When the Plenary Council’s Second Assembly opened last week, there were few who doubted that Aboriginal rituals would make some kind of appearance during the proceedings. It turned out that those rituals were a daily feature of the Assembly; while an Eastern Rite cleric excused himself for the duration of those rites each day, and a few faithful Catholics stayed and prayed the Rosary in silence, the majority of attendees enthusiastically appreciated the pagan “Welcomes.”

The “Welcome to Country” and “Acknowledgement of Traditional Custodians” have become de rigueur before progressive liturgies and other Catholic events, despite being a very late addition to Aboriginal culture. Mark Powell, in his informative article on the subject, states that the current iteration of the “Welcome” ritual was invented in the 1970’s, and it conveniently omits some of the less-appealing traditional elements, such as participants wiping themselves with their underarm sweat to ward off evil spirits.

Bishop McKinlay announced that Australia’s Novus Ordo liturgies will soon include the option of a new penitential rite which will “draw on Aboriginal spirituality.”

Mark Powell also documents some of the customs that should make our feminist mouthpieces shudder: the wife-swapping that was common among Aboriginals, and which was often employed when settling squabbles among the various tribes; the loaning to strangers, along with conjugal rights, of a tribe’s married and single women as an act of hospitality; and the “sex magick” which was involved in some indigneous rituals. None of those elements is acknowledged by those who promote the “Welcome” rituals within the Church. 

After the Assembly, one employee from the Bishops’ Council which deals with indigenous Catholics posted to social media that she has only just realised that the laity are not well catechised. This is hardly surprising when her department is constantly promoting a violation of the First Commandment at Masses and other events.

Bishop Shane McKinlay of Sandhurst was at pains to explain, however, that the obligatory rituals always precede the Catholic liturgies, and so (to his mind) could never be mistaken for Catholic rites. That gives little comfort when the average pewsitter doesn’t know Sacrosanctum Concilium from Cicero and complains because Father can’t wander off the sanctuary for the kiss of peace due to COVID regulations.

Putting aside the “Welcome” rituals, however, Bishop McKinlay announced that Australia’s Novus Ordo liturgies will soon include the option of a new penitential rite which will “draw on Aboriginal spirituality.” (This decision was apparently pulled from thin air as it doesn’t appear in the official Plenary documents.)  If the former abuse doesn’t confuse the people, then the latter one certainly will - and more than catechesis, priests and congregants at those Masses may need the services of an exorcist.

Accompanied on the sanctuary by a man playing an indigenous instrument, the woman acknowledged the area’s traditional landowners before “requesting permission” from the ancestral spirits to allow the Catholic Mass to go ahead.

The first “Welcome” took place before the Assembly’s Opening Mass when a non-Catholic Aboriginal woman addressed the congregation, opining that the Church needs to learn more about ancient Aboriginal beliefs. Accompanied on the sanctuary by a man playing an indigenous instrument, the woman acknowledged the area’s traditional landowners before “requesting permission” from the ancestral spirits to allow the Catholic Mass to go ahead.

Presumably getting the go-ahead, she held the microphone and looked at the video camera, apparently unaware that it was the evil Western civilization, and not her traditional culture, that had provided the cutting-edge technology along with the electricity to power it. Likewise, the beautifully constructed roof of the chapel which protected her from the elements, and the ornate pews holding her audience were gifts from the Christian west, quite a step up from the dirt-floored shack that her ancestors would have met in.

Once the Plenary sessions began, it was the Catholics themselves who took up the baton of the Amazon smile, chiding the culture that has brought them so much good and serving up new outrages each day. Apart from the Aboriginal rituals, most sessions included a bland paraliturgy such as the planting of a seed or the sprinkling of ashes. The almost ubiquitous masks made a liturgy of their own: to express compliance to the State, or perhaps they were worn to keep the evil spirits at bay.

Missing from the proceedings was any acknowledgment of the real problems being faced by Aboriginals today: the high rates of child abuse in indigenous communities, the chronic unemployment, poor education standards and alcoholism. Such is Australia’s modernised Aboriginal culture which in some areas has taken the worst from its colonists to add to the least noble parts of its own.

A nun stated that the pertinent motion was being redrafted because “we can’t leave … without something concrete that honours the equality for women and men in the Church.”

A protest staged by proponents of women’s ordination halted proceedings midweek, totally disrupting the finely-tuned process of voting on the Plenary’s thirty motions. The complaint was due to a controversial section of the agenda being voted down by the bishops. The motion had included a pathway for women’s ordination, and once the bishops’ decision was made known, a large group of delegates stood up, refusing to continue until they received the attention they sought.

