There was a shift from the Church of the bishops to the Church of the people and bishops. It gave Catholics a platform and they found their voices. The events of the Plenary Council were online, available to see and hear for anyone who was interested.

Our previous experience of similar Catholic gatherings was proceedings behind closed doors with official announcements and reports later. If we were lucky, leaks occurred over time to reveal what really went on.

The first general assembly of the Plenary Council, meeting October 3-10, was an extraordinary experience. About 300 members of the Catholic community in Australia engaged in a process of communal discernment involving people from almost every sphere of Church life including laity, deacons, bishops and priests.

Within the space of a month, three significant events have happened within our church: our local Diocesan Assembly, the first session of the Fifth Plenary Council of the Catholic Church in Australia and the beginning phase of the next Synod of Bishops to be held in 2023 on synodality.

A round-up of articles about the Plenary Council from the Southern Cross Newspaper.

An interim Diocesan Pastoral Council, a youth assembly in November and another major Diocesan gathering late next year were announced at the closing session of the 2021 Diocesan Assembly. he interim Diocesan Pastoral Council (DPC) would develop terms of reference prior to the establishment of a permanent body. Expressions of interest for membership will close onOctober 15 with the interim council’s first meeting scheduled for November.

Speaking at the closing session of the Diocesan Assembly, acting chancellor Sarah Moffatt said the DPC would be a major diocesan body exercising leadership under the authority of the Archbishop by “investigating, considering and proposing practical priorities and strategies about the pastoral life and activity in the Archdiocese”.

A recurring theme in the discussions taking place during the Diocesan Assembly this month was the absence of young people and families in our parishes. As one parish priest bluntly put it: ‘I am burying an awful lot of my parishioners and I don’t know how I am going to replace them’.

Not that this is anything new – we have been talking about the need to get young people into the pews for decades now. It’s just that as every day passes, the problem becomes more urgent.

We can be tempted to look at ways to make parish life and liturgy more ‘fun’ and appealing to young people, but that’s not necessarily the answer according to Charlie, a 20-year-old pastoral coordinator with one of our parishes and a participant at the assembly.

I write these few words just after the first night and day sessions of our recent Diocesan Assembly and before our concluding session a few days later. My deep thanks to our organising team for providing such a powerful experience.

My experience, so far, is that it is a moment of grace for us. Every person I met had been touched by this grace. Each had allowed the grace of their baptism to be renewed. Each was more in touch with the call of God, and the call to service and of fostering this communion.

The program on Saturday included morning prayer and a panel discussion before participants broke into 36 groups to discuss a number of key themes arising from the consultation process for the Diocesan Assembly.

Issues included outreach and accompaniment of young people and families, inclusion and healing, parish life and liturgy, responding to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, and leadership and formation.

Each group discussed two themes and through a listening, dialogue and discernment process came up with 144 recommendations.

Episode 1 of the Diocesan Assembly Podcast following the journey of the Assembly. In this episode Fr James McEvoy and Peter Bierer talk about their hopes for the Diocesan Assembly.

In a few weeks we will be entering a new phase in the life of the Archdiocese of Adelaide, and a couple weeks after that, the life of the Australian Church. The 2021 Diocesan Assembly and Plenary Council offer our local and national Catholic community an opportunity to listen deeply to young people, to allow ourselves to be converted and experience a transformation of love. Young people are calling us out of the comfort of our church buildings and the confines of convention and into the streets, the homes and lives of everyday, ordinary people, of those in deep need, and to address the realities and challenges of our time. Will we listen? Will we have the humility to allow ourselves to be accompanied?

With less than a month until the opening session of the Fifth Plenary Council assembly, lay member Maddy Forde is speaking to as many young people as possible to ready herself for her involvement in the proces

More than 450 people from parishes, communities, schools, agencies, religious orders and groups will participate in the local assembly, to be held over three sessions from September 17.

Archbishop O’Regan said the sessions would provide an opportunity for Adelaide’s eight Plenary Council members to hear the voices of the local community.

