The nine-month celebration phase of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia ended on Saturday, with Council Members standing and applauding as president Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB formally declared the Council closed.

Members of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia should persevere in their prayers to the Mother of God, Bishop Paul Bird CSsR said on Friday morning. The Bishop of Ballarat was the homilist during a Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary to open the final full day of proceedings. Just like the early Christian community who gathered in prayer with the Blessed Virgin, Bishop Bird said, “the mother of Jesus is with us, as she was with those first disciples”.

On the final full day of the Plenary Council, Members have celebrated the passage of almost all motions contained in the Motions and Amendments document that formed the second assembly’s agenda.

Eighteen of the 19 motions considered on Friday passed. All five motions in Part 4 of the document, entitled “Witnessing to the Equal Dignity of Women and Men”, passed decisively.

After a change to the program, Plenary Council Members have been reflecting on four parts of the Motions and Amendments document on Thursday, assisted by input from the theological advisors to the Council. Members are expected to address Parts 5 to 8 today, with a range of votes to happen during the day. The Members heard reflections from the advisers, also known as periti, on Parts 5 and 6 on Wednesday. They were asked to reflect upon whether the motions considered would help the Church to be “transparent to the grace of God, and the hope that we have in Christ”.

Those gathered for the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia are following in the footsteps of the early Christians, Cardinal John Dew said at Mass on Thursday evening. The Archbishop of Wellington, one of the observers at the Plenary Council, was the homilist for Mass celebrated on the memorial of Blessed Peter To Rot, Papua New Guinea’s first Blessed. In his homily, Cardinal Dew spoke about the faith and devotion to Blessed Peter, a lay catechist and martyr who suffered persecution during the Second World War.

Plenary Council Members have passed all six motions they considered on Thursday across parts of the agenda in the areas of Church governance and integral ecology. Among the reforms backed were a call for the establishment of diocesan pastoral councils across the country, the hosting of diocesan synods within five years of the conclusion of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia and the undertaking of broad consultation about the creation of a national synodal body for Church collaboration. Those were captured in the four motions that emerged from Part 7 of the Council’s Motions and Amendments document entitled “At the Service of Communion, Participation and Mission: Governance”.

Members of the Plenary Council are being invited to spend additional time to discern after two motions did not achieve a qualified majority in voting that has taken place over the past 24 hours. 

The outcomes of the consultative and deliberative votes for motions of parts 3 and 4 of the Motions and Amendments document published last week have been announced. They can be found on the Plenary Council’s Motions and Voting page on the Council’s website. 

The Members of the Plenary Council have spent Wednesday afternoon working together to reconsider a pair of motions that were not passed earlier in the day. In the first afternoon session, an overwhelming majority of Members backed a motion to reconsider the two motions from Part 4 of the Council’s Motions and Amendments document entitled “Witnessing to the Equal Dignity of Women and Men”. At least half of the Council’s 277 Members had to support the motion to reconsider before it could proceed to a deliberative vote. The motion then received almost unanimous support in the deliberative vote, which required a two-thirds majority.

Members of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia were encouraged on Tuesday evening to embrace the “new and demanding urgency” of ecumenism.

Bishop Michael McKenna, the chair of the Bishops Commission for Christian Unity and Inter-religious Dialogue, celebrated Mass at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral for the unity of Christians.

Darwin Bishop Emeritus Eugene Hurley, during his homily, reflected on the fact that when he was ordained as a bishop, he took the motto “Ut Unum Sint”, a Latin translation of Jesus’ prayer to the Father: “That they may be one” (John 17:2).

At the beginning of the second full day of the second assembly of the Plenary Council, members received input from two of the Council’s theological advisers — or periti — on topics being considered on Tuesday.

Speaking to the theme “Called by Christ: Sent Forth as Missionary Disciples”, Fr Patrick McInerney SSC quoted from the Vatican II document Ad Gentes, which he described as “revolutionising our understanding of mission”.

At the end of the first full day of proceedings, the Members of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia were invited to receive more deeply the Holy Spirit “who will console us and lead us to the truth”.

The day concluded with a Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit at St Mary’s Cathedral, celebrated according to the Ukrainian Rite by Bishop Mykola Bychok CSsR. In his homily, Syro-Malabar Bishop Bosco Puthur invited Members to think of the Church as a “communion of Churches” rather than considering it to be a “monolithic” entity.

The Members of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia were urged to “cling to the cross” and “ask the Holy Spirit to help us” as they commenced the Council’s second assembly on Sunday evening.

The opening Mass of the second assembly began with a heartfelt Welcome to Country ceremony that included an apology to First Nations peoples on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday

The four-year journey of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia is about to reach its high point, with Members gathering in Sydney this weekend for the start of the Council’s second and final assembly. “For the 277 Members, most of whom have been walking this journey for almost two-and-a-half years, this has something of the feel of a grand final,” Plenary Council president Archbishop Timothy Costelloe SDB said. “We have been preparing spiritually, emotionally, psychologically and in all sorts of other ways for some time, and we have reached this pivotal moment.”

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’”.