Tasmania is a beautiful place but it is also the least religious place in Australia, according to Hobart Archbishop Tony Ireland. Source: Hobart Archdiocese.
Citing a daily newspaper article about the expansion next year of provocative Hobart-based winter arts event Dark Mofo, Archbishop Ireland said: “We live in a place where religion is mocked and our values are questioned.
“Others feel simply that the gospel has nothing to say to them. We cannot respond to that reality with business as usual.”
He was speaking at a Synod Regional Listening Session in the Launceston suburb of Invermay on Saturday, as the Hobart Archdiocese progresses towards forming a synodal and listening Church.
About 80 clergy, religious and laity gathered at St Finn Barr’s Catholic School, following on from about 50 attending a similar session at St Brendan-Shaw College in Devonport, on October 31.
“The Synod speaks of a missionary synodal church, one that listens deeply, not to dilute the Gospel but to bring it more effectively to the world,” Archbishop Ireland said.
“Listening is not weakness. It is the way Jesus ministered.
“The Synod also reminds us that every baptised person is a missionary disciple … Synodality is about awakening the whole people of God for mission.”
Archbishop Ireland said the Synod was a response to a world of declining trust, increasing isolation and a crisis of participation.
“People no longer feel that they belong or that their voice matters,” he said.
“The Synod says that the Church must be a sign in a different way – a community of listening, participation and shared responsibility; a prophetic witness in a fragmented world.
“If we can become that kind of church here in Tasmania, we will already be evangelising.”
Archbishop Ireland emphasised that each diocese in Australia is travelling at its own pace in the synodal process; that synodality is not a program, slogan or item to tick off and forget but instead the ‘bishop, priests and people together on a continuous journey as the local Church’; and that if synodality does not lead to evangelisation it has missed the point.
Synod Project Officer Jane McKeown, who will represent Hobart Archdiocese as an observer at the Melbourne Archdiocese’s Synod in December, highlighted the importance of listening together and praying together.
By doing so, “we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit to journey together on a path that Christ is calling us to walk”.
FULL STORY
Synod heralds new era for missionary church (By Wendy Shaw, Hobart Archdiocese)
