undeniable change and has become an increasingly complex reality on account of a number of factors. Parishes are becoming geographically larger and yet numerically smaller with the practice of amalgamation and diminishing attendance. We experience growing multicultural diversity and new immigration in our pews and on the altar in our active clergy; we are impacted by a shortage and ageing of priests as we inevitably baptise more than we ordain; and we see the beginnings of more regional planning in the light of our resources and a desire for more creative ways of organising ourselves as Church.
On the level of faith, we know as well that we can no longer rely on a straightforward ‘conveyer belt’ which was presumed to take Catholics from the cradle to the grave in faith, the assumption that a Catholic baptism, having Catholic parents, mere attendance at a Catholic school or Catholic university, for example, would secure a lifetime of committed discipleship. Indeed in our pews, schools and agencies there is no ‘beige Catholicism’ or ‘cookie cutter Catholic’. Our experience tells us that we have in our communities people at various stages of faith, with varying relationships to the person and the message of the Gospel. Discipleship is never a given.
Our parishes are populated with the deeply committed, those who hold a vague or uncertain faith, those who affiliate out of family custom rather than conviction, and some engage with our Church for reasons other than religious motives (for the purpose of school enrolment for instance). As well our sharing of the same pews does not mean we believe the same things (for example, many older Catholics have stopped believing that pre-marital sex is always wrong, perhaps because many of their children are now cohabiting with their partners).[7]
Even among those most committed each Sunday there will be people at various stages of faith commitment, as Sherry Weddell notes in her decades’ long experience of discernment with laity and clergy. People find themselves passing through various thresholds of faith, in and out at times:
Intentional discipleship (‘dropping their nets’ with a conscious commitment to follow Christ in the midst of the Church).[8]
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The Problematic
The times have changed definitively. Some would say these times are not for us. However, and this is the pinch, while the surrounding culture and conditions of faith has changed our pastoral practice has remained much the same. I think it is for this reason that our efforts, our tireless and well-intended efforts, are not bearing the fruit of intentional and missionary discipleship we so desperately want to see. We are in a new landscape for faith but are still reading off the same maps. It is no wonder that people are lost along the way.
Take one recent example, the increased number of Australians now identifying as ‘no religion’. For the first time in our history we have more ‘nones’ than Catholics in our nation, with ‘nones’ now accounting for 30.1% of the population while 22.6% of Australians self-identify as Catholic. There might have been once a hope that those who were baptised and guided to the faith in youth and who then drifted away might eventually return to the Church at a later age, perhaps when they had children of their own. This might have been the story for some baby boomers who, once emancipated from their parents, became a ‘seeker’ and explored other options, before coming home to the Catholic fold or settling in a new church. However, today the figures are not showing that kind of return to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Disaffiliation is here to stay.
While scandal and poor experiences of Church and parish can be a part of this story, realistically some have shed the Catholic ‘brand’ as they have come to the plain and simple conclusion that their lives simply no longer reflect the religion they inherited. The result is many today feel comfortable in saying, ‘To be honest, I don’t belong anymore’.
In fact, a very basic analysis looking at ‘net’ changes between Censuses showed that between 2011 and 2016 every 5-year age group (from the age of 10 onwards) saw a net decrease of people identifying as Catholic, which was not the case in the five years prior. Catholics in almost all age groups are ceasing to nominate as such.
This shift challenges our parishes for, historically and habitually, our parish outreach programs are geared towards Mass attending Catholics or those still identifying as Catholic even if they are not practicing. We are not so comfortable reaching the ‘nones’ or secular people who do not attend or identify with us whatsoever. These ‘nones’ are not saying, ‘If only you had a better version of Church I would go to it’. They are not interested in ‘Church’ at all so our new coffee and contemporary Church music is not what they are looking for. It would be akin to trying to sell an upgraded car to someone who is not in the market for one. Evangelisation in this new time calls us to adjust our eyes and lengthen our arms to reach increasingly secular people where our relationships with them (rather than religious upgrades) will take priority.
Opportunities for Parish Renewal
Looking forwards and taking into account the complexity and variety of this new situation, I would suggest three principles or areas for consideration in the effort to renew and strengthen the evangelising mission of the local parish.
These three areas of focus include the need to take more seriously pre-evangelisation (what the Congregation for Clergy, describes as ‘Christian witness, dialogue and presence’ prior to proclamation), the recovery of discipleship as the fundamental basis of parish life and mission, and the setting of parish vision as essential to stimulating growth and motivating change.
Pre-evangelisation
An accessible way to underscore the critical importance of ‘pre-evangelisation’ (our witness, dialogue and presence in charity prior to any explicit proclamation of the Gospel) is to contrast it with a word and activity that we are more comfortable or familiar with as Catholics and that is ‘catechesis’. The word ‘catechesis’ means ‘to sound out’. It has been compared to standing at the entrance of a cave, and speaking out and hearing a voice coming back. When we catechise we are speaking into people’s lives, we are giving them faith and knowledge, and what we seek is for that faith and knowledge to resound back, echo back upon its reception. However, the only way we can hear an echo is if there is a ‘cave’, if there is a space to speak into. If we were to run out and shout at a brick wall we are not going to hear an echo as there is no space to absorb and reverberate what is being shared. This is why pre-evangelisation matters and must precede catechesis because there has to be an open space to speak into if we are going to hear faith resound back from one receiving the Gospel into their life.
In past attempts at evangelisation, we have not always been sufficiently attentive to where people are at in their lives and sought to convey the Gospel to them almost as a blunt tool without an appreciation of whom we are speaking, their lived situations and immediate concerns. These situations can be the ‘on ramp’ to the evangelisation, faith and conversion we want to see.
It could be added that past attempts at evangelisation have so often confused people’s indifference with ignorance. People’s hearts may not be engaged, they may be indifferent or hold little trust in the Church or ourselves as Christians, entertain little space or desire for dialogue, and yet we can seek to drown them in information in the hope that this might effect personal change. In short, we have sought to instruct the indifferent, catechise the unconcerned, and can, as Evangelii Gaudium notes, fall into the trap of providing answers to questions that nobody is asking (EG 155).
