Keynote speakers

For me, Donald Cozzens humbly inserted the human heart into our changing priesthood, with integrity and humour. Geraldine Doogue focused her ABC lens on the value of daily allotted tasks and on the wisdom that our secular society can teach our church and us.

David Tacey uncovered real spirituality and pre-evangelisation in his Latrobe University students. And Richard Lennan let me be my own person of hope, facing the sacred interruptions of life through the lived context of classic and modern theologies and philosophies.

Community sharing

Spiritual impulses, deeper than heady academic ideas, nourished our priestly deliberations over food, drink, and in the Sebel Hotel lifts. The stuff of our priesthood was shared freely by 250 city and country priests and bishops from most States and Dioceses including New Zealand.

The electives, led by lay and religious order experts helped to expand our vision of both church and secular society. I give thanks to our wellplanned and visionary NCP organisers.

In the background for our Reconciliation and Mass, was the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral of Parramatta. It is an enlightening reminder of the religiosity and faith which we carry by renewed ways into the future.

Personal experiences

Apart from four keynote speakers and community sharing and electives, a third element of the convention was to expose to friends and strangers our own personal experiences of living the Faith. Young and old told of their victories and their disappointments.

In the last 20 years I have been energized by the full-time role of detecting spirituality among mental health sufferers in Melbourne. This wrestle with the True Self and the False Self was never far from our convention conversation, under other headings such as the priesthood’s changing future, sexual abuse and authority in a feudal-style church… and my own future as a newly-retired diocesan priest living with other priests at George Maher House, Clifton Hill.

Future directions

Examples of hope were shared. The true fatherly approach of Donald Cozzens throbbed new life into my future.

I felt empowered by his word and example to suck in and breathe out new hope to myself, other priests, to family, parish, wider church and society. Aged 75 this June, I have been challenged at a course in Spiritual Direction 2004-6, by the Jesuits at Campion, Kew, and Baptists at WellSpring Centre, Ashburton.

Now this National Convention has opened for me a clearer pathway to use these skills. Our keynote speakers and leaders of elective topics breathed new life into our vocation and our meaningful spirituality. They echoed the life of Jesus Christ: the humanness of us all, the spiritual yearnings of secular society, the chance to reclaim our spiritual innards, and the relief of re-discovering our true self.

When Donald Cozzens and Bishop Robinson spoke at the Veneto Club Melbourne the following week, there was a notable shift in emphasis. Although both embraced a mostly lay educated group of about 200 men and women with firm direction and challenge, Robinson seemed less aggressive than at Parramatta, Cozzens more searching like a humble compassionate father. Their message was for the wider church and society.

Parramatta was a throbbing convention of renewed hope.

Len Thomas