In October 2012, the 50th anniversary of the commencement of the Second Vatican Council (11 October 1962) was commemorated. To celebrate this, the Holy Father has called for a ‘Year of Faith’ for the Universal Church from 11 October 2012 to 24 November 2013.

Among the various events to celebrate this historic moment in the Church's history, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney hosted a major national conference from 20-23 May 2013, The Great Grace, receiving Vatican II today. The focus of the conference was the reception of the Council by the Church in Australia, now and into the future.

The opening address for the Great Grace conference was given by Bishop Peter Comensoli, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Sydney, on Monday 20 May 2013.

In the Archdiocese of Sydney, Bishop Comensoli is Episcopal Vicar for Life, Marriage and Family, Chair of the Sydney Archdiocesan Catholic Schools (SACS) Board, and Parish Priest of Our Lady Star of the Sea Parish, Watsons Bay, amongst other ministerial activities. At a national level, he is currently a member of the Bishops' Commissions for Church Ministry and for Mission and Faith Formation.

Closing Address of the Great Grace Conference with Cardinal Pell and Launch of Catholic Talk

Archbishop Mark Benedict Coleridge was born in Melbourne on 25 September, 1948, the third of five children of Bernard Coleridge and Marjorie Harvey (both deceased).

He was ordained a priest in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne on 18 May 1974 by Bishop John Kelly, then serving as Administrator of the diocese following the retirement of Cardinal James Knox. After Ordination, he worked as an assistant priest in various Melbourne parishes for a few years before studying Sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. After four years in Rome and Jerusalem he returned to Melbourne to teach Scripture.

Three years later he was again back in Rome for doctoral studies, after which he returned to teach in Melbourne and was eventually made the Master of Catholic Theological College. In late 1997 he was both greatly surprised and humbled to be invited to work in the Vatican Secretariat of State. Four years later he returned to Australia and was episcopally ordained Auxiliary Bishop for Melbourne.

In 2004, he was appointed a member of the pontifical Council for Culture and Chair of the Roman Missal Editorial Committee of the International Committee for English in the Liturgy. He was subsequently named Chair of the International Commission for the Preparation of an English-language Lectionary. In 2006, he was appointed as Archbishop of the Canberra and Goulburn Archdiocese upon the retirement of the long serving Archbishop Francis Carroll. In 2011, he was appointed a member of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

On 2 April 2012, he was named Metropolitan Archbishop of Brisbane.

All the keynote speakers returned to the stage to answer questions from the audience.

Austen Ivereigh is joint coordinator of Catholic Voices, and an English Catholic journalist and commentator who writes for Our Sunday Visitor, America magazine, and the Guardian CiF among others. His latest book is How to Defend the Faith Without Raising Your Voice: Civil responses to Catholic Hot-button Issues.

Jack Valero is Press Officer for Opus Dei in the UK and the co-ordinator, with Austen Ivereigh, of the Da Vinci Code Response Group in 2006, a team of Catholics who made themselves available to the media in the run-up to the DVC film. During 2010 he was also Press Officer for the Beatification of Cardinal Newman.

The reception of the Second Vatican Council in Australia followed similar patterns to that of other countries of the Western world with an initial emphasis on the correlation of the Catholic faith to intellectual currents within the culture of modernity. This culture reached its zenith in the 1950s and began to implode from the late 1960s onwards. Sociologists now speak of 1968 as the moment of the turn to postmodernity. From the 1980s onwards the correlationist projects began to be overtaken by the Christocentric projects of the pontificate of John Paul II at the core of which was Blessed John Paul II’s Trinitarian Christocentric anthropology. The hallmark of this pontificate was that Christ should position culture, rather than the culture of the times positioning Christ. According to this interpretation it is Christ himself who is the ‘sign of the times’ in the period between His Incarnation and return in glory. The contrast however between correlationism and Christocentrism remains a central feature of ecclesial life in contemporary Australia representing different appropriations of the teaching of the Council.

- Professor Tracey Rowland is Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne) and a Permanent Fellow of the Institute in Political Philosophy and Continental Theology.