While Pope Francis represents neither the first nor the last word in the Church’s grappling with mission, we cannot miss the moment. His clear emphasis on accompaniment as fundamental to change of life and conversion is right for our times. Reaching the ‘nones’ and even the ‘nominals’ invites such relationship, marked by tenderness, especially at a time when established institutions, above all the Church, are subject to a cultural distrust that deafens the wider community to our claims. In Evangelii Gaudium the Holy Father clarifies, “Genuine spiritual accompaniment always begins and flourishes in the context of service to the mission of evangelisation”[9]. “Spiritual accompaniment must lead others ever closer to God . . . to accompany them would be counterproductive if it became a sort of therapy supporting their self-absorption and ceased to be a pilgrimage with Christ to the Father”.[10] In short, we are called not to be chaplains of secular humanism but to prepare and equip our people for the kind of courage in faith demonstrated by St Paul in the Acts of the Apostles (Chapter 17:16-34).
Desiring the good of the other and holding a deep concern for them (“he was distressed that the city was full of idols”). Without that desire not much is possible.
He identifies shared values (“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way”)
In seeking to share the Gospel, he uses evidence and examples from the audience’s perspective (“As even some of your poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring. Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold’)
He avoids using ‘insider’ language so as not to create stumbling blocks too early in the relationship (e.g. he does not yet use the name of Jesus though he will go on to do so).
He begins to inspire curiosity, rather than providing pat answers (“When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’”)
Ultimately some became believers, “including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them”.
Our own age also suggests a shift from thinking about evangelisation in terms of programs and showcase events to ssr免费订阅地址 that accompany people to personal and spiritual change. This brings us to a second and related opportunity – the recovery of discipleship as the primary purpose of our parishes.
Reclaiming Discipleship
A focus on discipleship reclaims the Great Commission of Matthew’s Gospel as the foundational task of the church Catholic and of the parish as its local manifestation: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19). As it has been pointed out, our Catholic Church has certainly learnt to “go” and can claim a presence at all corners of the earth. We “baptise” and confirm relentlessly. We “teach” and catechise great numbers in our Australian schools and sacramental programs. However, our ability as Church to “make disciples” remains in question, as raised by the pastoral realities for the Australian Church we have explored.酸酸乳ssr网站
We must acknowledge that if we were to measure how many of those hundreds who receive the sacraments in our local parish each year, pass through our sacramental life in initiation or from week to week, and emerge on the other side as ‘missionary disciples’, we would have to admit that there is much less fruit than we might hope to see. Our pastoral experience tells us that we have in our communities no lack of those who have been ‘sacramentalised’ but not yet evangelised, those who are merely ‘done’ but not yet discipled.
I would suggest that one of the causes of our dilemma as Church is that we have tended to lift the sacraments, and indeed much else that the Church does, out of their proper context which is precisely discipleship, a living and fruitful faith. A pastoral approach that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’ neglects our duty to awaken in each person that active and personal faith, that fertile soil, in which the grace of the sacraments can actually take root and bear fruit. To make the point,
baptisms, confessions, weddings, funerals, daily devotions, anointing, and adoration. It’s all good stuff, it’s how some Catholics grow spiritually. For others, it’s what they do instead of grow . . . For certain, the sacraments give us grace to put us in right relationship to God and his life in our soul, nourishing and strengthening us for our discipleship walk. But they’re not mean to replace it.[12]
This is not to discount the centrality of the sacraments or to deny the place that devotions have in the Catholic life. But it is to say that people can be ‘sacramentalised’ without being evangelised, that it is entirely possible to undertake a routine of religious custom and practice without a personal and responsive relationship to Jesus Christ.
In short, we cannot look at the sacraments or our pastoral practices in isolation from discipleship. Unless people come to faith, come to relationship with God, unless people become disciples, the likelihood that the sacraments will bear the fruit they are intended to bear is severely diminished. As the saying goes, gifts are given but ssr购买网址.
To substantiate this view in tradition, Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium affirms that the sacraments presume a living faith amidst its people.[13] The Catechism of the Catholic Church which followed tells us explicitly, “The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church: it must be preceded by evangelisation, faith, and conversion”.[14] As well, both the Council and the Catechism affirm the Eucharist as “the source and summit of 酸酸乳ssr网站“.ssr免费订阅地址 When there is no Christian life, no trace or intention of Christian living, then the Eucharist can be neither source nor summit of anything (it remains so in fact but not in effect). Outside of the context of discipleship, the Eucharist can be reduced to an object of piety or mere consumption rather than a relationship that invites a Jesus-shaped life. We could say that the mission of the Church is not sacraments but disciples which the sacraments nourish.
Passive reception of a sacrament is not enough as the Catechism names without apology: “To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition”.[16] In other words, sacraments are not magic. The Church has consistently taught that a positive disposition is critical to the reception of grace. As St Augustine avers, God ‘did not will to save us without us’. Living faith is essential if the grace of the sacraments is not to be bound – merely valid but tied – within the life of the one who receives.
At the level of the parish, this gap between our presumptions (our unspoken ‘sacramentalism’ that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’) and the active faith and discipleship to which all the baptised are called is palpable. Time and again how often have we heard parents, good and faithful parents, lament that their grown children are now disconnected from the Church, that they are no longer going to Mass, and even now hold no faith at all. Yet they did all they were supposed to do, received all their sacraments, and their children served as altar servers and so on. There can also be a latent notion, and I think a false hope, that the grace of the sacraments might ‘kick in’ many years later, like a time release capsule, but there is very little evidence that this is true. Again, hear the laments of old generations of Catholics who did all they thought they had to do, received all the sacraments, were never encouraged to ask questions and carried out the practice of the Catholic religion but lament never experiencing a life-giving or transforming faith. Where is the fruit?
As an aside, we have traditionally been more focused on issues of validity – and validity of the minister’s celebration of the sacrament, tied up with the controversies of the Donatists and Reformation – rather than its fruitfulness. This is despite the biblical mandate of John 15:6 and magisterial teaching such as that of St John Paul II who remarked, and I quote, “Bearing fruit is an essential demand of life in Christ and life in the Church. The person who does not bear fruit does not remain in communion: ‘Each branch of mine that bears no fruit, he (my Father) takes away”. Without fruit, without active discipleship, there is no communion, only a crowd.[17]
To ground our discussion in practice, what would it look like if the commission to make disciples informed our sacramental preparation, moving away from what is generally an age-based reward system for many who will never darken the doors of our parishes again? Certainly we must commit to meeting people ‘where they are’ but we also have to love them enough not to leave them there. Pastoral care and accompaniment are not opposed to personal challenge and the expectation of spiritual growth. Pastoral care and accompaniment are fulfilled by the change of life that discipleship entails.
