PRESIDENT of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Perth Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, has challenged leaders from the Catholic health and aged care services to use the example of the Plenary Council as a “Christ-centred” way to operate in the future.
Decision making at the Plenary Council was based on “synodality”, that is often defined as “journeying together as the People of God”.
“… we should be making our decisions not just as a corporate body, or something like that, but also as a group of disciples,” Archbishop Costelloe told delegates at the Catholic Health Australia National Conference 2022, being held in Brisbane.
Catholic Health Australia (CHA) is Australia’s largest non-government grouping of health and aged care services and makes up about 10 percent of hospital-based healthcare in Australia. Members provide around 25 percent of private hospital care, 5 percent of public hospital care, 12 percent of aged care facilities, and 20 percent of home care and support for the elderly.
Archbishop Costelloe said it was fundamental that decisions be made that are “Christ-centred”, conceding this was “not the normal way of making decisions that most of us experience in many other settings”.
He said the Plenary Council second assembly completed six weeks ago had demonstrated “the complexity, the challenge and the treasure of synodality”.
“This call to synodality, to deep reflective listening, should be the way we all try and discern how we’re supposed to be moving forward into the future,” Archbishop Costelloe said.
“As a community of disciples of Christ, I would say we are still at the very beginning of this journey.
“One of my hopes is that we’ll always have more to learn about this journey of discernment.
“For that to happen, I think we’re all going to need to reflect deeply on our own situations.”
Based on this, Archbishop Costelloe spelt out the challenge facing CHA delegates.
“The greatest challenge facing Catholic Health Australia today is to return Catholic Health Australia to Christ and return Christ to Catholic Health Australia,” he said.
“I’m not saying that to be critical in any way. I just think it captures beautifully something that’s absolutely essential for all of us.
“If the Church isn’t that [Christ-centred], not just in theory, but in day-to-day practice, I do think we run the risk of losing our way.”
He said it was easy to get caught up in routine challenges of responding to government regulation, demands from people in our hospitals “and all the rest of it”, that “ we lose the fundamental ground on which everything we’re trying to do rests”.
“Reading the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel is again, another challenge,” Archbishop Costelloe said.
Using the Latin phrase Norma Normans Non Normata, he said reminds us that God’s word comes first, not our own and not our culture.
“The scriptures are the norm against which everything else should be evaluated,” Archbishop Costelloe said.
“It doesn’t go the other way. We don’t evaluate the scriptures and pick and choose out of them.
“On this basis we look at the signs of the times and begin to discern what we might be being called to because of them in the Gospel.”
