On this day 25 years ago, 12 of us Jesuits were privileged to join thousands of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders who met with Pope John Paul II at Alice Springs.
Two nights before, we had camped at Uluru. On the way to Blatherskite Park, where the Pope was to speak, I was invited to accompany a busload of people from Kununurra and Turkey Creek in the Kimberley because they did not have their own priest with them. The community leaders gave me a red T-shirt which depicted their Dreaming. We all wore yellow headbands and waited patiently for the Pope's arrival.
He had been delayed by the breakdown of his Mercedes Popemobile, which was unsuited to the hot conditions. Workers resorted to throwing iced water over the engine but failed in their attempts to get the vehicle running. Eventually the Pope arrived on the park's Caterpillar Dreaming track in the back seat of a plain white Australian Ford sedan, which was more becoming than the foreign vehicle.
There had been months of planning and negotiation about this meeting on the Yipirinya Dreaming track. People came from all over Australia.
There had been some consternation early in the planning because the offices for the papal visit had been donated by a major mining company. But Aboriginal leaders were assured that the Pope's message would not be qualified because of the generosity of the corporate sector.
A week prior to the visit, there was unresolved conflict between the Church's national advisory committee of Aborigines and Islanders preparing the visit, and the local Aboriginal community. The committee wanted only Aboriginal and Islander children to have access to the area where the Pope would be welcomed. But they heeded the call of the local Elders with the result that Alice Springs children of all races who shared in the local Dreaming were permitted to participate.
The Alice Springs Mayor said, 'It's wonderful. The Aboriginal people are doing the right thing. It's not the locals that have caused any problems. It's people from the south who wanted to segregate the races.'
The tension between the local church community and national Aboriginal church leaders evaporated by the time the Pope kissed the tarmac at Alice Springs airport. He was welcomed by eight traditional owners who greeted him in Arrernte language. Among the group were the late Wenten Rubuntja and Charles Perkins.
Protocol dictated that the Pope could not be attired in the Aboriginal colours. But Vatican rubrics gave way to local custom when he was presented on the Dreaming track with a crocheted stole and beanie in black, red and yellow. Being the consummate performer on the international stage, John Paul graciously received the gift and wore the accoutrements for some distance along the track.
Then Louise Pandella from the Nauiyu Community at Daly River made her way to the barrier and handed her baby Liam to the Pope. The Pope held Liam up to the cameras which captured one of the iconic shots of John Paul II. When I rose at 4am in Minneapolis 19 years later to watch the papal funeral, the major US television networks used the photo several times during the course of the broadcast.
Along the track, the Pope met the nation's most respected Aboriginal leaders, who presented him with a shield inscribed with an aspirational message. The director of the Alice Springs based Central Land Council, Patrick Dodson, who had left the priesthood, respectfully stood in the background to spare His Holiness any embarrassment.
The Pope received numerous other gifts including a copy of the 'Our Father' in the local language of the Stradbroke Island people, who had been the first Indigenous Australians to receive Catholic missionaries.
While the Pope was still on the Dreaming track, I was approached by a throng of international media who asked my opinion of the Pope's speech. Not having heard it, I was in no position to answer. They had read copies on the papal jet once they had taken off from Darwin and regarded the comments on land rights as very hot news. For many of the international journalists, this was to be the big story of the visit.
At the end of the track, the Pope made his way up to the stadium while storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. Behind him was a mural by Wenten Rubuntja depicting the Caterpillar Dreaming and the mountain gaps around Alice Springs.
As the Pope completed the lengthy speech, he took a large gum branch, reached into a clay coolamon which later would be used in the Alice Springs church for baptisms, and blessed the people with water.
It was at that moment that the lightning sounded and the heavens opened. All of us in the crowd were convinced that grace and nature were one and indivisible at that moment in the red centre. The Centralian Advocate reported that 'as an electrical storm was threatening the gathering of about 4000 people, most of the thunder was coming from the podium'.
The Pope later confided to Bishop Ted Collins, 'I think the people prefer meeting me rather than listening to me. But I had to say it all because otherwise it could not be published.' The mainstream media picked up the Pope's remarks about land rights, self-determination and reconciliation.
But he put even more demanding challenges to the Australian Church when he enunciated the place of Indigenous Australians in the life of the Church, and when he outlined the relationship between Christian faith and Aboriginal culture and religious tradition.
No one would claim that the Pope's speech was a catalyst accelerating the positive developments and putting a brake on the negative reversals in Australian Church and society these last 25 years. But it still embodies the most noble shared aspirations of Aboriginal Catholics and those wanting to see Aborigines take their place in the Australian Church.
The speech undoubtedly painted too rosy a picture of the role of the missionaries, glossing over the failings, including assimilationist mindsets and the evil of sexual abuse. Only recently has the Church come to appreciate its failings in adopting assimilationist methods such as removing children from their families and placing them in dormitories, and in using English exclusively rather than local languages.
The speech gives too optimistic a reading of the prospects of Aboriginal Australians taking their rightful place in the Church without the likelihood of Aboriginal priests or bishops in the foreseeable future. And it too simplistically glosses over some of the disconnection between Christianity and some of the core beliefs and practices of traditional Aboriginal religions.
It has been very helpful to have the Pope offer the encouragement that there need not be any conflict between Christian faith and Aboriginal culture. But Aboriginal culture is often founded on religious beliefs which find and express God's self-communication outside of Christ and the Church's sacraments.
I recall a funeral of a well respected Aboriginal leader in the Kimberley. After the church service, the Elders took the body for a ceremony which was no place for the priest or other outsiders. No participant presumed the religious business had been confined to the church and that all that occurred thereafter was purely cultural. The body and its bearers moved seamlessly from one religious world to another, the bearers and the onlookers respecting the sacred space of each world.
The abiding grace of the Pope's speech is incarnated in those words in which he reverenced the Aboriginal identification with country and the daily Aboriginal reality of suffering and marginalisation. He touched the deep Aboriginal sense of belonging, embracing the hope in their suffering. He conceded in the spoken word and by his charismatic presence that the Dreaming is real, sacramental and eternal.
He retold the story of Genesis in Aboriginal voice. He relayed the calls of the post-exilic prophets to the contemporary powerbrokers and poor of Australia. He spoke poetically of things he knew not, knowing that those listening had endured the flames:
If you stay closely united, you are like a tree standing in the middle of a bushfire sweeping through the timber. The leaves are scorched and the tough bark is scarred and burned; but inside the tree the sap is still flowing, and under the ground the roots are still strong. Like that tree you have endured the flames, and you still have the power to be reborn. The time for this rebirth is now!
Everyone present knew that he understood, and more than many who had spent a lifetime in this place.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Public Policy Institute, Australian Catholic University and adjunct professor at the College of Law and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Australian National University.