Launch of new Parish website
Fr Bill, Friday 15 July 2022
Our Parish is about to launch its new website and if all goes well, and the countdown is completed, the launch will take place during this coming week. Even after launch there will still be work to do on the site, material to upload and bugs to be ironed out, so please be patient with those trying to bring this project to fruition. As we prepare to transition from our current website to this new platform we thank John Costa who over many years has initiated, developed and maintained our current website ensuring that our parish has been at the forefront of online information for those seeking not just information on the parish but news from sources far and wide bringing the Universal Church into the reach of parishioners week by week. We thank John not just for the thousands of hours he must have spent, week by week, as our Webmaster, but also for the endeavour and commitment in bringing to us the rich diversity of news and views from sources from around the world.
Parish Redevelopment Project Update
Sad Essential Step – Sale of Mother of God Church
Pat Kelly, Project Manager, 15 July 2022
The Roman Catholic Property Trust, the owner of all church property within the Archdiocese of Melbourne, has engaged Colliers as agents for the sale of the Mother of God Church at 56 Wilfred Road, East Ivanhoe. Expressions of Interest for purchase of the property will be placed in commercial real estate publications around the end of July 2022. The terms of sale provide for the church to be used until all parish activities and assets are located to the redeveloped Mary Immaculate site and our new Mary Mother of the Church Parish Centre.
Letter from Archbishop Peter Comensoli on the 5th Australian Plenary Council
To all of Christ's faithful in the Achdiocese of Melbourne
15 July 2022
Australia’s historic Plenary Council ended on Saturday with a Mass
and approval of a final statement by the 277 Council members that “The
Holy Spirit has been both comforter and disrupter”. The Council’s final six-day assembly in Sydney included tense and difficult moments, especially last Wednesday (July 6) when the assembly was left in disarray after two motions aimed at promoting women’s roles in Church did not pass. The motions were redrafted and five, reshaped motions relating to the role of women in the Church went to a vote on Friday and passed. Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge who flagged a Plenary Council in 2016,
said decisions made after voting on dozens of plenary motions would
“have their effect in communities all around Australia”. “These
are not decisions made on Planet Mars, they are really quite concrete
decisions that will have all kinds of effects seen and unseen upon the
communities that make up the Catholic Church around Australia,”
Archbishop Coleridge said. “I can’t predict in detail what those effects will be, but I know that they’ll happen over time.” The
final statement said the Council had been an “expression of the
synodality that Pope Francis has identified as a key dimension of the
Church’s life in the third millennium”. “Synodality is the way of
being a pilgrim Church, a Church that journeys together and listens
together, so that we might more faithfully act together in responding to
our God-given vocation and mission,” it said. The statement
agreed with Pope Francis’ assessment that synodality is “an easy concept
to put into words, but not so easy to put into practice”. Townsville Bishop Tim Harris agreed the Council assembly had been a “powerful and palpable experience of synodality. “And I think that now we’re at the end it’s proved to me that what the
Pope has asked us to do is the right thing to do… the end of the Plenary
is now the beginning of the implementation,” he said. The Plenary Council directly engaged with some of the tough issues
that have confronted the Australian Church – First Nations recognition
and identity, historic child sexual abuse and the safeguarding that is
now needed, and the place of women in the Church. The Plenary
attempted to capture the major issues affecting contemporary Churh life
in Australia, hearing from 222,000 people and the contribution of 17,457
submissions. Now, after final voting, dozens of motions will be scrutinised in the weeks and months ahead. The Plenary concluded with Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral in central
Sydney on Saturday morning. Earlier Council members confirmed the
decrees of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia, which were then
signed by all bishops present. After a November meeting of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the decrees will be sent to the Holy See. Once
recognitio is received by the Holy See, the decrees will be implemented
and become the law of the Church in Australian six months later......(MORE) Photo: Plenary Council expression of synodality Mark Bowling Catholic Leader 20220711
2nd Assembly Results of first six Plenary Council votes announced
Extract from CathNews, ACBC Media Blog, 5 July 2022
The
outcome of the initial rounds of voting for the Fifth Plenary Council
