Held within the majestic setting of St Patrick's Cathedral in Parramatta, Australia, the Adult Confirmation Mass brought together people from around 20 parishes in the Diocese. It was celebrated by the Bishop of Parramatta, Bishop Vincent Long OFM Conv.

At the Mass, Bishop Vincent said the sacrament marked a pivotal moment in the Catholic faith journey of these adults - no matter their age, background or faith journey.

"May they who commit themselves to receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit live out their commitment as heralds of the Good News," Bishop Vincent said.

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The plan focuses on fostering a synodal Church aimed at strengthening inclusivity, collaboration and active participation within the diocese.

Bishop Vincent Long (pictured) launched the plan at an event which more than 220 attended.

Central to the plan is the emphasis on communal discernment, recognising the shared responsibility between clergy and laity in Church decision-making.

"Our journey has only just begun" Bishop Vincent said.

"As we move forward, we endeavour to institutionalise best practice in communal discernment, decision making and governance which would enhance the authority of the ordained and the rightful participation of the faithful" he said.

"Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we are strengthened by the encounter with Jesus as we embark on the journey of participation, communion and mission."

Sense of Faith

Reverend Dr Ormond Rush said the new Pastoral Plan is built on a framework of key shared principles.

These principles include the significance of baptism as the starting point for the Diocese's shared mission in the Church, as well as Sensus Fidei, meaning ‘sense of the faith'.

"We see this in how a person lives, speaks and acts as a follower of God. It helps us understand that everyone, not just clergy, can recognise true expressions of faith.

"It is this Sensus Fidei which propels us to work towards a Synodal Church by recognising the truth in what is said as we listen to others, to better understand our faith to make informed decisions, and to keep us on the right path" explained Rush.

Humility and openness

Bishop Long underscored the importance of a Church that listens and learns from its members, promoting a culture of humility and openness.

The new Pastoral Plan, shaped by insights from the 2023 Diocesan Synod, focuses on key objectives - creating an inclusive, humble and healing synodal Church; fostering a spirit of prayer and renewal; listening and reaching out to the margins; and encouraging collective journeying.

Five priorities have been set to achieve these goals:

• prayer
• mission
• formation
• listening and discernment
• building community.

The initiative is part of a broader effort by the Diocese of Parramatta to create a more vibrant and inclusive Church that remains relevant and responsive to the needs of its members and the world.

Sources

Catholic Outlook

CathNews New Zealand

The country's bishops have urged the Senate Select Committee on the Cost of Living to take action to mitigate the rising cost of living, which they describe as one of the country's most pressing policy issues.

"Every day, thousands of Australian families feel the effects of international crises, insecure job markets, inflation, rising interest rates and slow wage growth," says Bishop Vincent Long.

Long is chair of the Bishops Commission for Social Justice, Mission and Service.

Long said that basic household necessities such as groceries, fuel, energy and housing have become increasingly unaffordable for many Australian families.

The bishops' submission to the committee called for several measures to provide relief for families, including an increase in the minimum wage and policy changes to make housing more affordable.

"Economies exist to serve people"

According to the bishops' submission, a family of four with one income earner on the minimum wage would be 18 per cent below the poverty line.

The bishops suggested that calculating the minimum wage by factoring in the needs of families could address housing affordability issues, which they said is a problem for all Australians, but particularly for families.

"Economies exist to serve people and the bonds of family and community that make life meaningful," Long said.

"Raising a family is not a lifestyle choice, like buying a car or taking on a hobby.

"It is, instead, a fundamental commitment to the development of human persons, both of ourselves and our children.

"Australia's future depends on the social, psychological and material flourishing of its next generation, which is best facilitated through strong, loving families."

Long emphasised that the supply of affordable housing needs to be expanded, with a particular focus on setting aside a higher percentage of new residential developments as housing for low-income earners.

Sources

Australian Catholic Bishops Conference

Australian Bishops Full Submission

The synod will be known locally as the "Parramatta Way".

The Parramatta Way, held in two phases, in October this year and in mid-2024, will develop a pastoral plan and a "path of renewal" for the Diocese of Parramatta.

