Australian Catholics are preparing for a ‘plenary council’. But the Church is in danger of encouraging false expectations
Jump on to any diocesan website in Australia and there will be a tab, a fact sheet or a snazzy revolving banner informing you about the Plenary Council 2020. The event is the latest initiative of the Australian bishops’ conference. The first complete gathering of the Australian Church since 1937, it will begin in October 2020 in central South Australia – close to the heart of the country.
Plenary 2020 is the Australian version of the October 2015 family synod in Rome. The main instigator is Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the bishops’ conference, who took part in the synod and was inspired by Pope Francis’s vision of a “synodal” Church.
Since Pentecost a team, led by plenary council facilitator Lana Turvey-Collins, has been asking parishes and groups across the country to respond to the question: “What do you think God is asking of the Church in Australia at this time?”
The agenda for the Plenary 2020 will be set by the responses they receive to this question. So far, Turvey-Collins has received more than 21,000 responses.
For Archbishop Coleridge, the Plenary 2020 is a chance to move the Church beyond sexual abuse scandals and steer it in a more positive direction. For others, it is an opportunity to take the pulse of the Church, while still others believe that the Holy Spirit will speak through this process – and good fruits will flow from it in proportion to good will.
But there are obvious problems with Plenary 2020, and evidence of a confused process are already beginning to show.
At the most basic level, there is widespread confusion over what a plenary council is authorised to do – even among session leaders. The official Plenary 2020 website uses terms such as “dialogue”, “listening” and “reforming Church” to generate responses. This may encourage people to respond, but it also strongly implies that the Australian Church could change Catholic doctrine under the pressure of the will of “the People of God”. This is simply not the case.
Despite this clear avenue for confusion, Plenary 2020 resources do not make it explicit that the council has no authority to change dogma or doctrines pertaining to faith and morals.
A notable exception to this is the Diocese of Broken Bay in Sydney, which includes a clear definition of a plenary council based on canon law. But compare this to the Plenary 2020 website, which in its FAQ explains that the council has “legislative and governance authority”, and that its decisions will be “binding for the Church in Australia”. While technically true, this doesn’t acknowledge the limits of the Australian bishops’ legislative and governance powers. In the demotic, not everything is up for grabs.
Aggravating this, plenary resources and facilitators are continually seeking the participation of people “on the margins”, or even those who are outside the Church. These people are even less likely to understand the boundaries within which the bishops can operate. The Church is not a democratic institution, and to use democratic language in a democratic country is a recipe for false expectations and disappointment.
A plenary facilitator in Sydney reported that this was a repeated theme at “listening and dialogue” sessions, where participants were often enraged to discover that only the bishops will be voting in October 2020. “There is a real problem of expectation management … and the messaging is inconsistent at every level,” she said.
The results have been fairly predictable. Those who are angered and disenfranchised, or simply don’t like Church teaching, will attend “listening” sessions only to submit predictable requests for change in Catholic doctrine.
The most striking example of this is the official “draft submission” of the Canberra-Goulburn diocese, published on its website. The result of four listening sessions run by the Deanery of Canberra with more than 300 participants, it suggested, along with the re-introduction of general absolution, that the Church review its position on “women, LGBT people, the divorced, [and] people of other religions …”
The submission was removed from the website, and the Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn, Christopher Prowse, had to remind his flock to “listen” to the voice of God.
This was not an isolated event. A participant at an information session hosted by the Archdiocese of Melbourne reported that people were requesting that the Church change its position on Communion for the divorced and remarried, while another suggested that the ordination of women was an “obvious next step” – as the two priests at the session nodded in agreement.
One Brisbane parishioner noted: “As the sessions have gone on, it’s become visibly clear that almost no parishioners hold orthodox beliefs. Just tonight I had someone say to me that we ‘don’t actually have to believe in the Nicene Creed’.”
Despite this confusion, there have been no steps to clarify the limits and purpose of the Plenary Council 2020.
The problem is perhaps best summarised by the Plenary 2020’s own explanatory video, which says: “We will listen to God by listening to one another.”
In response, concerned orthodox Catholics have created several Facebook groups. Perhaps the largest of these is the Plenary Council 2020 youth discussion group, which has more than 2,000 members, compared with the official Plenary Council 2020 youth group, which has just over 300. The former group has become an orthodox watchdog for the plenary.
Judging by the 21,000 responses that have so far been received for Plenary 2020, it seems that the orthodox voice has not yet made itself heard. One explanation for this is that, as a rule, orthodox Catholics are not activists. Dialogue, in their opinion, is not the proper response to a bishop of the Church. They do not want or need a Church to “listen” to them, but rather to be a strong “sign of contradiction” (Luke 2:34) in the world.
Many feel that the answer to the question “What is God asking?” is obvious and perennial: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The fact that the bishops would even ask this is, to their mind, a sign of decline and confusion.
In this way, it is likely that the responses will be skewed in favour of liberal-minded Catholics agitating for change. As one parishioner observed: “The only people who feel qualified to write a response are those who are, in fact, the least qualified to do so.”
The weakness of the plenary council is that it is relying on the existence of a remarkable breed of individuals: humbly prayerful, but also convinced that they can recognise God’s voice; liberal enough to expect the Church to represent their “voice”, but conservative enough to accept the final votes of the bishops as truth.
Phase one of Plenary 2020 will continue until Ash Wednesday, oscillating between democratic free-for-all and orthodox Magisterium, shifting in response to place, politics and temperament. In this way at least, it is reflective of the Catholic Church in Australia.
Natasha Marsh is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne
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