“THE pallium means that I as the Archbishop of Brisbane am profoundly in communion with the Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome and that really unless that is true then my ministry is an empty shell…”
Archbishop Mark Coleridge made the comment in the lead up to his reception of the pallium from Pope Benedict at St Peter’s Basilica Rome on June 29.
The 63-year-old archbishop received the woven strip of white lamb’s wool symbolising the authority given to an archbishop by the Pope along with 43 other new archbishops.
Joining him at the ceremony was fellow Australian, Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of Perth.
Before celebrating Mass in St Peter’s Basilica, Pope Benedict gave the archbishops from 23 countries the woollen pallium as a sign of their sharing with him authority over the faithful in their archdioceses.
Pope Benedict, after placing the pallium around the shoulders of new archbishops as they knelt before him, told them it was a reminder of their ties to heaven and earth and of their loyalty to Christ and the successor of Peter.
“You have been constituted in and for the great mystery of communion that is the church, the spiritual edifice built upon Christ as the cornerstone, while in its earthly and historical dimension, it is built on the rock of Peter,” the pope said during his homily on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.
But he added, the “church is not a community of the perfect, but a community of sinners, obliged to recognise their need for God’s love, their need to be purified through the cross of Jesus Christ.”
The ceremony in St Peter’s Basilica began with trumpets and Tu es Petrus sung by the Sistine Chapel Choir and the Westminster Abbey choir of Great Britain.
Archbishop Coleridge also expressed hope the ceremony would provide a boost to the work of re-evangelising Australia.
“It’s a shot in the arm at a time when I think we need that,” he said.
He noted the pallium “is a call not just to me as the archbishop who wears it but it is a call to whole Church to be more apostolic and you can only become more apostolic by entering into deeper communion with the See of Peter”.