In a letter convoking the synod, Bishop Long said the synod would significantly impact how the community and mission are carried out in the diocese.

Bishop Long has been an active and enthusiastic promoter of synodality.

In a talk given on 25 January to Catholic school leaders in the area, Bishop Long emphasised the need for a "radical shift from the ‘business as usual' approach".

The "Parramatta Way"

The upcoming synod will build on the work done in the governance review and develop a pastoral plan to guide the diocese in the coming years.

The synod will also promote a culture of synodality in the diocese, which the reviewers recognised as the "Parramatta Way."

"I am proud to say that the Diocese of Parramatta is solidly on its way to becoming a synodal Church that Pope Francis is calling us to," said Bishop Long.

"The upcoming synod is an important step in this journey and will help us to renew our commitment to the mission of the Church in Parramatta."

According to Dr Elissa Roper, a key figure in the drafting process for the Plenary Council, synodality is "a call to listen in ever-widening circles of interest".

"We live with ideas, with pastoral plans, with curiosity, with pre-established solutions. But it's necessary to live with the heart.

"Living with our hearts means we respond as Jesus did to suffering and injustice.

"When Jesus looked at the hungry crowds and was moved with pity, the Greek word [in the Gospel] is splagchnizomai, this means to be moved in one's bowels or inner parts—that is, compassion that moves the very depths of your being.

"The church on the margins, on the peripheries of a comfortable and functional life, is where we see the value of compassionate guts."

Sources

The Catholic Weekly

The escape happened after South Vietnam had fallen to the Vietnamese communist forces in 1975, and my world descended into total chaos with an international embargo, wars against China and Cambodia, forced collectivisation and the insidious spread of what were termed ‘re-education camps' — but were really communist gulags.

My siblings and I grew up in a world of poverty, isolation, oppression and constant fear of what might happen to us or our loved ones.

Finally, my parents, who had escaped by boat themselves from North Vietnam in 1954, encouraged my siblings and me to escape.

The boat journey was risky, and there were far more people on the boat than it could carry safely.

By the third day, we'd run out of food, water and fuel and were at the mercy of the elements.

On the seventh day, we drifted near an oil rig, half alive and half dead.

Fortunately, we were rescued, and brought to a refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, where I stayed for over a year.

In December 1981, I was accepted and brought to a country I knew nothing about: Australia.

Here, I built a new life, and worked hard to become a priest, a dream that I had held since I was 13 years old.

Growing up in war and later transiting in a refugee camp, all I wanted to do was to help people who suffered, and so in Australia I was finally able to follow that dream properly, eventually even becoming a Bishop, something I never would have imagined when I was clinging to that boat on the ocean.

Today, even though it's been decades since I fled the war, it all comes flooding back as I see footage of people clambering onto planes.

Some of the images of people dangling off the stairs to aircraft in Kabul were eerily similar to what happened in Saigon in April 1975.

My Catholic faith compels me to try to address these kinds of injustices, ones that remind me of what I and my loved ones experienced in Vietnam.

I believe in the universal and inclusive love of God, a love that seeks to embrace all people, most especially those at the periphery, who are experiencing poverty and injustice.

I also believe that people of faith, and Australians more broadly, must stand for social and moral issues, because this is the only way that we can build the world we want to see in the future.

And this is a pivotal moment for us to step up and support those in need in Afghanistan.

I hope to see the same level of bipartisan support for Afghan refugees now as there was for Vietnamese refugees then.

We must offer additional refugee resettlement places for Afghan refugees immediately, as we did in 2015 for Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

Canada has already committed to 20,000 additional places for Afghan refugees, and we could match this offer to show that we are ready to shoulder our responsibility to those in need.

We must extend the temporary visas of all Afghan citizens in Australia so that they will not be at risk of forced return to a dangerous country, and extend permanent protection to any Afghans on temporary protection visas.

Finally, we must support family reunion applications for Afghan Australians whose families are in danger.

We need to support the Afghan people.

And we need to live up to our international obligations, and also live up to our status as a prosperous society, one with a courageous past that welcomed previous waves of refugees en masse from Asia.

