- Inaugural Meeting of the Diocesan Pastoral Council

Our Archdiocese

Inaugural Meeting of the Diocesan Pastoral Council - Keynote #1

Inaugural Meeting of the Diocesan Pastoral Council

Keynote Speech #1

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Saturday 4 July, 2026
Salvatorian Retreat Centre, Currumbine

Just a little over one month ago, on the 28th of May, Pope Leo XIV gave an address to the members of the Italian Bishops Conference. In that address, he spoke of Synodality, reiterating, as he has done now on so many occasions, that this is the pathway which the Church must follow today and into the future.

As we inaugurate our Diocesan Pastoral Council with this first gathering here in Currumbine, it is important, and I hope encouraging for us, that Pope Leo continues to affirm not just the importance of Synodality, but also his conviction that it must become what he calls a permanent style for the Church – which means, of course, a permanent style for us here in our archdiocese.

I say this because the decision to reconstitute a Diocesan Pastoral Council here in Perth has been in response to the recent Plenary Council of the Church in Australia, and in response to the most recent Synod of Bishops which I believe can be seen, from our point of view here in Australia, as a fundamental confirmation of both the process and the outcomes of the Plenary Council. Both the Council and the Synod were explorations and at the same time manifestations of the synodal style to which we are being called.

At the heart of our Plenary Council was the central question of discernment: What do you think God is asking of us (as the Church) in Australia – or, in terms of our current gathering, in the archdiocese of Perth - at this time? Without realising it at the time we anticipated in many ways the Synod itself. The nature of the consultations we conducted, the process of gathering the fruits of that consultation together, the process of spiritual conversations which we developed as the tool for our discernment together, and the structure of the formal assemblies themselves, were all to be duplicated when the first assembly of the Synod of Bishops gathered in Rome in October 2023. I do not hesitate to say that the Synod organisers, and I was one of them, learnt a great deal from the experience of the Plenary Council of Australia.

I recently spoke about all this at a workshop on Synodality for the Heads of Agencies in our archdiocese as part of this year’s Mary MacKillop oration. I know that some of you were there, so I apologise for repeating myself, but I think it is important for us that I do so as we take what is really a momentous step in the life of our archdiocese.

The Plenary Council gathered its reflections, the fruit of an extensive three-year period of consultation, reflection and discernment, in ten decrees. I have them up on the screen, simply to remind you of them. Unfortunately, due to a perplexing delay in receiving what is called the recognitio from Rome, these decrees remain aspirational for the moment, although it is the case that many dioceses in Australia, including our own, are beginning to implement them, and have in fact been doing so for some time, acting on the presumption that, possibly with a few qualifications, they will be accepted by Rome as the legitimate voice of the Church in Australia.

What is very important, however, is that we remember that these decrees seek to express in concrete ways the results of the deep discernment which occurred not just during the two formal assemblies but in the years of preparation prior to those assemblies and in the period between the first and second assemblies. The initial preparation, consultation and discernment resulted in six themes which were framed as questions for the Church to consider. This morning I want to remind you of those six themes or questions, not because I want to tie our new Council to the past in any attempt to cut off ongoing discernment, but because I believe the questions capture yearnings in the hearts and minds of many of us which should continue to exercise our minds and hearts and keep us grounded in our deliberations as the work of the Council unfolds.

In reminding you of these six themes, I am also hoping to deepen our understanding that what will be new about our Diocesan Pastoral Council will be the fact that it is a body, or perhaps better a community, which seeks to discern the presence of the Holy Spirit guiding us as we place ourselves at the service of the community of disciples which we call the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Perth.

Before I remind you of these six themes, I want to recall something which happened along the way which, at the time and even more now as I look back, was a privileged moment of grace when the Holy Spirit guided us very forcibly.

