Members of an Australian collective calling for the Church to place greater emphasis on human rights are among speakers at the Root and Branch Synod, the lay-led and reform-focused event to take place in Bristol and online from 5-12 September.
The Australian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform – a collective of nineteen organisations calling for a more inclusive Church – has produced a book demanding changes to the agenda of the Australian Plenary Council, which is set to meet in October 2021.
The group will lay out its concerns at the Root and Branch Synod on Friday 10th September.
Among the demands in their book A Church for All: A Guide to the Australian Plenary Council and Beyond are calls for greater emphasis on social justice; including “equality for women, meaningful connections with First Nations’ traditions, co-responsibility and governance reform”.
In its agenda for their meeting from the 3-10 October, the Australian Plenary Council, a formal gathering of Australia’s most important Bishops, has stated that it will consider a variety of points, including how the Church might meet the needs of the most vulnerable, go to the peripheries, be missionary in places that may be “overlooked or left behind”, and how to heal the wounds of abuse, while learning to see through the eyes of those who have been abused.
However, the ACCCR has said that it finds the agenda inadequate: “The institutional Church has alienated many people who for years lived a sacramental life, including many who attended Catholic schools. It has now become irrelevant to the lives of too many of our people,” the group said.
The pro-reform collective has proposed a list of expectations, including that the Church “acknowledge the full dignity of women and LGBTQIA+ peoples” and that they “invite victims and survivors to have a voice at the plenary council”.
This comes amid national soul-searching following the final report of the Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia 2017, which called for a deep consideration and full response from the Church.
In 2018 Mark Coleridge, Archbishop of Brisbane welcomed Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s apology for historical institutional sexual abuse in the country. However many, including the ACCCR, feel not enough has been done to make amends.
The Church in Australia has also been criticised for its treatment of aboriginal people, and made an apology in 1996 to the “Stolen Generation” for its policy of removing indigenous children from their families to send them to Catholic boarding schools, under the guise of Christian “assimilation”.
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