Read Part I of this interview here: Australian Archbishop Costelloe tells Pope Francis ‘The church in Australia is alive.’
Within the second a part of this exclusive interview with America, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, S.D.B., the president of the Australian bishops’ conference, discusses the Plenary Council of the Church in Australia that was held from 2018 to 2022, of which he served as president. He explains that, unlike the German synodal way, the Australian Plenary Council didn’t have its origins within the abuse crisis. He goes on to discover the highest three priority conclusions that emerged from that historic event: take care of Indigenous people, the abuse crisis and the role of girls within the church.
The archbishop recalled that a couple of months after Benedict XVI appointed him because the ninth archbishop in Perth in 2012, the Australian government announced the organising of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. “This was, subsequently, a significant component. But even prior to that, we had already decided that we needed to do something to deal with the challenges facing the church. The sexual abuse crisis was there, we were all painfully conscious of it, but it surely wasn’t as if it was the one factor which prompted us to act,” the archbishop said.
“In reality, the announcement of the Royal Commission convinced us that we had, in a way, to place our plans for the Plenary Council on hold due to the urgency of responding in addition to we possibly could to the Royal Commission and the crisis that we were facing.” He recalled that the Australian bishops postponed the Plenary Council’s second assembly twice, first to reply to the Royal Commission’s report and again due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The fact of the sexual abuse crisis and the growing realization of the extent of it was very much a component of our recognition that we couldn’t just proceed business as usual. It was subsequently a really significant factor. But we didn’t initially call the Plenary Council in response to the Royal Commission.”
Look after Aboriginal Peoples
When the plenary commission finally met again, the archbishop said, three priorities emerged.
Archbishop Costelloe identified the primary priority as “the best way the Plenary Council, all through the entire journey, and really strongly within the second assembly, focused on the entire query of the Indigenous people in Australia, the Aboriginal people and the necessity for the church to make our response to their situation a significant priority.”
Elaborating on this, the archbishop said: “The issues of the Aboriginal people, like Indigenous people in every single place, I believe, include the dreadful degradation really of the best way by which a lot of them are forced to live. It is an element of Australia’s shame that here we’re, probably one among the wealthiest countries on this planet, and yet so a lot of our Indigenous people live in deplorable conditions.”
“It is an element of Australia’s shame that here we’re, probably one among the wealthiest countries on this planet, and yet so a lot of our Indigenous people live in deplorable conditions.”
He recalled that take care of Australia’s Indigenous peoples “has been a priority for the church for a very long time. But within the Plenary Council, there was a powerful recognition of it as a significant priority for the church moving forward.” This priority, he said, was reflected within the council’s final documents and was highlighted by the inclusion of Indigenous people as members of the council. It also stood out, the archbishop said, in “the presence of and respect for his or her spirituality and the incorporation of their spirituality into [the Plenary Council’s] liturgies.”
The 2019 Synod on the Amazon proposed a special liturgical rite for Amazonian Indigenous peoples. Asked if the Australian church had discussed an analogous possibility for its Indigenous people, Archbishop Costelloe said that they had but thus far have only agreed “that the celebration of the Eucharist may be influenced by and incorporate Indigenous culture and spirituality. A special rite does exist already but is just not widespread in Australia. It was authorized and is well known particularly within the diocese most north of Perth, Broome, which is basically a mission [diocese] to the Aboriginal people, a huge area but with only a few people.” He said there are ongoing attempts to integrate various elements of the Aboriginal culture into the liturgy, “but how far it is going to go, I do not know.”
The sexual abuse crisis
Although the council was not a direct response to the abuse crisis, “there was a really strong recognition that our response to this dreadful reality within the church in Australia could be very much a problem for us, and the continued business of the church probably for so long as any of us will likely be around,” the archbishop said. “The council desired to underline absolutely the need for an ongoing commitment to this.”
He added that the council recognized “that this is just not simply something previously. The damage which sexual abuse causes in people’s lives is ongoing. The council sought to specific our must take care of [survivors of abuse], to reply to them, and, equally, our must do all the things we possibly can to make the current and the long run a really different story for people than the past.”
He raised as specific concerns the way to welcome survivors who desired to return to church but struggled with trauma responses in those spaces and the “extraordinary lack of credibility” of the church in Australian society.