Initially, the group which, over three days of prayer, reflection and discernment, received the results of the initial Australia-wide consultation and committed itself to distilling these results into key themes, identified not six but seven themes. As I mentioned a moment ago these themes were framed as questions. Each theme begins with the words, followed by the specific themes being considered. The first of the seven themes was this: How is God calling us to be a Christ-centred Church? Because the group approached this task with what Pope Leo has since called a synodal style, we were led, slowly but very surely, to the recognition that this was not one among many themes: rather, this was the main game! Guided, I am convinced by the Holy Spirit, (and let me say in parentheses that I am very slow to claim too quickly that anything we decide is the result of an unambiguous prompting by the Holy Spirit), we recognised that this first theme had to be inserted into, and form the foundation, of all the themes. Thus, the question which introduces each of the Plenary Council themes became this: How is God calling us to be a Christ-centred Church which is …

I cannot stress this enough. As the Diocesan Pastoral Council for the Archdiocese of Perth, we are nothing; we will have no legitimacy, and our deliberations and discernment will profit nothing for the Church in this Archdiocese, if we lose sight of this fundamental truth or allow it to slip out of our consciousness. Christ is our way, Christ is our truth, Christ is our life. The challenge I placed before the whole archdiocese, including myself, when I was installed as the Archbishop in March 2012, remains as relevant and as urgent today as it was then: our ask as disciples of Jesus, called together into the Church which is His body, is to restore Christ to the Church and restore the Church to Christ. This is not a slogan; it is not even a program. It is a call to conversion, and an invitation to which the Lord looks to us for our response. How is God calling us, the community of disciples who together form the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of Perth, to be a Christ-centred Church?

I am convinced that the only way for us to move forward is to grapple seriously with this fundamental truth of our faith and consider every challenge and every opportunity which might come before us as members of the Diocesan Pastoral Council with this fundamental goal in our minds and hearts.

It is in the light of this that I want to simply remind you of the six themes of the Plenary Council and suggest to you that as you read the Final Document of the Second Assembly of the Synod on Synodality you look for the many ways in which the Synod, over its long journey, identified and sought to respond to the very same themes, even if they were not articulated in exactly the same form as the Plenary Council of Australia expressed them.

It is not my intention today to focus directly on these questions or to begin a process of discernment about them in terms of how they might relate to our archdiocese. They might well become focal points for our agenda as it develops in the months and years ahead. My real purpose in bringing them to your attention this morning is to remind us that, in ways that were not perhaps so explicitly stated in earlier versions of the Diocesan Pastoral Council here in our Archdiocese, we are, in constituting this new Diocesan Pastoral Council, establishing ourselves very clearly and very deliberately as a discernment body. Our first and primary task will always be to consider any issues, challenges or opportunities which come before us from this fundamental perspective: in any recommendations we make, are we able to demonstrate how in practice these will contribute to our fundamental vocation to be a Christ-centred Church? Are we confident that the decisions we are proposing and the recommendations we are making are reflections of the mind of Christ?

In making this point so strongly, I am not for a moment suggesting that questions of practicality, financial responsibility, transparency, accountability, efficiency and good old fashioned common sense, have no place to play or are simply peripheral in our deliberations. On the contrary, they are clearly very important. But our overriding concern must always be the advice Saint Paul gave to the early Christian community in Philippi: you must have in you the same mind that was in Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5).

This leads me back to the address which Pope Leo gave to the Italian bishops just a few weeks ago. You all have a copy of it with you today. It is true of course that the Pope is speaking to a group of bishops and there may be some things in his address which relate uniquely to bishops.

But because the bishops are leaders in the Church, what the Pope says to them will largely apply equally to anyone who exercises any role of leadership in the Church - and membership of the Diocesan Pastoral Council means that in a way which is not true of the majority of people in our archdiocese, you share responsibility with me for ensuring that the Church here in Perth remains faithful to the Lord and to His gospel. At the same time, much of what the Pope says to the Italian bishops is applicable to every disciple of Jesus - but perhaps that is a discussion for another time.

