In January The Australian Bishops Conference invited Catholics to a ‘listening and dialogue session’ in anticipation of the Plenary Council to take place in 2020. I suspect this session on 6 February was merely the first step in softening up Australia’s Catholic population in preparation for the Council. The invitation provided the opportunity for a rich flow of the New Church rhetoric that reduces some of us to a catatonic state. Here is the mind-numbing text of the invitation:
Upcoming Plenary Listening & Dialogue Session
Calling all LGBTIQA+ Catholics, Christians and the broader LGBTIQA+ community, family, friends and supporters to come along for a safe and inclusive conversation.
What is discussed and determined by the Plenary Council will be based on a long listening to the Holy Spirit speaking through the voices of people from around Australia. This listening and dialogue process provides an opportunity to come together as a group to spend time thinking and talking about personal experiences of faith, life and church. Following this session, a submission will be made on behalf of the LGBTIQA+ community by Acceptance Melbourne, a community for LGBTIQA+ Catholics. The session will be facilitated by Kevin Meese (Catholic Mission) and Mary Ryan (Archbishop’s Office for Evangelisation). Other key collaborators include Ro Allen (Victorian Commissioner for Gender and Sexuality), Kaye Bradshaw (Collective Impact), Teresa Ma (Acceptance Melbourne), Bishop Mark Edwards OMI (Auxiliary bishop of Melbourne) and Fr Kevin McGovern (St Cecilia’s Parish, Camberwell South). This session is being held in partnership with the Victorian Government and Acceptance Melbourne. Health Care card holders please let us know if you require further assistance with travel costs. Privacy and confidentiality are assured.
I wonder that the authors of such announcements are not embarrassed by the regurgitation of the same deadening and ultimately meaningless rhetoric. Listening to ‘Holy Spirit’, dialoguing and other ‘spirit of Vatican’ buzzwords and phrases have meant in the past the charade of the Catholic left pretending to listen and dialogue but dominating the proceedings that lead to the imposition of their ‘vision’.
Let me make a prediction this far out from the Plenary Council. The Council will be a leftist farce with the outcome already decided. A huge amount of money will be spent in orchestrating that farce. The only question for the victors is how far they get in forwarding their agenda, an agenda that now differs little from the Marxist agenda of the secular left.
What other conclusion could you come to about the collusion of Church representatives with Australia’s first Marxist government headed by an ideologically drooling premier entertaining Stalinist measures against dissenters, a government virtually legalising infanticide, a government ramming through a program of indoctrination that aims to sexualise children from infancy? The Church is dialoguing with a bunch of state paedophile pimps. And down the road is the slow destruction of a decent man framed with the crime of child sexual abuse.