A new Archbishop of Liverpool was due to be announced yesterday with the Bishop of Nottingham, Malcolm McMahon, understood to be in line for the post, writes Christopher Lamb.
Bishop McMahon, 64, is chairman of the Catholic Education Service and was seen as a contender to become the Archbishop of Westminster in 2009.
As The Tablet went to press, church sources were predicting that Pope Francis would appoint Bishop McMahon to Liverpool.
Liverpool has traditionally been one of the Church’s most important sees and has been in need of a new archbishop since the retirement of Patrick Kelly, who submitted his resignation on the grounds of ill health 14 months ago.
The Dominican bishop was born in London and studied mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist).
After graduation he worked for the Daimler Motor Company in Coventry and then for London Transport. He joined the Dominicans in 1976, was ordained a priest in 1982 and Bishop of Nottingham in 2000.
Liverpool is a large, vibrant diocese but has been struggling with a Catholic population shifting from the city centre to the suburbs and an ageing clergy. In 2012, Archbishop Kelly commissioned laypeople to undertake funeral ceremonies in order to relieve the pressure on clergy.
Bishop McMahon is seen as a moderate who has in the past been quoted saying that the Church could ordain married men. However, he later clarified his remarks to say he believed that clerical celibacy was “not a mere external rule but a spiritual necessity”.
Pope Francis has appointed the first Oratorian bishop in England and Wales since 1874.
Fr Robert Byrne, 56, former provost of the Oxford Oratory and until now national ecumenical officer for the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, has been named as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Birmingham.
His episcopal ordination will take place at St Chad’s Cathedral, in Birmingham, on 13 May.
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