At the beginning of his address, Pope Leo says this:

It is from the gospel that faith is born, as a living encounter with Christ, dead and risen, present in his Church. Today, in the context in which we are called to act, confronted with other perspectives on life and with unprecedented anthropological challenges, returning the Gospel to the centre is the gift that gives enthusiasm to our lives (as bishops) and the urgency that drives us.

We are called, therefore, to ask ourselves: what face of God do we allow to shine through in preaching, in catechesis, in the liturgy, in charity, in the life of our communities? (Pope Leo, Address to Italian Bishops, 28 May, 2026)

What face of God do we allow to shine through in all we do in the Church? It is not only the bishops of Italy who need to reflect on this question. It is an urgent question for us here in our archdiocese as well. As I reflect on this question, the first thing which strikes me is the phrase “the face of God”. We Christians answer this question rather differently to all other religions because we believe that in Jesus we do in the fullest sense possible encounter God. For us, Jesus is not simply a man sent by God, a man who speaks in the name of God, a man who brings into the world a deeper understanding of who God is than any other man or woman has ever done. Jesus is all of this, and more: because of what we believe about the Trinity and because of what we believe about the incarnation, Jesus is not simply a messenger from God but rather God among us as one of us. The question about the face of God is fully answered in Christianity by gazing on the face of Jesus, as Pope St John Paul II would express it. I am always drawn back to Pope John Paul's statement that the witness of Christians before the world will be hopelessly inadequate if we have not first contemplated the face of Christ. (John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte16)

But in reflecting on this statement of Pope Leo, I am also struck very much by the word “allow”. What face of God, of Christ, do weallow to shine through? All of a sudden, the Pope shifts the focus to our responsibility. If we as Christians accept that we are, as the scriptures tell us, the body of Christ with Christ as our head, then the way we act, the way we choose to act, and indeed the way we uncritically allow ourselves to continue to act, become very serious and urgent matters for courageous discernment.

Once again this brings me back to Saint Paul’s challenge: you must have in you the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. No doubt, like me, you have often heard people suggest that in making decisions in a Christian setting it is really quite simple: you simply ask yourself, “what would Jesus do?” and then go and do the same. In theory this is absolutely correct – but, of course, it depends on how confident you are, and indeed how confident the rest of us can be, that what you think Jesus would do (which more often than not corresponds with what the person making the suggestion has already decided he or she wants to do) is actually a reflection of the mind of Christ.

This points to a fundamental responsibility, which is also a potentially hope-filled invitation, to all members of our Diocesan Pastoral Council to immerse ourselves as fully as we can in an ongoing journey of discovery of the Christ of the gospels and of the Church’s tradition. If we are to have in us the same mind that was in Christ Jesus and be well equipped to make wise decisions and recommendations about the ongoing life of the Church in our archdiocese, we will need to bring open and humble hearts to this task. There may be things we have to “un-learn” about Jesus as well as new things to discover and deeper dimensions to explore to what we already know.

In this respect I might comment briefly on a gospel passage which I think can become a “cautionary tale” for all of us as we enter into the work of our DPC. I am referring to the encounter between Jesus and Peter as it is found in Matthew’s gospel:

Matthew 16:13-23 The encounter between Jesus and Peter: Peter’s confession of faith and Jesus’s rebuke of Peter.

It is possible to “get Jesus right” and “get Jesus wrong” all at the same time. No-one could doubt Peter’s love for Jesus, or his sincerity, or his desire to follow Jesus faithfully. None of that protected Peter from allowing his own preconceptions of who and what Jesus should be to blind him to the truth about who and what Jesus really was. We are all subject to this confronting possibility, both in terms of who Jesus is and in terms of what the Church, the Body of Christ, is. It will require great honesty, openness and humility from us – a preparedness to look again at things we had previously presumed to be absolutely fixed and certain – if we are to be trustworthy and faithful discerners of “what God is asking of us in our Archdiocese at this time” as we seek to become a Christ-centred Church.