"Spiritual Olympics" in Melbourne

IT was hardly the type of Mass that might have been expected at a Eucharistic Congress, a Roman Catholic spectacular long noted for its traditional pomp. Australian aborigines wore only breechcloths, their bodies painted in geometric patterns of dots and streaks. Along with tribal women in short yellow skirts, they leaped and stomped and mimed their version of the Last Supper to the rhythm of clapping hands, tapping sticks and a primitive wood wind called the didgeridoo.

Lawrence Cardinal Shehan of Baltimore, who presided at the aboriginal liturgy before a crowd of 20,000 in Melbourne's Myer Music Bowl, wore a long chasuble decorated with a woodblock print of an aboriginal tribal totem. Before the consecration of bread and wine, the cardinal prayed: "Father, you made the rivers that gave us water and fish. You made the mountains and the flat country. You made the kangaroos and goannas and birds for us. You send the sun to keep us warm, the rain to make the grass grow and to fill the waterholes." The congregation responded, "Father, you are good."

The week-long 40th International Eucharistic Congress, dubbed a "spiritual Olympics," was notable for its liturgical boldness, but its ventures into the discussion of social problems were somewhat less original. A variety of seminars simply belabored the familiar problems of ecology and ecumenism. As for the aborigines, a number of tribal delegates to the congress walked out of a special seminar on aborigines when recommendations opposing racial discrimination were eliminated from the conference report. The tribal people, they said bitterly, had been brought to the congress as "exhibition niggers."

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