E-conference delivers the goods as specialists throughout the country contribute.
By Anthony Barich
National Reporter
THE Gospel has been domesticated so that Catholics too often brush over the significance of key events in Jesus’ life, Canberra-Goulburn Archbishop Mark Coleridge told the e-conference on the Gospel of St Luke on November 4.
Archbishop Coleridge said that “the Gospel should shock us”, noted Fr Gerard Conlan OMI, chaplain of the University of Notre Dame’s Fremantle campus which hosted a webcast screening of the conference from the Australian Catholic University’s Ballarat campus.
“Archbishop Coleridge highlighted that we have domesticated so much of the Gospel in the sense that it no longer shocks us,” Fr Conlan said. “Some of the images used in the parables were really shocking and confronting to the people of the time whereas, now, we just brush over them.”
The Archbishop added that “if Christianity is not missionary, it is no longer Christian.”
Fr Conlan said there is a challenge for Catholics to put themselves into the shoes of the people in the Gospel and allow themselves to be shocked by what Jesus does rather than saying ‘that’s nice’.
UNDA staff and students joined community members, seminarians and Knights of the Southern Cross in the e-conference that was streamed over the internet in real time, connecting with about 200 small communities around Australia, as well as others in Ireland, the United States, Rome and Britain.
Studying Scripture also reveals that Jesus calls the faithful to a “radical detachment from bonds that are not absolute … a loosening of conventional logic”, when “in the new world there is a relativising of family relationships”.
Scripture scholar Sr Elizabeth Dowling RSM, a key speaker of the e-conference, said that “in Jesus we are forming a new understanding of family”.
Fr Conlan added that, “if we have God as our first priority in our life, we can be a better father/mother, a better daughter/son, a better spouse”.
UNDA Fremantle campus minister Tom Gannon said a major challenge in “faith circles” is that some people like to study Scripture to make themselves feel good and tell others off so they feel bad.
“The real transformation happens when they see their faith like any other relationship where it’s a matter of having to do the hard yards, inviting people into a relationship that’s actually lots of different things – sometimes it laughs, it cries, it gets bored, those kinds of aspects,” Mr Gannon said.