Australia has changed for the better with each successive wave of new arrivals because people like me have brought our determination and drive for a better future.

We need to honour this legacy by showing the Afghan people our compassion and solidarity because I believe that this is the true identity of the country I have made my home. In view of our involvement in the war in Afghanistan, we also have a moral duty to do so.

• Bishop Vincent Long OFM Conv is the Bishop of the Diocese of Parramatta in Western Sydney and Chair of the Bishops Commission for Social Justice, Mission and Service within the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.
• First published in Eureka Street.
• Republished with permission of Eureka Street and the Diocese of Parramatta.

"It is hardly an exaggeration", says a Vietnamese-born former boat refugee, a survivor of clergy sexual abuse and Paramatta Bishop, Vincent Long.

There's an "unprecedented momentum for deep reform, the model of the Church based on clerical hegemony has run its course", the bishop said, 30 June, while delivering the Dom Helder Camara Lecture at Newman College, Melbourne.

For the Church to flourish, "it is crucial that we come to terms with the flaws of clericalism and move beyond its patriarchal and monarchical matrix," he says.

"We have struggled under the weight of the old ecclesial paradigm of the clerical order, control and hegemony with a penchant for triumphalism, self-referential pomp and smugness."

It has to change "into a more Christ-like pattern of humility, simplicity and powerlessness as opposed to worldly triumphalism, splendour, dominance and power."

He says he agrees with Gerald Arbuckle that we need to re-found the Church rather than renew it, going to the very cultural roots in a hope-filled journey under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

"What is urgent is that we need to find fresh ways of being Church and fresh ways of ministry and service for both men and women disciples. New wine into new wineskins."

Long says the tone for sweeping Church reform in Australia was set in 2016 when Archbishop Mark Coleridge proposed a Plenary Council to discuss "the critical issues of the times".

Concerns in Australia include dwindling Mass attendances, a decline in priestly and religious vocations and the critical and damaging public fallout of the royal commission into child sexual abuse.

Cosmetic changes, mediocrity or restorationism dressed up as renewal won't work anymore.

It will not be a simple restoration project or doing old things better; the Church needs to focus on new horizons says Long.

He says it will be a Church in which women and men are aware of their baptismal dignity.

"So long as we continue to exclude women from the Church's governance structures, decision-making processes and institutional functions, we deprive ourselves of the richness of our full humanity.

So long as we continue to make women invisible and inferior in the Church's language, liturgy, theology and law, we impoverish ourselves.

"Until we have truly incorporated the gift of women and the feminine dimension of our Christian faith, we will not be able to fully energise the life of the Church.

Long is of the view that the Church in Australia is uniquely positioned to move into a new fresh future.

The painful Royal Commission brought about a heightened level of consciousness and an unprecedented momentum for deep reform.

"The Church cannot have a prophetic voice in society if we fail to be the model egalitarian community where those disadvantaged on account of their race, gender, social status and disability find empowerment for a dignified life."

As he notes, Australians are offering goodwill, enthusiasm and hope in the Plenary Council.

"Could we be a leading light in the struggle for a more fit-for-purpose Church in this place and in this time?"

"Could Australian Catholics rise to the challenge and co-create the synodal Church that Pope Francis has envisaged?"

In October 2021, the Catholic Church in Australia will gather for the first Assembly of the Plenary Council.

The initial phase of listening drew nearly 220,000 people across Australia and 17,500 individual and group submissions.

These submissions were distilled into the six national theme papers and then further distilled again into the working document and finally the agenda.

Momentum for the Plenary Council ebbed and flowed during this process, which has been disrupted by the pandemic but by and large, there has been considerable goodwill, enthusiasm and even a sense of hope for the future of the Church in Australia

Submissions have been distilled into six national theme papers, which were further distilled into the Council's working document and agenda.

Source

• CathNews
• The Tablet
• Image: The Australian

It is a labour shortage echoed by a local priest!

"I wonder if I should turn out the lights in Church on Sunday?" he asked.

The priest does not want to be identified.

