"...the Church herself in Australia will not be fully the Church that Jesus wants her to be until you have made your contribution to her life and until that contribution has been joyfully received by others."
Pope John Paul II, Alice Springs 1986
NEW: Gathering of Message Stick Custodians May 16th: For details click here.
The “Pass It On” Message Stick Relay is a call from the Indigenous Catholics of Australia to the church and the nation to renew their responses to the challenges identified by the Pope in 1986.
As both an expression of and a response to this challenge, the call is issued by an Indigenous symbol, a Message Stick. The use of such Indigenous symbols tells us not only that Indigenous peoples ruled and owned this land in the past but that they are still here in the present - both in our nation and in our church. Symbols like the Message Stick confront us with the - perhaps disturbing - fact that we cannot be a complete nation or a whole church until and unless we embrace the peoples represented by these symbols.
The call to embrace Australia’s Indigenous peoples is issued to the whole Church and the whole nation in nine “Pass It On” Message Sticks bearing symbolically the messages of the Pope’s 1986 statement.
The message sticks were launched on May 1st, 2005 from St. Mary’s Cathedral Sydney and spent a year being relayed among parishes and schools around your diocese. Each interested parish and school had discussions about what has been done and made a commitment to doing more to realise the Pope’s message.
The results of the discussions were brought together in October 2006 when the “Pass It On” Message Stick Relay culminated in Alice Springs in a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Pope’s speech. At that gathering, the responses of all those who have heard the call heralded by the Message Stick, and participated in the discussion program detailed in the materials provided, were reported to an assembly of leading Indigenous Catholics. [Read more here]