In his final address to the clergy of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI observed that the Second Vatican Council began with a consideration of the liturgy as a very positive sign, because “the primacy of God was self evident”, as was the desire of the Council Fathers to open to the entire people of God the possibility of worshiping in the common celebration of the liturgy. The fiftieth anniversary of Sacrosanctum con cilium invites us to return to its sources and to examine the development of the ideas which have shaped the evolution of our experience of the liturgy in these past fifty years.

“Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the nature of the liturgy itself…” [SC,14]. Many considered this to be an innovation and are surprised to discover that it is a key concept of the liturgical movement evident from the early twentieth century onwards. The treatment of this notion presents a subtle balance between internal engagement and more external experiences of participation, the recovery of which offers helpful insights which point towards the renewal of the liturgy in our own time.

- Archbishop Arthur Roche is the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship & the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Pope Benedict XVI claimed with the Second Vatican Council “broad new thinking” was required which set the Church in a new direction. In particular, this workshop examines the Council’s vision of humanity through the lens of its emergent philosophy of the human person, as differentiated from the traditional Boethian / Thomistic understanding of “person” and detailed in the final documents of the Council, the Declaration on religious liberty Dignitatus Humanae and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the world of today, Gaudium et Spes; which provides the Church with the means of dialogue with the contemporary world on the basis of our shared humanity.

Consideration is given not only to the significant contribution offered by the thought of Pope John XXIII, the Father of the Council, but also to that of three successive popes, namely Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI; all present from the beginning of the Council. These four popes would exercise a fundamental influence in the evolution and on-going promotion of this distinctive Conciliar humanism, as Cardinal Wojtyla writes in his essay written to mark the tenth anniversary of Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae: “wherein the dignity of the human person is the basis of man’s vocation: it thus constituted the essential content and meaning of that vocation.” In this novel Conciliar thinking, humanism and personalism happily coincide.

- Rev Dr Tom Carroll is a Parish Priest of St. Aloysius of Gonzaga, Cronulla, Secretary of the Cardinal’s Council of Priests, Director of Diaconate Programme for the Archdiocese of Sydney, Knight Commander of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the Collegium Augustinianum.

When we think of the Second Vatican Council and the Bible it is easy to think only of Dei Verbum, and although this is where we would start, nevertheless unless we see something of how this Document relates to the overall Council, we will miss its full significance. This is because informing the Council was a biblical logic that can be characterised as gracefulness, the major characteristic of which is the principle of expansive inclusiveness. It is in the Church that the meaning of the Bible grows; that is, grows as a seed grows into a tree, a tree tall and majestic, and, to borrow from the words of Jesus, one that becomes the home of all the birds of the world (Mark 4:31-32).

The goal of this workshop is to show how the graceful dynamic of expansive inclusiveness is present in the Council and in the Scriptures. We will see how this dynamic serves both to frame the Bible and to elucidate the meaning of its contents. That is, to show how this dynamic is present in the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and how it is brought to completion in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible.

The question we want to take away from this workshop is this: in light of Dei Verbum how are we to serve the Church and, thereby, serve the world, which is to say to help in some small measure the bringing about of the New Jerusalem?

- Dr Robert Hugh Tilley, Lecturer in Biblical Studies, The Catholic Institute of Sydney

Commencing with Our Holy Mother Mary’s ‘yes’ to the Angel Gabriel, women have shared the responsibility and privilege of proclaiming the Christian Faith and building the Catholic Church. The manner in which women have shared the responsibility and privilege of proclaiming and living the Faith has been shaped and influenced to a large degree by the historical norms regarding the role of women in society at large (although it must be noted that the vocations carried out by Women Religious throughout history were often counter cultural for their times).

Documents of Vatican II acknowledged that the role of women in society was undergoing transformation and that the full dignity and vocation of women within the Church and society at large needed to be explored further. It was at Vatican II and the years following it that the significance and nature of women’s role in the life of the Church and in the promotion of the Christian Faith has been articulated so clearly and powerfully by the Church. Beautiful and profound teachings emerged throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, including Pope John Paul II’s “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women” (1988) and his letter to women in 1995. This workshop will allow participants to explore together how the Church’s teachings on the unique genius of Women are of enduring relevance and significance and how they can empower and guide women to develop their full dignity and vocation in 21st century Australia.

- Professor Celia Hammond, Vice Chancellor, The University of Notre Dame Australia