"You know the shortage of restaurant workers has a parallel in the Church", he commented to CathNews; adding, he is the parish priest of what were four parishes.

"How many more parishes will I have to take on?"

The priest acknowledged there were benefits in combining parishes; 'economies of scale'; one secretary, one accountant, one parish council, but said while these are vital roles, it is not really the point.

"They're hubs of faith", he said.

He thought the Amazon Synod might have delivered married priests, 'viri probati', he is now hopeful he will get help from overseas priests.

"It's either that (priests from overseas) or the Church needs to seriously think about how it can change its model of ministry in parishes".

The priest told CathNews that in his opinion Bishop Vincent Long from Parramatta has put out the challenge not only to Australia, but New Zealand too.

"Long's 'on the money', the days of a Church based on a clerical model are over".

Pressed, he agreed the Church takes a long term view but emphasised, "I need a solution, and if I'm honest, ideally now, but certainly soon".

Right behind the New Zealand synod, he is of the view the New Zealand Church, "at least", needs a decent organisational change strategy accompanied by a lot of prayer.

"I hope we all bring our ears to the New Zealand Synod conversations."

The priest acknowledged two of the parishes he serves are small, but does not think closing them down is the solution.

"It's certainly time to stop thinking in the old ways; shutting things down when one priest can no longer supply services in the same way, particularly in rural areas, disrespects people's lives, their faith and the Church's commitment to the local community".

The priest acknowledged parishes need priests, and then went on to say, "we're not the only component in parishes."

"We need to approach the various situations with pastoral sensitivity".

"We're not a branch of a bank that closes when the rent outweighs the number of transitions", he said.

"We need to approach the matter differently.

"We need to think differently".

"Gerry Arbuckle calls is it 'refounding the Church'.

"I always thought that was a 'tall order', but perhaps I should read his book again; this time with 'different eyes'".

The priest says he keeps a watch on the News and wondered at the time about the impact of the Government's new immigration settings.

Responding to the 'immigration reset', Westpac economists say the Government's announced review into migration settings will result in a "significant tightening" in the form of tougher skills requirements for new migrants.

The bank's Satish Ranchhod says a tightening in migration settings will see a big change when the borders reopen.

Net migration is likely to settle around 30,000 per annum which is about half of what New Zealand saw over much of the past decade.

Asking the priest if he was aware the Immigration Department has a special category for religious workers, the priest replied, "yes", followed quickly by, "And they don't have to buy a house".

"The fact is, for some time now priests haven't been coming and it seems they are not coming".

"It's post-lockdown and New Zealand is not open, the world is way off safely being fully open and I suspect we need to think differently".

Sources

• interest.co.nz
• Stuff
• Immigration NZ
• Image: Stuff

The initial phase of listening drew nearly 220,000 people across Australia and 17,500 individual and group submissions.

These submissions were distilled into the six national theme papers and then further distilled again into the working document and finally the agenda.

Momentum for the Plenary Council ebbed and flowed during this process, which has been disrupted by the pandemic.

By and large, there has been considerable goodwill, enthusiasm and even a sense of hope for the future of the Church in Australia in the post-Royal Commission period. Robert Fitzgerald who - among other prominent roles - is the new Chair of Caritas Australia, once enthused that the Plenary Council is the only game in town.

For a country of about five million nominal Catholics, the initial response was quite remarkable.

Perhaps, for many of the disenfranchised, it is the last throw of the dice. I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, though.

Some of you might have heard or even attended the first of the three convocation series organised by the Australasian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform (ACCCR).

There were 3,000 participants, including myself.

We heard a powerful and inspiring address by Sr Joan Chittister.

Catholicism "must grow up", she said, "beyond the parochial to the global, beyond one system and one tradition, to a broader way of looking at life and its moral, spiritual, ethical frameworks."

That is the kind of stretching of the imagination and dreaming of the transformation of the Church that many Catholics are thirsting for.

Few Catholics have any appetite left for cosmetic changes, mediocrity or worst, restorationism dressed up as renewal.

We have struggled under the weight of the old ecclesial paradigm of the clerical order, control and hegemony with a penchant for triumphalism, self-referential pomp and smugness.

