16th Sunday Year C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2022

After four years in the making, the Plenary Council Meetings finished their task last weekend. What remains now is, hopefully, for the bishops of Australia to sign their names to the motions, send them to Rome for approbation, and then to begin [or continue] to put the motions into practice.

The first of the major issues considered by the Council revolved around reconciliation between First Nations inhabitants, here over 60,000 years, and the rest who have arrived only in the last two hundred or so years.

Other issues centred around ecological responsibility, including the contested issue of human-induced and highly-dangerous climate change.

For Catholics to accept such issues as thoroughly moral concerns will call for enlightenment and radical conversion — but as children of our Creating God, as brothers and sisters particularly of the poorest and most endangered nations of our world, we need to model to our world a community that takes these problems seriously.

The Council members also looked at what we have learnt, [and, sadly, have still to learn and do], from the shocking exposure of child sexual abuse in the Church. The systemic evil of clericalism needs to change — and we have hardly even begun.

Another issue of deep concern to many, if not most, Catholics was that of the participation of women in decision-making in the Church, and in the general exercise of both power and service. The Council eventually bit the bullet, and reaffirmed the equal dignity of women and men, not only in society in general but also in the Church. It re-affirmed women’s right to participate in the governance of the Church in various practical ways; and has requested that the Australian Bishops formally approach the Pope and ask him to consider seriously the possibility of ordaining women to the Diaconate.


After many ups and downs, the general feeling from Council members seems to have been that the guidance of God’s Spirit was powerfully tangible — right from the beginning, but particularly so towards the end. What was most important was that participants learnt in a “hands-on” way the effectiveness of the two processes that have come to be called synodality and discernment. Synodality called for a deliberate decision on the part of all present to say what they really believed, and why; and equally to listen carefully to each other. Discernment required them to listen also to God’s Spirit.

People inevitably differ in their ideas and attitudes and in the relative emotional importance they attach to these attitudes. It is normal to feel confident when they sense they belong to a group of seemingly like-minded others. That attitude of belonging is deepened when there is an opposing group of people who do not agree with them — who, they feel, do not belong to “us”. People align along lines of “us” versus “them”; and their primary aim becomes to win the argument at all costs and to impose their views on the unwilling but unsuccessful minority. Polarisation temporarily brings together people who may not in fact share many other ideas and attitudes. It compromises their personal uniqueness and forms a very shaky and short-lived togetherness. It is the way, sadly, that most political decisions are reached and that most people have come to take for granted.

Given that there will almost always be people who disagree with each other, and that polarisation invariably destroys community and cooperation, synodality presents a superior alternative. It presumes a sense of the equal dignity of everyone, based on our common humanity. Rather than seeking to win, is asks the question: “Given our uniqueness and inevitable differences, what can we agree on and act on together without feeling compromised?” For any one individual the outcome is rarely perfect. But it is something that all can accept honestly; and it takes seriously community, belonging and cooperation.

Perhaps as your homework for the week, you might re-read both today’s First Reading and the Gospel, and reflect on the cultural attitudes displayed there, both to the women involved in the two stories, and by the women involved in them; and ask: Did Jesus question the embedded culture of his day?