Church in the World

New life in Church, says archbishop

Australia

THE new Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn has declared that while the Australian Church was passing through a time of diminishment, surprising new growth prompted initially by the Second Vatican Council was now evident that required "a new kind of apostolic imagination".

Archbishop Mark Coleridge, in his homily at his installation in the national capital's St Christopher's Cathedral on 17 August, said that, like Abraham before he responded to God's call, Australia was in many ways rich and successful, but there was also something missing deeper down.

"Now is the time for a new kind of apostolic imagination, a kind of lateral thinking in the drive to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus in fresh and powerful ways that go to the heart of Australia," Archbishop Coleridge told more than 700 people, including political leaders, diplomats and interfaith representatives.

The 57-year-old former auxiliary bishop of Melbourne succeeded Archbishop Francis Carroll, who until this year was president of the Australian bishops' conference. "It's plain to see that the Catholic Church in Australia is in some sense passing through a time of diminishment, and there are some who think that this is a process of terminal decline, that we who remain are the last of a dying tribe," Archbishop Coleridge said. "A young Church, it seems, has grown old very quickly. If that is the case, then perhaps the best we can manage is to circle the wagons in some self-protective manoeuvre that might delay the end a little.

"I see things differently, however. To my eye, the Catholic Church in Australia is like the ageing Elizabeth of whom we have heard in the Gospel just proclaimed. She is pregnant against all the odds ... There is something stirring in the old, seemingly barren womb of Mother Church in this land, and it's all God's work."

Archbishop Coleridge said that for all that had happened in the past 40 years, the Church was still in the early days of the great renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council. "The buds of new growth are there, though they are not always the buds we expected or in the places we might once have looked," he said.

"What is increasingly clear to me is that in the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Spirit was seeking to stir in the whole Church new energies for mission. The Council was not about renewal of the Church for the Church's sake, but about renewal, new energy, for the Church's mission in the world."

Back to the front page