We yearn for a Church that commits to a God-oriented future of equal discipleship, relational harmony, wholeness and sustainability.

The revitalisation and convergence of many lay reform groups in response to the Plenary Council is no small development for the Church in contemporary Australia.

It is a sign of the "growing up" that Joan spoke about.

Australian Catholics are growing up beyond the passive, subservient to the co-responsible agents for the transformation of the Church.

In Germany, there is a lay body called Central Committee, which plays a key role in their Synodal Assembly, including having one of its members as co-president of the said structure.

Perhaps this unique feature is part of the legacy of the Reformation in the German Church.

Is the Church in Australia in pole position for deep reform?

The Church in Australia is uniquely positioned to move into a new fresh future.

Yes, it is true that we have been humbled and reduced to near irrelevancy by the sexual abuse crisis.

The Royal Commission, though being the lightning rod, has also served as a necessary wake-up call for Australian Catholics.

Indeed, no other country in the world has conducted a similar national inquiry, which is as comprehensive in its scope as ours. This has brought about a heightened level of consciousness and an unprecedented momentum for deep reform.

In many areas, Australia punches above its weight.

• Could we be a leading light in the struggle for a more fit-for-purpose Church in this place and in this time?
• Could Australian Catholics rise to the challenge and co-create the synodal Church that Pope Francis has envisaged?

While the Plenary Council may not address all of the issues of importance, it is certainly worth the effort in discerning the roadmap for the future.

Recently, Cardinal Marx of Germany tendered his resignation in a personal gesture to take responsibility for sexual abuses by priests over the past decades.

In Chile, the bishops after a period of discernment offered to resign en masse for similar reasons.

This collective act of contrition is totally unprecedented, and it shows the depth of the crisis in the Church.

Whether or not we bishops of Australia should make the same radical gesture remains an open question.

However, what is indisputable is the need for deep institutional change that will restore confidence and trust in the Church. Nothing less than a root-to-branch reform that will align our minds and hearts to the Gospel will do.

What the Church needs is not simply a renewal or an updating of methods of evangelising.

Rather, what we desperately need is an inner conversion, a radical revolution in our mindsets and patterns of action.

Gerald Arbuckle speaks of refounding as opposed to renewal. This refounding means going to the very cultural roots and a hope-filled journey into the paschal mystery for mission under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Unless we genuinely repent of institutional failures and unless we convert to the radical vision of Christ and let it imbue our attitudes, actions and pastoral practices, we will not be able to restore confidence and trust in the Church.

Conversion is one of the key areas on the agenda of the Plenary Council.

It is framed in terms of our openness to learn and meet the needs of the world we live in.

As a result, the questions revolve around our engagement with First Nations peoples, with the marginalised and the vulnerable.

However, one wonders if conversion needs to be framed not just in terms of our openness to learn and meet the needs of others but also in terms of our examination of the Church's attitude and treatment of racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ individuals and others.

Until we have the courage to admit the old ways of being Church, which is steeped in a culture of clerical power, dominance and privilege, we cannot rise to a Christ-like way of humility, inclusivity, compassion and powerlessness.

There is a sense in which the Church must change into a more Christ-like pattern of humility, simplicity and powerlessness as opposed to worldly triumphalism, splendour, dominance and power.

Christians in the post-Royal Commission are like the Jews after the exile.

The future of the Church, like the New Jerusalem that the exilic prophets often speak of, will not be revitalised by way of simply repeating what was done in the past.

It will not be simply a restoration project or doing the old things better. Rather, we must have the courage to do new things; we must be open to the Spirit leading us to new horizons even as we tend to revert to the old ways.

Change of era and new way of being Church in the world

Many Catholics hope that the Australian Plenary Council of 2020 will see a change in a number of priority issues such as greater inclusion of the laity, the role of women, clerical celibacy et cetera.

While it is important that there is an openness and boldness to discuss these matters, what is more important is to envision a new way of being Church in the world.

The model of the Church based on clerical hegemony has run its course. Insofar as it is deeply embedded in patriarchal and monarchical structures, it is incapable of helping us to meet the needs of the world and culture in which we live.

