Members of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference gathered in Mary MacKillop Memorial Chapel on Monday for a Mass celebrated in the Melkite tradition. Source: ACBC Media Blog.
Melkite bishop Robert Rabbat led the Mass with prayers in English and Arabic. The Mass was concelebrated by all the bishops with Archbishop Anthony Randazzo and Maronite Bishop Antoine-Charbel Tarabay assisting at the altar.
Celebrating Mass in an Eastern Church tradition has become a regular part of the ACBC plenary program.
Bishop Rabbat became Eparch of the Melkite Church in Australia, New Zealand and All Oceania in 2011.
He told the bishops that since the 1960s, the Eastern Catholic Churches in Australia had journeyed from “being listed as migrant chaplaincies to being accepted as integral Churches within the Cattolica”.
“The journey we have made together is why I can celebrate the Byzantine Divine Liturgy today in this especially significant place for the Australian Catholic Church and do so with a bishop of the Maronite Syriac tradition and another of the Roman Catholic tradition,” Bishop Rabbat said.
“And what you see today is indeed the theme that I would share with you today, the unity of the Church which is made manifest in the diverse ways in which the faith is held and proclaimed, and in which the Household of the faith lives the life in Christ.”
He said Christians of the first millennium, when asked which Church they belonged to, would have replied, “but there is only one Church”.
“I wonder how many of us truly take to heart the words of the prayer offered by our Lord at the Last and Mystical Supper: ‘That they all may be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that you have sent me.’” (John 17:21)
He urged his fellow bishops to “seek to make that oneness ever more certain before the world”.
“I would suggest that here in Australia we can make a valuable contribution to the journey to the one Eucharist with the Orthodox Churches, our sister Churches, by working towards the regularisation of the date of Easter – and that as a pressing need, not simply something to be left to our successors,” Bishop Rabbat said.
FULL STORY
Melkite bishop reflects on Church’s journey (ACBC Media Blog)