For the priest, this involves helping people understand what holiness requires as a teacher and helping them to realise this teaching in practice as a pastor. As such our first response to the mixed assembly of people who come forwards for the sacraments of initiation should never be a ‘no’ but at times the proper response in good faith could well be a ‘not yet’. ‘No’ should not be our first response but time may be needed to reflect on what a ‘yes’ means and to allow people to be prepared not simply for one sacrament or one liturgy but for a lifetime of discipleship.
As an attempt to set discipleship at the heart of my home parish of St Bernadette’s Parish, Castle Hill, we introduced four weeks of parental preparation for entry into the sacramental program (the parish celebrated the sacraments of Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist all in the one nine month period). This formation was focused not on children but on parents who were asked to attend four 2 hour sessions – on God and us, God and his Church, God and the sacraments, and living God’s way. Each session was offered three times a week to accommodate parents’ commitments, and completion of all four sessions was a requirement of entry into the sacramental program and preparation for the year.
Recall in respect of the sacraments that the Great Commission calls us to ‘go make disciples’ and then baptise and teach. In many ways, we are running our attempts at evangelisation in reverse order to the ancient Church. In the ancient Church, neophytes were evangelised, catechised, initiated and then given access to the sacred mysteries, namely the liturgy of the Eucharist. Today neophytes are introduced to the liturgical rites, initiated, and then those who remain in the pews may be lucky enough to be catechised, and perhaps a handful might come to be evangelised.
To grow our parishes we must reclaim discipleship as the ‘new norm’ and a starting point for evangelisation. We must recognise that the measure of parish vitality is not the number of ‘bums on seats’ but a matter of impact, the extent of personal and spiritual change the Spirit brings about through the environment and processes we install to support an encounter with Christ. To underscore our goal is discipleship and not mere scale, the Church was never more ‘catholic’ than in the Upper Room at Pentecost when all of its members could fit inside a tiny room. ‘Good church’ does not necessarily mean a large church, and faithfulness and fruitfulness is not measured in the size of a crowd. Large parishes can be spiritually dead, and small parishes can foster genuine discipleship like no other.
can pray spontaneously out loud when asked (this in fact presumes the practice of personal, daily prayer as aforementioned)
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and see their lives as a mission field.[18]
This is the quality of Christian living we seek to bring about in God’s Church. This is the commission of discipleship that Jesus entrusts to his apostles.
Parish Vision
We turn now to consider how we might move our communities from a casual acceptance of sacramental minimalism to the apostolic zeal of an evangelising parish. A third key opportunity to move from maintenance to mission is the development of an articulate vision that goads, challenges and stimulates the parish toward change. Our parishes are often caught between a call and desire for renewal and the weight of our own church culture towards maintaining the status quo. In this moment which cries out for new energies, priests and people alike can feel bound by layers of expectation that demand the continuation of the old even while new forms of life and mission long for expression.[19]
However, a fresh vision admits of new possibilities and allows us to let go of what no longer serves our mission. When we communicate a vision for the parish, how we seek to respond to God in ssr网站context, in this time, in this local community, when we can articulate a vision of the kinds of spiritual growth we are seeking to raise up in our people, this passionate purpose becomes the heartbeat or pulse of a parish. As in our Eucharistic liturgies, ‘remembrance of our future’ in Christ provides the case for change and conversion in the present.
The alternative to a parish communicating vision is a community standing in the silence of an unquestioned routine. The lifeblood of the parish might occasionally receive a boost or uptick through the initiative of individuals or the occasional event but without a sustained vision to consistently stimulate a higher life, the pulse of the parish inevitably slows and returns to maintenance, to the pace of survival rather than growth.
Not only is a clear and galvanising vision the basis of every growing Christian community that I am aware of, whether Catholic or otherwise, it is clear that our people are hungry and seeking this clarity of purpose and direction. The recent 2016 NCLS survey tells us that around 30% of Mass attending Catholics are unaware of any vision, goal or direction in their local parish, while 18% of parishioners (including those in parishes of the Archdiocese) want to be more involved.[20] It is our task as leaders to answer the question, “Involvement in what?”
A parish vision that reclaims the Great Commission, that reclaims the making of disciples as our primary calling clarifies the purpose of the community and makes it possible for others to become a part of that purpose. It is not a stretch to assert that some of the spiritual stagnation in our pews may be attributable to the plain fact that many Catholics have 酸酸乳ssr网址 as to how the life of holiness could be pursued or ultimately take expression.
As an example, a sense of welcome and expectation is well captured in the vision of Saint Benedict Parish in Halifax, Nova Scotia, “Saint Benedict Parish is a healthy and growing faith community that brings people to Christ, forms disciples, and sends them out to transform the world. Our members commit to worship, to grow, to serve, to connect and to give”. This combines welcome and expectation, as Jesus does in John’s Gospel when he expects the vine to bear fruit, and even prunes and expects more from those vines already producing.[21] It underscores that healthy things grow and sets the expectation of growth for its members. If we do not cast such vision for our people in our Church, the question will inevitably arise from the pews, ‘Are we going anywhere?’
As Sherry Weddell notes with conviction, parishes that seriously and consistently set a vision for and make disciples will experience astonishing levels of growth in depth and number,
Disciples are hungry to pray and worship, so naturally Mass attendance goes up. Disciples want to serve, and often migrate into parish leadership. Disciples will fill every faith formation class in your parish and diocese, because they want to grow in their faith. They clamour to discern personal vocation and personal call . . . Disciples go to great lengths to pass on the faith to their children. They care about the poor and about justice. They take risks for the kingdom of God. Disciples give.[22]
As we will note, the teaching, liturgical and pastoral offices of the priest is in service of this process of evangelisation in which disciples are formed and sent into service of the Kingdom, that fullness of life in God, that Jesus himself embodies.
Conclusion
We have surveyed the state of the Australian parish, named the complexity of our local faith communities amidst a new landscape for faith. We have addressed the necessity of pre-evangelisation in the journey of faith, contrasting it with catechesis that has assumed a reality that is no more, and underlined discipleship as the context or lens through which to reclaim the evangelising mission of the parish, as the context for our sacramental life, our ministry and mission in the world. Finally, we have canvassed vision as critical to the revitalisation of the Church communities for mission, setting forth a definite purpose for our local communities with which people can engage.