We have long moved out of the Ancien Régime and the age of absolute monarchs.

We are on this side of the secular state and the rise of democracy.

Yet it seems that the deeply entrenched patriarchal and monarchical structures of the Church have failed to correspond with our lived experience.

For the Church to flourish, it is crucial that we come to terms with the flaws of clericalism and move beyond its patriarchal and monarchical matrix.

What is urgent is that we need to find fresh ways of being Church and fresh ways of ministry and service for both men and women disciples.

New wine into new wineskins!

The new wine of God's unconditional love, radical inclusivity and equality needs to be poured into new wineskins of humility, mutuality, compassion and powerlessness.

The old wineskins of triumphalism, authoritarianism and supremacy, abetted by clerical power, superiority, and rigidity are breaking.

It is worth noting that at the recent Synod on the Amazon, the synod bishops say they consider it "urgent" for the Church to "promote and confer ministries for men and women in an equitable manner.

"It is the Church of baptised men and women that we must strengthen by promoting ministeriality and, above all, the awareness of baptismal dignity," they state.

Beyond these generic statements, it remains to be seen how women can share in the decision-making power and institutionalised ministries in the Church.

The Church cannot have a better future if it persists in the old paradigm of triumphalism, self-reference and male dominance.

• So long as we continue to exclude women from the Church's governance structures, decision-making processes and institutional functions, we deprive ourselves of the richness of our full humanity.
• So long as we continue to make women invisible and inferior in the Church's language, liturgy, theology and law, we impoverish ourselves.
• Until we have truly incorporated the gift of women and the feminine dimension of our Christian faith, we will not be able to fully energise the life of the Church.

In the world where the rules are made by the strong and the structures of power favour the privileged, the Church must be true to its founding stories and responsive to the living presence of God.

It must find ways to promote a community of equals and empower men and women disciples to share their gifts for human flourishing and the growth of the Kingdom.

Our founding stories are those of emancipation and liberation.

• It is the story of Moses and the movement of the new social order against the tyranny of empires that lies at the heart of the prophetic imagination.
• It inspires Mary who sings of the God who overthrows the powerful and lifts up the lowly.
• It is the story of Jesus who washes the feet of his followers and subverts the power structures that are tilted towards the strong.

This narrative of the new reality that envisions radical reordering of human relationships was in fact the hallmark of the earliest Christian movement.

The Church must continue to embody the alternative relational paradigm.

This alternative relational paradigm turns the world's system of power structures on its head because it is rooted in the biblical narrative of the new social order of radical inclusion, justice and equality.

The Church cannot have a prophetic voice in society if we fail to be the model egalitarian community where those disadvantaged on account of their race, gender, social status and disability find empowerment for a dignified life.

Towards a Church of co-responsibility and synodality

Martin Luther King, Jr famously said that the arc of history is bent toward justice.

The parallel statement I want to make is that the arc of the Church is bent towards co-responsibility or synodality. Let me explain.

The way of being Church has evolved over the centuries.

When, after the early centuries of persecution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the early tradition of egalitarianism gave way to a more clerical and hierarchical governance system that actually took on many features of the Empire.

Throughout the long reign of Christendom and up to the Second Vatican Council, the Church often understood itself predominantly as a perfect society. Its institutional functions and dynamics were steeped in clericalism.

Ministries gradually became the domain of the ordained.

They were all subsumed under a very cultic priesthood (set apart for the sacraments). Even the ancient ministry of deacon became a casualty of the process known as the "cursus honorum". This means that no one could begin "the course of honour" unless he is destined and qualified for the priesthood (no married and certainly not women!).

The shift towards the celibate priesthood as the normative form of ministry effectively deprived the Church of the richness of ministries as attested by the New Testament.

At the Second Vatican Council, there was a shift in the Church's self-understanding.

The dominant metaphor of "a societas perfecta" gave way to a more biblical image of a pilgrim people.

The priesthood of faithful was rediscovered along with the affirmation that the working of the Holy Spirit was granted not to the ordained only but to all baptised. Ecclesial ministries were understood in such a way as to fully honour what Paul says, "everyone is given the grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ".

