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The 2021-2022 Plenary Council

4 August 2021
Paul Collins

This article was originally published in the popular Italian Catholic monthly Missione oggi ('Mission Today') entitled Il Concilio plenario dell'Australia.

Like the church in many countries, Australian Catholicism faces a crisis as it confronts its failures and decides its future. The basic cause: a half-hearted implementation of Vatican Council II, bishops lacking leadership ability who have lost all credibility and, above all, the failure of church leadership to deal with widespread clerical sexual abuse, with 1,169 brothers and priests accused in Australia between 1950 and 2010.

The statistics tell the story. The Catholic proportion of Australia’s population has fallen from 27% in 2001 to 22.6% in the 2016 national census. Of the 5.3 million Catholics, only about 10% attend Mass regularly; most of these are over seventy, or recent immigrants. Australia is an increasingly secular country, with 30.1% of the 25.7 million population declaring that they have ‘no religion’.

Historically, Australian Catholicism was a carbon-copy of the Irish church, and until the late-1930s almost all bishops were Irish-born. In 1937 the then-Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Giovanni Panico, following Vatican instructions, attempted to break the Irish strangle-hold by promoting Australian-born priests as bishops.

Panico also presided over the last Australian Plenary Council, held in 1937, which replaced local church legislation with that of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, and it’s this Rome-inspired, authoritarian, inward-looking church that contemporary Catholicism is trying to move beyond.

Generally, Australian Catholics and priests embraced the reforms of Vatican II, although there was an exodus from the church after the 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae on contraception. During the long papacy of John Paul II, many more Catholics drifted away and the shortage of native-born priests became increasingly acute. Overseas-born priests were recruited and now constitute more than 55% of all priests working in parishes, creating many cultural problems. But there is still a solid core of post-Vatican II Catholics who are deeply committed to the Council’s vision.

Catholicism’s crisis came to a head in 2013 when the Australian government established a Royal Commission to examine sexual abuse in institutions and churches. Because of the bishops’ long-term failure to deal decisively with clerical abusers, the church’s reputation was effectively trashed in the Commission, despite Catholicism’s enormous contribution to national education, health and social welfare.

The 2021-2022 Plenary Council is the bishops’ response to the Royal Commission. To prepare for it, a nation-wide consultation was held discussing the question: ‘What is God asking of the Australian church?’

The response was enormous: more than 222,000 people participated, with 17,457 written submissions from groups and individual Catholics. Suggestions emerging from the consultations focused on issues like clerical and ecclesial governance, appointment or election of bishops, gender and sexual issues, women’s ordination, married priests, consultation of the laity in decision making and many others.

The Plenary organisers watered-down these issues to six bland ‘National Themes.’ Writing groups were set-up with the task of drafting these themes into papers which, in turn led to what one Plenary attendee described as a 69 page ‘bland…excessively cautious document’ lacking any sense of crisis, written by an archbishop, a priest and two laypeople, entitled 'Continuing the Journey'.

‘Continuing the Journey’ is now the agenda and working document for the Plenary. It doesn’t reflect community concerns as expressed in the consultations and submissions, and it was further modified by the Vatican before approval was finally given. 

The chosen themes are conversion, prayer, formation, structures, governance, and institutions. These nebulous words are vague and frustratingly generalised. They don’t encourage practical and hard questions about issues like church structures, governance, clericalism, gender questions, the power and functions of bishops and priests, ministry, the role and leadership of women, or evangelisation in a secular culture. There’s also no discussion of synodality, or consulting the Catholic community before decision-making.

Who will attend the Plenary? In total about 285 people, made up of 46 bishops, 99 priests, one deacon, 25 women religious and three brothers, 66 laywomen and 37 laymen. Of those attending, 146 (53%) are clerics and 131 (47%) are laypeople. Women make-up 33% of attendees. A significant number of lay attendees are directly employed by the church.

Bishops alone have a deliberative vote; other attendees have only a consultative vote, so the bishops control the process.

What attitudes do attendees bring to the Plenary? Certainly, the majority of members of religious orders and many priests will support root-and-branch church renewal. However, only two laymen from long-established church renewal groups have been invited.

A small minority of bishops actively sympathise with renewal. The majority have shown little support for the Plenary process and a minority actively oppose it. There are also several lay and clerical right-wing ‘culture warriors’ attending who repudiate Pope Francis’ vision of a less clerical, synodal church.

The Plenary will be held across two sessions, the first in October 2021. Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, this session will combine online and face-to-face participation. Members will meet in five capital city hubs that will be connected by Microsoft Teams. Votes taken at this first session will be entirely consultative.

The second session will be held in Sydney in October 2022. Here deliberative votes that should reflect the conclusions of the first session will be taken by the bishops. But in the end the bishops make the final decisions and their conclusions will go to the Vatican for approval. So much for local decision-making!

The whole process is very different to Pope Francis synodal vision and it’s obvious that it was a serious mistake to decide to go down the path of a Plenary Council. It would have been much better to have had a less-structured national assembly, where views could be expressed freely and votes could indicate what the local community wanted, leading to concrete actions. The suspicion is that the bishops chose the Plenary model precisely because it was tightly controlled by canon law, allowing them to manage it.

The synodal process adopted by the German church led by Cardinal Reinhard Marx is far superior to the Australian model. German Catholicism has a tradition of lay participation in church governance through the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), founded in 1949. The German synod is confronting real issues like power in the church, joint participation in mission, sexuality and partnership, contemporary priesthood, women in ministry and local church governance, while Australia is caught-up discussing pious platitudes.

What is lacking in Australia is a focus on looking outward toward evangelisation. Even supporters of renewal have become caught-up in inward-looking issues like church governance. There has also been a failure to understand what Pope Francis means by ‘synodality’ and the inappropriateness of using a canon law-bound process of a plenary council. In all of this, far-sighted proposals from the Catholic community have been lost.

Australia is an object lesson in what not to do when planning church renewal. Don’t go the way that gets you caught-up in a morass of canon law and hands over all decision-making power to bishops.

At a deeper level Vatican II drew on the church’s tradition to point us beyond the late-sixteenth century model of an absolute monarchy Catholicism, to build a community in which everyone’s gifts were included. Our task is not to patch-up the old church, but to follow Jesus’ words: ‘New Wine is put into new wineskins’ (Matthew 9:17). Tradition is not living in the past, but building on it to create the new.

Saint John Henry Newman was right when he wrote in The Development of Doctrine: ‘Here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’. Sadly, the Australian church has opted for business as usual.

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