Each of these elements contains implications for the ordained which we will enter into after our break. Whatever vocation we inhabit, as the baptised a reinvigorated mission ultimately means responding and having trust in what Christ in the Holy Spirit can do for us, with us and through us, even in the well-worn pews of the parishes we know and love.
References:
[1] Robert Dixon, Stephen Reid and Marilyn Chee, Mass Attendance in Australia: A Critical Moment. A Report Based on the National Count of Attendance, the National Church Life Survey and the Australian Census (Melbourne: ACBC Pastoral Research Office, 2013), 8.
[2] Ibid., 1.
[3] Ibid., 2-3.
[4] Pastoral Research Office E-News Bulletin, ‘Issue 18: Who goes to Mass? – First results from the 2011 NCLS – 2 December 2012’. Available online at http://www.pro.catholic.org.au/pdf/ACBC%20PRO%20E-News%20Bulletin%2018.pdf. Accessed 4 August, 2014.
[5] Dixon, Reid and Chee, Mass Attendance in Australia: A Critical Moment, 4; Robert Dixon and Stephen Reid, ‘The Contemporary Catholic Community: A View from the 2011 Census’, Australasian Catholic Record 90/2 (2013): 144-146.
[6] Robert Dixon, ‘The Catholic Community in Australia: Context and Challenges’, Presentation at the Pastoral Research Office Conference: ‘Beliefs and Practices of Australian Catholics’, 20 February, 2014.
[7] Robert Dixon, “What do Mass attenders believe? Contemporary cultural change and the acceptance of key Catholic beliefs and moral teachings by Australian Mass attenders” (Pastoral Research Office, February 2014), 8.
ssr网站 Fr James Mallon, Divine Renovation: Bringing Your Parish from Maintenance to Mission (New London, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 2014), 19-20.
酸酸乳ssr网址 Fr Michael White and Tom Corcoran, Rebuilt: The Story of a Catholic Parish (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press), 77.
[13] Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Concilium 59.
[14]Catechism of the Catholic Church #1072.
[15]Catechism of the Catholic Church #1324.
[16]Catechism of the Catholic Church #2111.
[17] John Paul II, ssr免费订阅地址32. ‘Validity’ means that the sacrament was truly bestowed and the intended grace made truly present to the person receiving the sacrament. But validity does not guarantee that the grace made available has been actively received and is bearing fruit in that person’s life. See also Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples, 99-123.
[20] NCLS Research, Church Life Profile for the Catholic Church in Australia: A Report on Vitality of Local Churches who took part in the 2016 National Church Life Survey (North Sydney, 2017), 10.
[21] Cf. John 15:1-2; Mallon, Divine Renovation, 155.
[22] Sherry Weddell, “Discipleship: The Key to Fruitfulness”, Chicago Studies 54:2 (Fall 2014): 24.
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It is a great honour to join other Catholics from a diverse range of backgrounds, experience and perspectives on the Executive Committee for the Plenary Council of the Church in Australia marked for 2020. The role of the Executive Committee will be to provide advice to the Bishops Commission for the Plenary, with details of membership here.
While the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference awaits for approval from Pope Francis for the Plenary Council, the pontiff’s placement of synodality and instalment of discernment at the heart of the Church encourages the Church in Australia to grasp this once-in-a-century opportunity to integrate the varieties of Catholic expression, spiritual experience and faith of the faithful, the pressing challenges and urgent opportunities toward a renewed missionary impulse.
The potential scope of a Plenary Council, to the best of my knowledge, is as broad as the Church itself, with the stated purpose to ensure the pastoral needs of the people of God are provided for, to determine whatever seems opportune for the increase of faith, to order common pastoral action, and for the direction of morality and the preservation, introduction and defense of common ecclesiastical discipline. These categories, generously abstract in canon law, furnish room for an immeasurable array of themes both ad intra and ad extra, from the emboldening of the baptised to live as missionary disciples, the leitmotif of Pope Francis and the process that delivered the Aparecida document, to the need of the Church to engage the world in faith, as it really is in Him.
In the wake of Pope Francis whose evangelical thrust has expressed itself not narrowly through the culture wars but through the peripheries and by his ability to personalise the Church, through to the searing grace of the Royal Commission whose recommendations must enter deeply into the Plenary deliberations, the conditions are ripe for the reform of the Australian Church.
Of course the word ‘reform’ is not ecclesiologically innocent. One only has to consult the work of historian Fr John O’Malley to be awakened to the varieties of ways in which the word can be engaged.[1] For some it will refer to a process whereby something is corrected which was in error. For others reform has the character of growth or development, which assumes an underlying continuity or unfolding of providence. Ecclesiologies shape the understanding of change within the Church, and each ecclesiology informs a historical consciousness – the classicist sees the Church as a doctrinal society moving through history largely unaffected; primitivists see the pattern of history as cyclic and look for norms in the past that will enable rejuvenation or revival in the present; or those with an ‘organic’ consciousness see the present as a reflection of where the past naturally tended, and so development is ahead of us without rejection of what has gone before. Church reform, then, can be practically engaged by excision, by addition, by revival, accommodation, development or a combination of these approaches.
In deliberations over reform, Vatican II will and must be a touchstone for the Plenary Council in style and substance. The trials and tribulations of the post-conciliar era are in part a consequence of the absence of operating paradigms of reform at the time of the Council. In contrast, the Plenary will be able to benefit from and indeed extend the example, insights and challenges of Vatican II as an instance of reform in recent memory. The varying ssr购买网址, or various contexts of reception, is but just one lesson we have learned from Vatican II, the recognition that we are as a community of communities extraordinarily diverse and that this will impact upon the translation of deliberations into real life.
With the encouragement of that Council, now fifty years young, it is hoped that new participative models of ecclesial life and modes of discourse will emerge that engage the sensus fidelium here in Australia. The meaning and implication of Lumen Gentium 12 and that active capacity or sensibility by which all the faithful are able to receive and understand the ‘faith once for all delivered to the saints (cf. Jude 3)’ calls for reflection and then concretisation in the processes and structures of the Church into the future. Hence, the Plenary Council and its processes will need to engage the continuum of a great tradition in which the Holy Spirit has spoken as well as the living faith of the pilgrim people, the ‘universality of all believers’ as Bellarmine put it, that has a capacity to discern the truth of faith.[2] This is no small task.