of Australia were announced yesterday, with all relevant motions being
passed with a qualified majority. Members of the Plenary Council
voted on six motions from the Motions and Amendments document. Prior to voting, the members agreed on three amendments. Under
the Reconciliation: Healing Wounds, Receiving Gifts theme, the members
voted to pass a motion that would, among other things, commit the Church
to say sorry to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the
part played by the Church in the harm they have suffered, as well as
endorsing the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The members
voted for Catholic schools, parishes, dioceses and organisations to
respond to recommendations contained in the National Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council position paper “Embracing
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Life of the Catholic
Church”. Members also approved a motion for
the Bishops Commission for Liturgy and NATSICC to "develop options for
the liturgically and culturally appropriate use of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander symbols and rituals in Catholic liturgical contexts”. The second theme considered was Choosing Repentance – Seeking Healing. The
members voted for the Plenary Council to say sorry to abuse victims and
survivors, their families and communities and recommit the Church to
respond with justice and compassion to those who have suffered from the
trauma of abuse. The members voted to
request the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Catholic Religious
Australia, and the Association of Ministerial PJPs, with assistance from
appropriate experts, to study, acknowledge and address systemic factors
which have facilitated abuse within the Church. The members
also voted to adopt a new name for the annual Safeguarding Sunday, and
for the Bishops Commission for Liturgy to develop appropriate rituals
and liturgical resources to be offered to parishes for use on the
day. The full details of the motions and votes can be found online at the Motions and Voting page of the Plenary Council website....(more). Photo: Plenary Council members vote on a PC motion ACBC, Fiona Basile, 5 July 2022
Towards a new hopefulness
Extracts from Gail Freyne*, Pearls & Irritations, John Menadue website 3 July 2022
....When Joan Chittister toured Australia these past six weeks a whole lot of hope washed over us.
And
a very big meeting was opened: Thousands of us bought tickets to hear
her in person, nearly two thousand in Melbourne, eight hundred in
Adelaide, eight hundred in Sydney, eight hundred in Brisbane and they
were just the public events. Privately, she spoke to hundreds at a
gathering of Catholic Religious Australia, for her ‘family’ of Good
Samaritan Sisters and Benedictines, and for Mater Health with its ten
thousand employees. Most of these events
were recorded for national and international viewing, many for religious
working overseas. More thousands tuned in to the programme, ‘Soul
Search’ on ABC National radio, and on ABC South Australia. Thousands
watched a Zoom presented by ACCCR, read interviews in the Adelaide
Advertiser, they watched her on The Drum on ABCtv, and listened to her
in conversation with Rachael Kohn, Geraldine Doogue and nationally on
Zoom conversation with John Warhurst for the states she was unable to
visit: Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. And, of
course, for those in hospital, jail, aged care and the far reaches of
the continent who were unable to attend in person. Finally, she spoke to
two hundred and fifty of our 14-17 year old students from eighteen
Catholic high schools in the Melbourne Archdiocese. They,
the hope of the side, blessed with a privileged education, were urged
to take the responsibility of being a Public Intellectual in the
tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. Why did all these people turn up or tune in? One
religious superior put it to me very succinctly: “Joan is an orthodox
Catholic to her core”. She is not contradicting church teaching, she is
asking us to live it and live it faithfully and more abundantly.........Here
we are taught a theology that gives us all we need and yet it is a
theology that for nearly five hundred years we backgrounded. The Council
of Trent, concluding in 1563, was concerned not so much with orthodoxy
but with reform: to abolish the sale of relics and indulgences, to
critique the shallowness of church governance, the extremes of sexual
and financial misbehaviour of our clerics that seem eerily close to our
church today. Happily, this time we have a
Pope who teaches that our problems arise from the still present evils of
that clericalism and the hierarchy’s refusal to adopt the reform
centred Council, Vatican II. Pope
Francis has told us that the failure to implement the reforms of Vatican
II is central to the dysfunctional situation in which the church finds
itself today. Sr. Joan explains: “this Council called upon the church to be the church that the church was meant to be”........(More). *Gail
Grossman Freyne, PhD, LL.B, Vice President of Catholics for Renewal,
Founding Member, Women’s Wisdom in the Church (WWITCH).