Pope Leo XIV appoints his first English-speaking archbishop

Australia’s Bishop of Sandhurst Shane Mackinlay will from September serve as the Archbishop of Brisbane and Queensland.

Pope Leo has appointed the first English-speaking archbishop of his pontificate.

Bishop of Sandhurst Shane Mackinlay will from September serve as the Archbishop of Brisbane and Queensland, Australia.  

He will succeed Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who said that Mackinlay “will be able to dialogue intelligently with a culture which at many points is distant from Christian understandings”. While Christianity is the largest faith denomination in the country, at 43.9 per cent, just 20 per cent of Australians currently identify as Catholic.  

“He deals well with both the big picture and the nuts and bolts, which is why he is a capable administrator. That will serve him well in a diocese as large and as complex as Brisbane,” said Coleridge.   

Mackinlay was ordained in 1991 after studying for the priesthood at Corpus Christi College, a seminary in Melbourne. He holds degrees in theology and physics, as well as a doctorate in philosophy. He has taught at Australian Catholic University in Ballarat and Catholic Theological College in Melbourne, where he was born in 1965. His elevation to Brisbane by Pope Leo comes just six years after Pope Francis appointed Mackinlay as the eighth Bishop of Sandhurst, in the Melbourne archdiocese.  

“At 60, he is also of the right age and maturity to assume greater responsibility not only in Brisbane and Queensland, but nationally and internationally,” Coleridge said. “I am grateful to Pope Leo for this wise choice of a new archbishop, and I commend Bishop Shane to you and your prayers as he prepares for this new mission.”  

Mackinlay said,  “I am deeply honoured by Pope Leo’s decision to appoint me as Archbishop of Brisbane – a diocese that has such a strong tradition of fostering the liturgical, spiritual, evangelising and educational endeavours of the Catholic community, both within the archdiocese and more broadly.

“I’m looking forward to coming here to the Archdiocese of Brisbane, where I’ll be the new Archbishop. I look forward to meeting many of you then and over the years ahead as we continue our life as the Church here in this part of beautiful Queensland.” 

The Archbishop-elect is scheduled to be consecrated at St Stephen’s Cathedral as the seventh Archbishop of Brisbane on 11 September.  

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