It is only together that we will have the best view of things, including an intelligible account of where we are and how we have arrived at this juncture as a Church, naming those antecedents that have shaped and misshaped the mission and culture of Australian Catholicism. Reflection on this past does not always provide pat answers or easy solutions but it does put the Church in a better position to make decisions for the present and future. Synodality is a mode of governance, as Pope Francis intimates, which involves listening to each other and also to the Spirit in our past and present to discern what he ‘says to the Churches’ (Rev 2:7). Synodality has the potential to connect tradition with fresh questions, expresses the journeying of the whole Church through human history, its dynamism of communion, and a practice that can inspire decision through the fidelity of the entire people.[3]
On the point of process, which I anticipate to be the foundational consideration of the Executive Committee, there is much to imbibe from Pope Francis’ well-worn expression, ‘time is greater than space’ (EG 222-223; LS 178; AL 3, 261). While seemingly obscure, the point Pope Francis seeks to make, with direct relevance to the Plenary, is that it is more important to initiate processes than to occupy positions or possess spaces. Pope Francis notes that we can often be dominated by short-term goals which result in ‘madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion’ (EG 223) without due attention to longer term processes for the development of the Church’s life. This ‘life’, to draw from the Pope’s theology, is found not in ideas but in the faith that really dwells in the hearts and hands of God’s people, a faith that grace wishes to bring forth and keep alive as a sign and reality in the world.
As a result, processes of dialogue and development will not be marked by human ‘neatness’. However, the messiness of discernment can enable a deeper penetration of our faith than would otherwise be possible. Take the two phases, those of 2014 and 2015, that comprised the Synod on marriage and family for example, phases which encouraged the ferment of ideas and the maturity of proposals, even if the process opened up difficulties that we as a Church must continue to wrestle with rather than ignore in the pursuit of meaningful, and not merely cosmetic, answers.
On a sociological plain, it’s worth acknowledging that ‘process’ can suffer both from the critique of impatient detractors and the obsession of nit-picking devotees. On one hand, process can be experienced as an unnecessary impediment to progress, a devourer of already-meagre time and a redundant obstacle that holds us up from achieving our objectives. Forestalling everything from home renovations, bank loans to public infrastructure, process can appear too much like the grinding wheels of bureaucracy that turn too slow. With numerous demands already making claims on our resources and commitment, process can be suffered as a mechanised and impersonal series of practices that most often serve an agenda and timing other than our own. In other words, process can seem to stifle rather than enable, to smother rather than energise.
On the other hand, individuals and communities can at times be fixated with process at the expense of larger goals, ensconced in the kind of hair-splitting that destroys the vitality of pursuits. No doubt we have all endured an unproductive meeting or two. ‘If you want to kill an idea, send it to committee’. This facetious one-liner well captures the reputation that process can attract.
Paradoxically, however, I would suggest that these misgivings about process sit alongside another experience, which is that process is essential to our identity and life together. In various spheres of human activity – including but not limited to education, politics, economics and religion – we recognise, even implicitly, that the way things are done matters at least as much as what is achieved, if not more. Indeed, for the Church a synodal and collegial mode is not simply a means or technique for a particular outcome but a deepening of the Church’s own nature as a communion. Hence Pope Francis’ citation of Saint John Chrysostom who avers, “Church and Synod are synonymous”.[4]
In considering the way of ecclesial development ahead, I think again of Vatican II as it planted seeds that enabled the post-conciliar developments from which we benefit today. An obvious example is ‘lay ministry’ which was never defined or discussed by the Council itself. Indeed, when we consult ‘ministry’ in the index of the Council documents we find only ‘see Clergy, Priests; etc.’ However, in giving rise to a renewed baptismal consciousness within the Church, Vatican II did enable and embolden lay participation and eventual leadership that would then gain explicit papal support in 1972 when Pope Paul VI established the lay ministries of lector and acolyte (cf. Ministeria Quaedam). The rest is ongoing history. While the participation of the laity in the life and decision-making of the Church is far from settled and calls for address, the development of lay ministry following the Council did underscore that the occasion of ‘Vatican II’ extended beyond the four years of its sessions but includes as well the history of its effects. This may well prove true for the Plenary Council as well.
Much remains to be clarified in these early days of the journey. What I am sure of is that the prayerful, impassioned and earnest conversations about the Church and its mission sparked by the Plenary Council will bear enormous fruit for our life and mission. It will involve a Church both learning and teaching, engaging with the wider culture as the occasion for Christians to become aware of the totality of our mission, and the politics of dialogue in a very healthy and fruitful sense, involving the exercise of compromise, the juxtaposition of often-conflicting viewpoints, the naming of ambiguities, the formulation of resolute proposals and above all trust in the Holy Spirit as the abiding counsel of our Church in twenty-first century Australia. The whole Church will be presented with new demands and prospects for our time and future, most essentially a new interior spirit and an outward commitment to a total opening up to the world in bold, catholic and apostolic faith.
References:
[1] John O’Malley, “Reform, Historical Consciousness and Vatican II’s Aggiornamento”, 一元机场网址ssr32 (1971): 573-601.
[2] International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church (2014), n.32.
[3] Pope Francis, Address of His Holiness Pope Francis Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops (17 October, 2015).
[4] Pope Francis, Address of His Holiness Pope Francis Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops (17 October, 2015).
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We celebrate the Ascension of Christ and approach the Feast of Pentecost in the light of the Resurrection. Christ is risen. Truly, He is risen!
As we learn from the Acts of the Apostles, it is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, promised to them by Jesus at his Ascension, that marks a new chapter in the disciples’ faith.
It happens that in these past months the experience of surrender has come to us. A global pandemic has left us dependent upon and yet strangely cautious of others, all at once. Individuals and entire communities are now vulnerable to a terrible scourge, originating on a distant horizon, that has brought life as we know it – in our homes, schools, workplaces and churches – to a collective and sudden halt. This global disruption is a striking reminder for us as Christians, and others besides, that we are not masters of our own world.