Pope Paul VI accordingly suppressed the minor orders and opened some of these ministries to the lay faithful.

Now some 60 years later (talk about the glacial speed of change in the Church), Pope Francis took a step further with two recent important decisions.

In January this year, he opened to women the "installed" lay ministries of lector and acolyte, previously restricted to men.

Then just a few weeks ago, he responded to an idea that sat untouched since the Council and established the installed ministry of catechist.

The Pope called for "men and women of deep faith and human maturity, active participants in the life of the Christian community, capable of welcoming others, being generous and living a life of fraternal communion."

Pope Francis affirms that ‘this path of synodality' is precisely what "God expects of the Church of the third millennium."

He gave new impetus to the doctrine of the sensus fidei fidelium, stating that the path of synodality represents an indispensable prerequisite for infusing the Church with a renewed missionary impulse: all the members of the Church are called to be active subjects of evangelisation and "missionary disciples".

The Church has entered a new era that is characterised by a crisis of a top-down centralised ecclesiology.

With Vatican II, the ressourcement and aggiornamento led to a more biblical paradigm of a pilgrim People of God, called to be the sacrament of the Kingdom and the prophetic witness in the world.

The emphasis on the superiority of the ordained gave way to an ecclesial communion based on common baptism.

Pope Francis has applied a critical lens through which the Church is renewed for the sake of its mission for the poor.

The Church is helped to decentralise and impelled towards the peripheries.

The Church, the People of God, should walk together, sharing the burdens of humanity, listening to the cry of the poor, reforming itself and its own action, first by listening to the voice of the humble, the anawim of the Hebrew Scriptures, who were at the heart of Jesus' public ministry.

Conclusion

The COVID crisis, the Pope says, has exposed our vulnerability.

It has revealed the fallacy of individualism as the organising principle of our Western society.

It has given the lie to a "myth of self-sufficiency" that sanctions rampant inequalities and frays the ties that bind societies together. If we want a different world, we must become a different people.

I wonder if the crisis in the Church today could be framed in analogous terms.

In fact, we are at a point in history where all the indications point to a perfect storm: sexual abuse crisis, near-total collapse of active participation, loss of credibility, shrinking pool of clerical leadership et cetera.

Some have likened the state of the Church to Shakespeare's state of Denmark.

It is hardly an exaggeration!

This monumental crisis above all has exposed the weakness and indeed the unsustainability of the clericalist model.

Hence, if we are to emerge out of this, we will need to boldly embrace a new ecclesiology from below that has regained momentum thanks to the prophetic leadership of Pope Francis. We must take up the call issued to St Francis, "Go and rebuild my Church that is falling into ruins".

It is not only possible; it is the most exciting time for us to construct a new future.

It humbles us to know that God is with us in the mess and even in the perceived irrelevancy of the Church.

It comforts us, too, to know that the Church was not at its best when it reached the heights of its power in what was known as Christendom.

It was the Church of the Catacombs that shone forth its best rays of hope ironically when it was poor, persecuted and powerless.

Christendom and for the most part of history, we have tried to be great, powerful and dominant.

It was no coincidence that Dom Helder Camara and many of his Latin American colleagues chose to make the so-called "Pact of the Catacombs" as a way to return to the roots and foundations of the Church.

They weren't just letting the fresh air of the Second Vatican Council blow away the cobwebs and the manacles. They were determined to recapture the original and radical spirit of the earliest Christian movement.

It may be a long and winding road to a vision of the poor, humble but empowering and leavening force in the world. But as Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "the only task worthy of our efforts is to construct the future".

I pray that this historic once in a generation Plenary Council may be an expression of such effort.

May we have the courage, boldness and parrhesia to move from the old paradigm of triumphalism, power and splendour to the new ways of being Church that will convey the freshness of the Gospel.

• Most Reverend Vincent Long Van Nguyen OFM Conv DD STL, Bishop of Parramatta - Dom Helder Camara Lecture.
• First published by Catholic Outlook. Republished with permission.