“All of this helps us to grasp why people speak, rightly I believe, of an unhealed wound. For thus many individuals the sexual abuse of the young has been and continues to be very damaging, primarily for the victims and survivors, for his or her families and their friends, but in addition for a lot of other people whose faith within the church has been so damaged. I worry that there are some who may never give you the option to search out a way through this tragedy.”
The archbishop added that “we handled the abuse crisis within the second assembly very in another way to the opposite issues. We handled it very much inside the context of, I’d almost say, a liturgical experience of lament, of sorrow, of apology and of a determination to proceed and deepen our commitment to the dignity, safety and security of all who engage with the church.”
The role of girls within the church
Archbishop Costelloe said the third major priority to emerge from the Plenary Council is “the role of girls within the lifetime of the church,” the talk over which led to a “moment of crisis.” The archbishop recounted that a series of propositions concerning women’s role within the lifetime of the church were all gathered into one complex motion. The motion passed the primary, consultative vote of the complete assembly with just over a two-thirds majority, but when it got here time for the bishops-only “deliberative vote,” the motion “just fell under” the two-thirds majority.
The result “prompted a moment of real distress and concern amongst many individuals, not only most of the women, but many individuals,” Archbishop Costelloe said. He was sick that morning and was not present for the votes but, he recalled, “I used to be called out of my sick bed to return and see what we could do. There was real distress amongst the bishops about all this as well.”
Over lunch, the bishops met and “realized that the motion was too complex, and so we broke it up into individual parts in order that each section might be voted on independently. We modified the method and allowed for further debate on the ground about these motions.” After some reorganizing of the motions and changes in wording, he said, “people felt that they were heard and that they may say what was of their mind and heart: It modified the mood completely.” In the subsequent two votes—the deliberative and the consultative—all the motions regarding women passed.
“There are some big theological questions around this whole idea of tying governance to sacramental orders, in the best way that we have now understood it…I feel there may be a theological issue here. It is just not only a sociological issue.”
“Since then, so many individuals have spoken in regards to the disruption as something like a Pentecost experience: There was the raging fire and the roaring wind, and we were capable of move forward,” the archbishop said. It was “one among the clearest indications that it wasn’t just members who were energetic on the Plenary Council: The Holy Spirit was at work as well.”
Asked to explain what the disagreement was over, Archbishop Costelloe said, “I believe it probably comes right down to the query of the governance issue within the lifetime of the church.” He explained that “the concept of girls taking up roles of great significance and leadership within the church has been a reality within the church of Australia, ever since I’ve been a bishop, indeed, longer than that.
“There was never any query in regards to the commitment of everybody,” he said, adding, “It was more a matter of what that may appear like in practice.”
The Salesian archbishop explained: “What I believe is at issue is the connection between the role of girls and the role of the ordained ministry. Even in the event you leave the ordination query aside for a moment, there remains to be an important must explore ways of engaging women in all other levels of the lifetime of the church in significant roles. There remains to be a variety of work to be done.”
“In my very own reflections,” he continued, “it seems to me that the undeniable fact that within the church ultimate governance is invested within the ordained ministry, and girls are usually not a part of the ordained ministry, is a big element of what’s a really difficult query.” Archbishop Costelloe said that as a researcher of the theology of ordination, he believes that this query is, at its heart, theological.
“There are some big theological questions around this whole idea of tying governance to sacramental orders, in the best way that we have now understood it,” he said. “I’m not saying that it will change or can change, or should or shouldn’t change, but I feel there may be a theological issue here. It is just not only a sociological issue.”
Responding to Pope Francis’ separation of the ability of Holy Orders from the ability of governance in his reform of the Roman Curia, the archbishop remarked, “This appears to be a really latest development, and I believe it’ll be very interesting to see the way it plays out.”
“Right now there may be an invite to the church to revisit the theology of ordained ministry and ask ourselves again, particularly in relation to Pope Francis’ vision of a synodal church, what we are able to discover because the unique and irreplaceable role of the ordained ministry—in other words, what is crucial and what is just not?” the archbishop said. “That is a very important query: one, I believe, which can still be there after the conclusion of the forthcoming synod.”