As we pray and reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit in the world, we find this life-giving presence in the opening verses of the Hebrew Scriptures. Here we see the Spirit of God at the beginnings of creation as it “sweep[s] over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:2).
This spirit-filled history of salvation continues into the New Testament where the revelation of God comes to fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Jesus’ entire life unfolds under the sign of the Spirit.
This Spirit comes to each one of us as a gift but also as a challenge to the ongoing conversion of our heart and mind. As the source and giver of all holiness, we implore the Spirit to keep us in grace and remove those artificial obstacles, habits and ways of thinking that prevent us from living fully in and for Christ. As St Paul writes in the Letter to the Romans, our baptism in Christ calls us to live no longer by the flesh, by the material things or selfish desires of this world, but to live according to the Spirit (Rom 8:5). It is for this new life that the Spirit of God dwells in us, the very same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11).
Of course, the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit are especially manifest in the saints. These ‘bright patterns of holiness’ remind us that Christian sanctity is not just an ideal or possibility but a reality in concrete persons and the concrete conditions of the world. This cloud of witnesses, these Christian exemplars, are models of holiness who have responded to the needs, challenges and opportunities of their time. These saints allowed themselves to be filled with the Spirit. In the pattern of Mary, “full of grace” the saints give birth or expression to Christ in the world.
The Church, as the third-century theologian St Hippolytus affirmed, is “the place where the Spirit flourishes”. The Church is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit animating and bringing to life and holiness its members through the Word and sacraments, the ministry of the ordained (our bishops, priests and deacons), the various gifts and charisms of the faithful of every rank, the varieties of religious orders and ecclesial movements that express the Spirit’s power and anointing.
As the Feast of the Ascension brings us to reflect on our Christian pilgrimage in this world and to the next, we do not have a choice between God and the world. As Christians, we choose God by choosing the world as it really is in Him. We choose God by working toward the transformation of the world as disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit who inspires true freedom and furthers God’s plan of salvation.
In the wake of the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and the limitations it places on human interaction and activity, the ability for Catholics to physically gather for liturgy comes under increasing threat. It is worth noting as attendance at churches thins and may well be prohibited into the future in some jurisdictions, there may be an increased appreciation for something that that has been taken away by these circumstances. Once precautions surrounding the Mass are lifted many may return to our parishes, including those whose participation has been infrequent or irregular.
This includes for we Australians. While the number of marriages in our Church has declined sharply over the years, the number of families and children who continue to seek the Sacraments of Initiation in our parishes remain substantial, in their many thousands.
So, what explains this phenomenon which sees thousands ‘sacramentalised’ but few appearing to be ‘evangelised’, that is, become intentional and life-long disciples of Jesus Christ? It cannot a deficiency of the sacraments in which we encounter the power and presence of Christ himself.
We know that reception of the sacraments can be treated as a mere social custom, a family tradition practiced without intention, or else sought for purposes other than itself. Whether it is driven by a desire for enrolment in Catholic schools, a bending to family pressure or social conformity, thousands continue to seek out sacraments in our parishes but often little else. Not only this, but the mixed motivations behind the demand for Baptism can be known, accepted or even encouraged by our silence on the matter. If this pattern persists, we risk nothing less than “a ritualism devoid of faith” (9).
Of course, this is not to say the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the one who receives. Baptism, for instance, confers a real “sacramental character” as God’s grace is truly given. But what baptism places within us is a capacity to believe. It cannot be a substitute for an active response, the ‘act of faith’ on the part of the graced subject. A sacrament can be valid but for it to be fruitful, it must be received in faith for “God makes the acceptance of this gift dependent on the cooperation of the recipients” (32). As St Augustine put it, God ‘did not will to save us without us’.
It is now eight months since the road to Plenary Council 2020 was formally opened at Pentecost 2018. It will be the first Plenary Council that the Church in Australia has held in over eighty years and comes at a time when the challenges for and to the Catholic faith – and so the allied possibilities for reform – are multiple. Consider parish decline, the shape of Catholic education, failures of governance, and the future of religious freedom alone.
Towards this end what the Plenary Council will do and is doing is generating a significant, even if for some unsettling, conversation about the way in which the Church can best practice its mission in Christ into the future. A Plenary Council can, for example, pass legislation regulating how doctrine is to be taught, how worship is to be regulated and how governance is to occur in practice. It is to these matters that diverse input is needed for the benefit of the Church’s missionary mandate.
Under present canon law, the decisions of the Council are made by bishops by nature of their episcopal ordination as successors of the Apostles. However, it would be mistaken to read this exercise of authority as an isolated act for in casting their deliberative vote the bishops are required to be attentive to the counsel of the people in their dioceses and at the Council sessions themselves. The magisterium must sense with the Church as a whole where the Spirit’s inspiration is leading. Lay delegates at the Council will have a consultative vote, namely a real vote which will be written and tallied and is to be considered seriously by those with a deliberative vote. So it is that the bishops are obliged to make decisions on the basis of their careful discernment of the work of the Holy Spirit in the minds and hearts of the People of God, recognising that the sense of the faith of the faithful – what is known as the sensus fidelium – is a source of the Church’s life and learning as it pilgrims through history.
Nor does it represent the intent of the listening process underway until Lent 2019. The thousands upon thousands of submissions and voices they represent will shape the major themes that will constitute the agenda of the Plenary Council. Naturally in the abundance of data received will be conflicting interpretations of what has been revealed in Jesus, the Scriptures and our Catholic tradition and varied proposals on how best to incarnate the Gospel in our present situation and our future. This interpretive maelstrom is not a new experience for the Church (think of the disputes of Saints Peter and Paul, and the divergences of the Pauline and Johannine communities).
workshop will extend the theme of ‘missionary discipleship’ to consider how youth ministry can support young people to move and grow from participation in youth ministry to exercise their discipleship as adults in broader parish and community life. If youth ministry gathers for the purpose of sending out, how can our ministries best prepare young people for that future? One of the claims of this workshop is that if we can identify the issues of our moment, and we know the destination at which we want to arrive, then this will shape the steps we can take to get there. If our purpose is sending young people out into mission, into the full life of the Church and world, then how does our youth ministry best prepare them for that future?
