The months between the first and second general assemblies of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia are a time for “prayer, reflection, maturation and development”, according to a concluding statement from the first assembly.

The statement, approved by the Council’s members during Saturday’s final plenary session, speaks of a week in which regular prayer and spiritual conversations, encouraging deep listening, “allowed space for still nascent dreams and visions to come to greater maturity”.

Vicar General Fr Philip Marshall features in this Plenary Podcast recorded during the first assembly last week.

Listen to "Plenary Podcast, Thursday, 7 October 2021. Fr Philip Marshall (Adelaide), Fr Quen Vu SJ (Australian Jesuits), Monica Doumit (Maronite), Katherine Jelavic (Sale), & Sojin Sebastian (Syro-Malabar)" by Plenary Council.

Click here for more podcasts.

A Mass celebrated by Australian Catholic Bishops Conference president and Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge has closed the first general assembly of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia this morning.

The Mass comes a week after Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB, the Plenary Council president, opened the first such gathering in Australia for more than 80 years with a Mass across the expanse of the continent in Perth.

As he closed the formal proceedings of the first general assembly of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia Saturday evening, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB reflected on a week that had been “inspiring, challenging and sometimes unsettling”.

Archbishop Costelloe, the Council’s president, adjourned the Council’s first assembly and summoned its 278 members to gather again in July 2022 for the second and final assembly.

The concept of “sniffing out” the presence of God in the world, articulated by theologian Fr Richard Lennan in an address to the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia, struck a chord with many members as they continued their discernment.

Fr Lennan, a priest of the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese and an expert adviser to the Council speaking from Boston, said the Church had “no option but to exist in the present”.

Maronite Archbishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay OLM has spoken about the significance of the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Latin Rite Church coming together as “pilgrims” for the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia.

Archbishop Tarabay, who celebrated Thursday’s Mass for the Plenary Council, said while the journey to the Council began in 2016, “maybe it was prepared for us from the beginning of time”.

Day four of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia will take on a different feel, as members spend extra time offline, praying with and reflecting on questions about seeing through the eyes of those who have been abused and reaching those on the peripheries.

The agenda for the Plenary Council poses 16 questions across six themes, with members called to “develop concrete proposals to create a more missionary, Christ-centred Church in Australia at this time”.

The 278 members of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia have continued to break open the 16 questions related to how we can create a more missionary, Christ-centred Church in Australia at this time.

After the broad discussions of the first small group sessions on Monday, yesterday’s “spiritual conversations” moved to more specific questions, suggestions and even proposals.

The first “spiritual conversations” of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia covered a broad range of thoughts and topics from Baptism being the place for fundamental conversion to the need for the Church to tend to its past and current failures.

The process for communal discernment by the 278 members during the Plenary Council’s two assemblies follows the centuries-old practice of “spiritual conversations”.

Using that process, 10 groups of members are praying with and reflecting on 16 questions across six themes: Conversion, Prayers, Formation, Structures, Governance and Institutions.

Pope Francis has sent greetings and blessings from Rome as the program for the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia, the first such event in this country in 84 years, began today.

A message read out during the opening plenary session this morning said the Plenary Council “represents a singular ‘journeying together’ of God’s people in Australia along the paths of history towards a renewed encounter with the Risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit”.

On the Feast of St Francis of Assisi, Bishop Shane Mackinlay has said the saint that so loved creation and those living in poverty can inspire the work of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia.

Bishop Mackinlay, the Bishop of Sandhurst and the Plenary Council’s vice-president, celebrated Mass for the first day of the Council’s program, a day after the historic event was opened by Council president Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB.

As Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB opened the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia, he said Catholics “must become, even more than we are already, a community of true disciples”.

The Plenary Council, the first such gathering in Australia since 1937, is being celebrated across nine months, bookended by assemblies from October 3-10 and in July 2022.

On 21 November 1964, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, known to most of us as Lumen Gentium, was officially promulgated as one of only two dogmatic constitutions which were the fruit of the Second Vatican Council. Fifty-seven years later the Council, as Pope Francis reminds us often, remains a fundamental touchstone for our understanding of the life and mission of the Church in our contemporary world. It represents, indeed, a particularly eloquent sign of the Lord’s ongoing fidelity to his promise that the Holy Spirit, who is sent to us by the Father, will as today’s gospel puts it, be with us teaching us everything, and reminding us of all that Jesus has said to us.

The agenda of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia calls those attending the Council assemblies to “develop concrete proposals to create a more missionary, Christ-centred Church in Australia”.

The Council agenda, which has emerged from three years and several layers of prayer, listening, dialogue and discernment, will shape the program of the Council’s assemblies – the first of which opens on October 3 this year.

The agenda’s preamble draws from Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which explores the Pope’s “dream of a ‘missionary option’”.