Catholica Sunday Commentary: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus XIII with Bishop Geoffrey Robinson

BISHOP GEOFFREY ROBINSON…

In cooperation with Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and his publisher, John Garratt Publishing, we have pleasure in presenting the end chapter meditations from his book which has created so much interest around the world. Today the reflection comes from Chapter Thirteen.

"A Government in which All Participate"

"I will be your God and you shall be my people." This idea, expressed time and again in the First Testament, expresses the essence of the Covenant, the great bond that united God and the people of Israel.

No people, however, can live its life with only a vast idea to guide it. People demand concrete expressions of the larger idea, homely, down-to-earth things with which they can identify. So the Covenant was made concrete in priest, prophet, king, law and land.

In the same way, beautiful ideas concerning participatory government, service of the reign of God within the hearts and minds of all people and the sensus fidei of the entire church will remain nothing but beautiful ideas unless they are given concrete expression in the daily life of the church.

It is, unfortunately, all too possible to accept the beautiful ideas, but reject all proposals for their concrete expression.

And yet a denial of imperfect and contingent expressions quickly becomes a denial of the beautiful ideas themselves.

“I come to practical issues that must be addressed if we are to avoid in the future the problems we have encountered in responding to abuse. It concerns a new understanding of how the church would operate in such a way that unhealthy ideas would find it much more difficult to become .entrenched” …Geoffrey Robinson

Credit: These meditations are taken from the end of chapter reflections in Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church — Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, published by John Garratt Publishing. We thank Bishop Robinson and John Garratt Publishing for permission to reproduce these meditations on Catholica Australia.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson who has degrees in Philosophy, Theology and Church Law, was Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of Sydney from 1984 until his retirement in 2004. In 1994 he was elected by the Australian Bishops to the National Committee for Professional Standards, coordinating the response of the Catholic Church in Australia to revelations of sexual abuse, and from 1997 until 2003 he was co-chairman of this committee..

We welcome your thoughts in response to Bishop Robinson's reflection in our forum.

[Sunday Reflections Archive]

The Mission of Christ, the Mission of the Church, the Mission of a Diocese Dominican bishop, Anthony Fisher, was installed as the Third Bishop of the Western diocese of urban Sydney, the Parramatta Diocese, on 4 March 2010. His homily delivered at the Installation Mass outlined his broad sweep of the Mission of Jesus Christ, the Mission of the Church, and what he sees as his personal Mission which he was seeking to invite the people of the Western suburbs of Sydney to embrace. Here at Catholica we think the homily offers rich food for reflection and discussion at a number of levels: firstly the evident thought put into the address, secondly in that the Western suburbs of Sydney in many respects are typical of the social challenges encountered in almost any major city of the Western world, and also because of questions that intersect with many of the discussions the community at Catholica engages in of the problems facing the Church today. Because of YouTube limitations the video is in three parts of 9m 54s, 5m 59s, 6m 12s (22m 5s total). [Catholica Editorial where we first drew attention to this homily] | [WATCH THE VIDEO]

Reports 013: 07 Mar 2010

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