The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins developed this term ‘inscape’ for the individual structure of a living being (like a tree or a leaf), an inner structure which results from the history of this being, an inner design made by the tree through its life in the way it has responded to life. We are much the same, our life is a work of art and all the good and the bad, conflicts and sufferings, troubles and happiness in our life all add up to something, all produce this inner structure, and this is what we are judged on, our encounter with Jesus and the direction that we chose to live. We are judged not on small incidentals (eating meat on Fridays) but rather the whole structure of our life – all that we wanted to do, tried to do, our relationships. This all adds up to our identity which God knows. Hence the value of youth ministers as spiritual guides who can help the next generation to be in touch with the whole direction and meaning of their life as a whole, what it is all adding up to and to encourage them to develop in this direction and not another.
I was grateful to be part of a workshop this week hosted by the Australian Catholic Youth Council in North Sydney. It drew together a select group of parish and diocesan youth leaders in conversation with Australia’s delegates for the October Synod on youth, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP and Bishop Mark Edwards OMI, as well as Archbishop Comensoli.
As the Church in Australia considers its future, it is imperative to understand the interactions and experiences that comprise young people’s lives for these provide the building blocks for renewed mission with and to young people. While the Catholic faith may today occupy less surface space in Australian culture, the rise of dedicated disciples within promises to bring new depths to our Christian living and cultural impact, and encourage the whole Church in its mission to the concrete people of each generation.
Challengingly, among Australian Catholic youth the influence of Church or religious leaders in their key decisions and directions is thin, identified as significant by just 11% of those surveyed and aged between 16-18 years. This meek influence might be explained by a lack of personal relationship amongst some clergy and young people, the broader collapse of the Church’s credibility in the light of the sexual abuse crisis, and the real struggle of Church leaders to listen or ‘hold’ the questions that young people are asking of the Church. On this score, young Australian Catholics rated their experience of being listened at a modest 5.9 out of 10.[2]
Positively, when Australian youth were asked how the Church can be of help to them, the responses actively invited our communities to provide guidance, to assist and counsel young people in their anxieties, personal challenges, understanding of sexuality and relationship issues.[6] As the meaning and direction of life is not uncovered in a single moment, it is incumbent upon the Church to journey with young lives in realising their own dignity and personal mission, both of which express a fundamental call to holiness.
Frustratingly for many, the accompaniment urgently desired by young Australian Catholics and urged by Pope Francis cannot be found neatly contained within a package or program. It demands in fact an entire culture of ecclesial life in which discernment is a norm and in regular evidence. When genuine discernment is not practiced in our sacramental programs, leading to fruitless reception, when RCIA processes teach people about Catholicism but neglect to train them to live as disciples, when parish pastoral councils and parish groups are more focused on ‘who will do it?’ rather than ‘where are we going?’, the offer of accompaniment to young people will appear more like false advertising than the expression of a community fully open to what God wants for the Church. The preparatory document for the Synod minces no words, “We cannot expect our offer of pastoral accompaniment towards vocational discernment to be credible to young people, unless we show that we are able to practice discernment in the ordinary life of the Church”.[1]
Held in Brisbane for the first time in its short history, Proclaim Conference 2018 gathered more than 600 participants from 12-14 July to discuss parish evangelisation with its theme drawn from John’s Gospel, “Make your home in me”. Keynote speakers over the three days included Archbishop Mark Coleridge, Cardinal John Dew from Wellington, Ron Huntley of the Divine Renovation network, Karolina Gunsser from Citipointe Church in Redcliffe, and Lana Turvey-Collins from the national facilitation team for the Plenary Council.
As a former ‘outsider’ to the Church it has taken some twenty years to learn to live as a baptised person and still the learning continues. Through my own faith experience I have come to believe that the parish is essential to Christian growth and discipleship. Indeed, if we did not have parishes we would have to invent them – local communities of faith gathered around the Word and Eucharist where faith is given shape and social support, fostered into discipleship and then enters the world through our living witness.
The Church is not for ourselves. In Pope Francis’ language, our community is called to be a ‘field hospital’ serving those who most need help now, the wounded and the lost. This is the antithesis of the self-referential Church. We are called to leave the ninety-nine to find the one, or in our Australian reality, leave the one to find the ninety-nine.
In fact, inward looking churches create consumers with preferences, while outward looking churches create missionaries with larger hearts and stories to tell, stories about how Jesus has changed their life. This is the heart of an evangelised parish culture – one beggar telling another beggar how he found bread.
A classic example of the need to prioritise our mission over method can be found in the story of Kodak, the photography business established at the turn of the twentieth century, with the expressed purpose of preserving memories which is a seemingly indestructible mission.
A third horizon we can move toward in forming evangelising parishes is structures that support the mission. We want to grow but many parishes are not necessarily structured to grow. There can be literally “no room in the inn” for change.
The fourth horizon we can move towards is putting mission into action, perhaps the hardest pilgrimage of all. As a friend once shared, conferences can sometimes be a bit like this: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit” and when we get home, it is more “… as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end”.
Then in 2013 came the surprise election of Pope Francis. By his papal exhortations and by his convening of the 2014 and 2015 synods on the family, the Pope placed a clear emphasis on the Church’s need to journey in discernment together with closeness to the people unified in baptismal faith and informed by the Holy Spirit.
Pope Francis himself has encouraged the need to prayerfully discern together what the Spirit is saying to our Catholic community at this time, remarking “A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realises that listening ‘is more than simply hearing’. It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the ‘Spirit of truth’ (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he ‘says to the Churches’ (Rev 2:7).”[2]
In the previous session, we acknowledged those factors impacting upon parish life today – a new and unchartered context for faith, the presumptions of our pastoral practices and questions of fruitfulness that invite change, as well as the biblical and magisterial foundations for reclaiming discipleship as our central commission.
It is enough to trace the various emphases that have shaped the theology and practice of the ordained ministry through this history to appreciate that, in speaking of the ordained vocation, ‘God-given’ is not the same thing as ‘set in stone’. There are a variety of ways in which the priestly life can and has been lived. To borrow from the thought of Fr Aidan Nichols, the ‘pattern’ of the presbyterate has in fact a variety of key elements that open themselves to the evangelisation and disciple-making we have discussed.[2] Within this ‘pattern’ of priestly life, developed and clarified over centuries, we find at least nine elements, each of which informs the other:
I would like to focus in particular on how the priest’s teaching office and his responsibility for pastoral government can best be lived today in order to serve the growth of discipleship in our parishes and evangelisation beyond the pews (sets one and three of that tripartite pattern of priestly life).