“They will not going to the Plenary as one person, but as representatives of the Adelaide Archdiocese,” he said.

“The other aspect of the assembly is the formation of a Diocesan Pastoral Council which will be responsible for implementing the vision of the Plenary Council when it concludes next year.”

There have been times when I wondered if we would ever make it. But after all the delays and changes of plan, we have come at last to the first assembly of the Plenary Council, which has quite a pre-history.

The bishops took the decision to move to a Plenary Council in 2016, but the roots of that decision reach way back to the early 2000s. It was then that the late Archbishop Philip Wilson proposed that the time was right for the Church in Australia to prepare for some kind of national ecclesial event.

Hosffman Ospino, a professor of theology at Boston College, interviews Rafael Luciani, one of the world's leading experts on the topic of synodality.

Luciani, a native of Venezuela, serves as a theological expert for the regional Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) and the Confederation of Latin American Religious (CLAR). He is also one of three Latin American theologians invited as expert advisors for the theological commission of the Secretariat for the next Synod of Bishops.

In the interview, Ospino and Luciani talk about why some Catholics seem reluctant or unwilling to consider synodality as a way of being church, and what it means that Sr. Nathalie Becquart, Luciani's former student, will be the first woman serving as a voting member at a Vatican synod.

https://thesoutherncross.org.au/news/2021/08/16/plenary-poised-for-virtual-guidance/

The Church is a living thing. Like all living things, it is constantly transforming itself. In this process of change, it may encounter difficulties, but it never forgets its evangelizing identity. Renewal of the Church, the Holy Father tells us, is guided by the Holy Spirit and begins with “a reform of ourselves, without prefabricated ideas, without ideological prejudices, without rigidity.” Let us join Francis’s dream of a Church with “an even more missionary option: that it go out to meet others without proselytism and that it transform all its structures for the evangelization of today’s world.”

Teamwork and the sharing of wisdom are critical for the success of the Plenary Council and beyond, according to one of the Archdiocese’s lay delegates who will attend the local hub assembly in October. Ian Cameron said he felt privileged to participate in next month’s Diocesan Assembly and the Plenary Council gathering the following month and represent the views of the diverse Catholic community.

“Lay and religious work seamlessly in many areas of Church life,” he explained. “Bishops and lay people need to combine their experience, expertise and wisdom to get the best results. “This teamwork and combined wisdom is critical for the Plenary and beyond – it is critical that Church teachings, rules and laws are written with ordained and lay teamwork, including parents, for more authentic content and credibility.

More than 600 responses have been provided as part of the consultation phase of the Diocesan Assembly since a video message was shown at every parish and community in late June. Diocesan Assembly coordinator Peter Bierer said while the number of responses received via the website and postage-paid postcards was “not insignificant” he was still hoping for more people to share their “thoughts, ideas, feelings and hopes”.

“The responses from this consultation phase, along with the local responses from the Plenary Council listening and dialogue process from a few years ago, will guide the development of the agenda for the Diocesan Assembly,” he said.

“So the more responses we receive from a wider diversity of people, the better the discussions will be at the Assembly.”

There’ll be lots of talking at the upcoming Diocesan Assembly – of course! It’d be a dull event without conversation.But according to Pope Francis, the quality of our gathering will be determined by our capacity to listen to one another. In a major speech from 2015 he urged the world’s bishops to foster a listening church: “It’s a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn…we are one in listening to others; and all are listening to the Holy Spirit.”

So, what should we listen for? And what will we learn?

As the fifth lay delegate named for the Adelaide Archdiocese, Kiara, 35, will be attending one of the assembly’s province hubs, most likely in Queensland, as for the next six months she and her husband Dan and four young sons are heading on the adventure of a lifetime.

“Life has changed since I put in my nomination to be a member…lockdown changed our direction as a family and changed Dan’s work and we have decided to go travelling around Australia for six months in a camper trailer,” she told The Southern Cross.