Over the course of 2024, Synod Engagement Team members have been engaged in consultations with various community members for all the Plenary Council focus areas (Decrees). Paul Jensen reflects on his experience facilitating conversations around safeguarding.

“For the upcoming Synod, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating 6 consultations with a variety of stakeholders on Plenary Decree 2 ‘Choosing Repentance – Seeking Healing’.  This Decree is charting a path for the Church post her experience of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.  As with all the consultations, we employed the SEE/JUDGE/ACT framework.  A question common raised in all the consultations was ‘how do we mature our safeguarding system to, at the very least, minimise the risk of abuse occurring?’

Alongside strengthening baseline safeguarding compliance, common responses to this question were:

‘We need to see safety and safeguarding all as fundamental to our identity as Church’;

‘We need a theology and mission practice of refuge and sanctuary’;

‘We want to strengthen our emotional and psychological maturity to welcome safeguarding and what it requires of us’.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming Synod where we as one body, a pilgrim people here in the Archdiocese Of Brisbane, can discern our path as a missional Church, post the Royal Commission”