Of course, even in the case of sound and effective preaching, the priest cannot be expected to carry the responsibility for the missionary conversion of our parishes alone. As we have acknowledged, it is not obvious in our day that the hearts of laity are burning with the fire of Jesus’ mission in the Church and the world, as evidenced by our gentle decline and the culture of maintenance or immobility we can sometimes encounter in our parishes.
In turning to the pastoral governance of the priest as whole – including building up the communion of the Church and overseeing the parish’s attempts to meet the needs of its members – there are practical steps that can be taken to lead parish renewal in a focused and also a sustainable way. To bring these practices and principles to real life, I will engage the parish of Saint Benedict in Halifax, Canada, as an example of best practice.
Having established a parish vision, a parish can then identify the priority areas where it intends to live that vision most immediately within a given time frame, say three to five years. Returning to the ‘Game Plan’ of Saint Benedict Parish, there were five priorities discerned by the community as areas for focus. The parish proceeded to identify those core systems of a church, which like the systems of a body, are essential to the growth of the ecclesial body.
Once parish priorities are identified, the parish can then conduct a simple SWOT analysis – identifying its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in each area of priority. This assists a parish identify its areas of strategic action. We can narrow these strengths and limitations that call for a response to a limited and workable number, by asking questions such as:
As the mainstay of ecclesial life, the parish is, however, undergoing a process of undeniable change and has become an increasingly complex reality on account of a number of factors. Parishes are becoming geographically larger and yet numerically smaller with the practice of amalgamation and diminishing attendance. We experience growing multicultural diversity and new immigration in our pews and on the altar in our active clergy; we are impacted by a shortage and ageing of priests as we inevitably baptise more than we ordain; and we see the beginnings of more regional planning in the light of our resources and a desire for more creative ways of organising ourselves as Church.
Looking forwards and taking into account the complexity and variety of this new situation, I would suggest three principles or areas for consideration in the effort to renew and strengthen the evangelising mission of the local parish.
We must acknowledge that if we were to measure how many of those hundreds who receive the sacraments in our local parish each year, pass through our sacramental life in initiation or from week to week, and emerge on the other side as ‘missionary disciples’, we would have to admit that there is much less fruit than we might hope to see. Our pastoral experience tells us that we have in our communities no lack of those who have been ‘sacramentalised’ but not yet evangelised, those who are merely ‘done’ but not yet discipled.
At the level of the parish, this gap between our presumptions (our unspoken ‘sacramentalism’ that assumes the sacraments will simply ‘take care of it’) and the active faith and discipleship to which all the baptised are called is palpable. Time and again how often have we heard parents, good and faithful parents, lament that their grown children are now disconnected from the Church, that they are no longer going to Mass, and even now hold no faith at all. Yet they did all they were supposed to do, received all their sacraments, and their children served as altar servers and so on. There can also be a latent notion, and I think a false hope, that the grace of the sacraments might ‘kick in’ many years later, like a time release capsule, but there is very little evidence that this is true. Again, hear the laments of old generations of Catholics who did all they thought they had to do, received all the sacraments, were never encouraged to ask questions and carried out the practice of the Catholic religion but lament never experiencing a life-giving or transforming faith. Where is the fruit?
As an attempt to set discipleship at the heart of my home parish of St Bernadette’s Parish, Castle Hill, we introduced four weeks of parental preparation for entry into the sacramental program (the parish celebrated the sacraments of Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist all in the one nine month period). This formation was focused not on children but on parents who were asked to attend four 2 hour sessions – on God and us, God and his Church, God and the sacraments, and living God’s way. Each session was offered three times a week to accommodate parents’ commitments, and completion of all four sessions was a requirement of entry into the sacramental program and preparation for the year.
We turn now to consider how we might move our communities from a casual acceptance of sacramental minimalism to the apostolic zeal of an evangelising parish. A third key opportunity to move from maintenance to mission is the development of an articulate vision that goads, challenges and stimulates the parish toward change. Our parishes are often caught between a call and desire for renewal and the weight of our own church culture towards maintaining the status quo. In this moment which cries out for new energies, priests and people alike can feel bound by layers of expectation that demand the continuation of the old even while new forms of life and mission long for expression.[19]
It is a great honour to join other Catholics from a diverse range of backgrounds, experience and perspectives on the Executive Committee for the Plenary Council of the Church in Australia marked for 2020. The role of the Executive Committee will be to provide advice to the Bishops Commission for the Plenary, with details of membership here.
In deliberations over reform, Vatican II will and must be a touchstone for the Plenary Council in style and substance. The trials and tribulations of the post-conciliar era are in part a consequence of the absence of operating paradigms of reform at the time of the Council. In contrast, the Plenary will be able to benefit from and indeed extend the example, insights and challenges of Vatican II as an instance of reform in recent memory. The varying ssr购买网址, or various contexts of reception, is but just one lesson we have learned from Vatican II, the recognition that we are as a community of communities extraordinarily diverse and that this will impact upon the translation of deliberations into real life.
On the point of process, which I anticipate to be the foundational consideration of the Executive Committee, there is much to imbibe from Pope Francis’ well-worn expression, ‘time is greater than space’ (EG 222-223; LS 178; AL 3, 261). While seemingly obscure, the point Pope Francis seeks to make, with direct relevance to the Plenary, is that it is more important to initiate processes than to occupy positions or possess spaces. Pope Francis notes that we can often be dominated by short-term goals which result in ‘madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion’ (EG 223) without due attention to longer term processes for the development of the Church’s life. This ‘life’, to draw from the Pope’s theology, is found not in ideas but in the faith that really dwells in the hearts and hands of God’s people, a faith that grace wishes to bring forth and keep alive as a sign and reality in the world.
Paradoxically, however, I would suggest that these misgivings about process sit alongside another experience, which is that process is essential to our identity and life together. In various spheres of human activity – including but not limited to education, politics, economics and religion – we recognise, even implicitly, that the way things are done matters at least as much as what is achieved, if not more. Indeed, for the Church a synodal and collegial mode is not simply a means or technique for a particular outcome but a deepening of the Church’s own nature as a communion. Hence Pope Francis’ citation of Saint John Chrysostom who avers, “Church and Synod are synonymous”.[4]