After years of lecturing faithful Catholics on the need to “listen to what the spirit is saying” and scolding them for their rigidity, these angry men and women refused to accept the bishops’ rejection of their beloved proposal. One source told me that after the protest, the Bishops agreed to a redraft of the document as they were afraid of being “booed” by the rowdy mob. The same onlooker confided that a woman who did not agree with female ordination had to be ushered from the room for her own protection.

The reality behind the apparently spontaneous protest may be gleaned from the Day 4 media conference, where a nun stated that the pertinent motion was being redrafted because “we can’t leave … without something concrete that honours the equality for women and men in the Church.” The idea that “we can’t leave until we get what we came for” flies in the face of the organisers’ claims that the Holy Spirit was in the driver seat of the Assembly.

That redraft of that section apparently mentioned Our Lady for the first time among all the documents, although the version that has been made public does not do so. The new draft also inserts “motherhood” among the various roles Catholic women choose in order to serve the Church - a role that had hitherto been overlooked among the calls for well-funded theological posts, governance roles and other “meaningful” positions for women.

At the end of one day’s proceedings, a “final blessing” was performed by a young Aboriginal woman, who recited the Sign of the Cross in her native dialect.

Among the motions passed was the adoption by every parish and Catholic organisation of a “Laudato Si’ Action Plan”, to be established by 2030. Indigenous spirituality made another appearance in this section and our bishops voted to “listen to the ecological wisdom” of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.

The reformers did not succeed in having the term “LGBTIQ” included in the final draft, which they had hoped would legitimize their perversions, but plenty of references to “outreach beyond Catholic communities” and similar subterfuges were snuck in. The most problematic issues were moved to their own motions for subsequent votes: asking the Pope to reconsider application of the Third Rite of Reconciliation, which passed; examining a female diaconate should the Pope allow it, which also passed; a request for Canon Law to be amended to allow lay preaching, which was rejected, although the Bishops voted to revisit their local policy on this.

An entirely new section was added to Part 5, the section which was meant to deal with the Eucharist. Instead, there is little mention of Holy Communion, but instead a focus on lay ministries such as acolyte and lector. Startlingly, a motion to revise the English translation of the Liturgy to make it “more inclusive” suddenly appeared in the final draft and was passed, almost unanimously. It is possible that many of the bishops didn’t realise it was there: the offending passage was tacked onto the end of the major revision and hadn’t appeared as a motion in earlier drafts.

At the end of one day’s proceedings, a “final blessing” was performed by a young Aboriginal woman, who recited the Sign of the Cross in her native dialect. Astonishingly, there were no murmurs from the participants, the majority of whom are not lovers of Latin, asking for the prayers in English so that they could understand them. The Amazon facelift was complete.

When the great Brazilian statesman, Plinio Corrêa de Oliviera, predicted fifty years ago that the rejection of Catholic teaching and its models of governance would lead to a loosening of morals and ultimately to a revival of paganism, it was difficult to see how this would be achieved. There seemed to be no obvious connection between “collegiality”, and the rise of what he called “ecclesiastical tribalism.”

That is certainly is the vision that some have for the Catholic Church in Australia, and indeed, for the rest of the world: a church where everyone has a liturgical role presiding over a Christless sanctuary.

Now the connection is more obvious, as the disintegration of Church structures and a growing cultural egalitarianism threatens to level the God-given hierarchies of Church, State and family. As foretold by Plinio Corrêa de Oliviera, Gnostic “prophets” have appeared in recent times to shape a Church in which all Her members have voting rights, and for which a Synodal Way has suddenly been illumined.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliviera’s grim prediction that “nobody would be anything in the empire of Nothingness,” could be reapplied to the Synodal Church where “nobody will be anything in the church of Nothingness”.

That is certainly is the vision that some have for the Catholic Church in Australia, and indeed, for the rest of the world: a church where everyone has a liturgical role presiding over a Christless sanctuary; where everyone has a say in electing a no-one to perform nothing very special in a mediocre manner; where there are no distinctions between men and women, lay and ordained, Catholic and non-Catholic, and where a bland liturgical life is interrupted only by the hubris of a new “revelation” about “what Jesus really meant.” This is the Church the Pope has requested, a church with an Amazon face that destroys hierarchies, flattens  pyramids and is capable of “making a mess” out of every orderly proceeding.

Aboriginal ceremonies and the banal rituals cooked up by Plenary organisers were a perfect match for the Amazonian Synodal church, and our modern-day Noble Savages lapped up the magic and mysticism which was meant to substitute for supernatural faith. But a Church which denies Christ by replacing crucifix and icons with indigenous totems is a church of Nothingness. As it dances around the fire, it celebrates its own obsolescence.

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