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RELIGION

The Plenary Council must address structural inertia and church decline

  • 25 February 2021
Two documents from and about the church in Australia issued in December last year should be compulsory reading for all Plenary Council (PC) delegates. They offer crucial insights into the state of the church in Australia, and taken together they paint a picture of church inertia and decline.

The first, The Australian Catholic Mass Attendance Report 2016 issued by the National Centre for Pastoral Research (NCPR) is a portrait of contemporary church decline despite the data being almost five years old. The second, the Response of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to The Light from the Southern Cross: Co-Responsible Governance in the Catholic Church in Australia (LSC) report is so averse to taking a national view on the major matters of church governance that it verges on national inertia.  

The Bishops’ response addresses the 86 recommendations in the LSC report. Their responses range from agreed, agreed in principle, outside their competence (competence apparently being either with individual bishops and dioceses or the Vatican) and not agreed. Their general remarks range from being highly complimentary of the report to expressing extremely worrying assumptions about the church. In the latter category is the remark that for Catholics the hierarchical structure of the church is a given. This tendentious remark is served up without explanation.  

The bishops’ response is inconsistent and ultimately negative on the matter of one of the report’s key recommendations, mandated diocesan pastoral councils, which they discuss in various parts of their response. At one stage they advise that Canon Law allows and even encourages them, but it does not mandate them. On another occasion they suggest that authoritative church pronouncements encourage them but leave them voluntary. The ACBC refuses to bite the bullet and does not even encourage them for Australian dioceses.  

The context of this inertia is the ACBC’s understanding of its own role, which it accuses the LSC report of misunderstanding. It concludes that other than in 'very limited ways', it 'does not govern the church in Australia; nor does it have oversight over individual bishops'. It is not 'a supervisory layer above the individual Bishops and their dioceses'.  The ACBC steps back much further than is wise.  

The Bishops’ response lacks a positive statement of the collective role that the ACBC might play. It is strong on what it cannot do (no governing, supervision, oversight, or even receiving annual reports from dioceses), but fails to take the opportunity
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