POPE Appoints English Archbishop As Nuncio to Australia

By Gerard O'Connell
Vatican Insider
December 10, 2012

http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/the-vatican/detail/articolo/australia-nunzio-nunce-nuncio-20518/

Paul Gallagher

Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher as the new apostolic nuncio to Australia.

The Vatican broke the news on December 11, after the Australian Government had given its agreement. Archbishop Gallagher succeeds the Italian Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarrotto whom the Pope last August sent as nuncio to Israel, and simultaneous as nuncio to Cyprus and Apostolic Delegate to Jerusalem and Palestine.

A man of considerable diplomatic experience, the 58-year old Archbishop Gallagher is the only English-born nuncio in the active diplomatic service of the Holy See. At the time of his appointment to Australia he was nuncio in Guatemala, where he had served since February 2009.

Born in Liverpool in 1954, he studied at the English College, Rome, and gained his degrees in Philosophy and Theology at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University. He is the only English-born nuncio to have trained at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy where the Holy See’s diplomats are trained, and to have risen through the ranks of its diplomatic service to the rank of nuncio.

A diplomat with wide and diverse experience in the service of the Holy See, he comes to Australia after serving in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.

Australia is a religiously diverse country of over 22 million people. Christianity is the predominant religion and Roman Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the country, with some 26% of the people declaring themselves Catholic. There are also several non-Christian religions in this land, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and the Sikh faith.

Archbishop Gallagher arrives in Australia at a particularly delicate moment when the Catholic Church is once again in the public spotlight for the way it dealt with the sexual abuse of minors by priests in past decades. Parliamentary inquiries are already under way in the states of Victoria and New South Wales and, on November 12, Australia’s Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced that a national Royal Commission would investigate how the various institutions in the country, both private and public, responded to allegations of child abuse. It seems clear that queries about how the Catholic Church and its various institutions responded to the abuse of minors by priests was a major factor in the Federal Government’s decision to hold this nationwide inquiry, a decision that polls show has widespread popular support.

Archbishop Gallagher began his diplomatic service in Tanzania and from there moved to Uruguay, the Philippines and later to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, after serving in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, in the Second Section which handles the Holy See’s relations with states.

Pope John Paul II sent him as nuncio to Burundi in April 2004 as successor to the Irish-born Archbishop Michael Courtney who was assassinated at the end of 2003. His posting there was a dangerous one as he sought to encourage the fragile peace process after a civil war that cost 300,000 lives. In the last year of his service in Burundi rebel shells aimed at the Presidential Palace hit the nunciature by mistake, causing damage to the building but fortunately no lives were lost. Gallagher was out of the country at that time but returned immediately disregarding the potential danger.

Then in 2009, Pope Benedict sent him to Guatemala, a nation that was still recovering from one of Central America’s most bloody and longest civil wars (1960-1996) that caused the deaths of over 200,000 people – most of them indigenous people, as well as the disappearances of a great many (40-50,000) who are still unaccounted for.

But there, thanks to the persistence of Church – and especially the efforts of the assassinated Bishop Juan Gerardi (1998), and human rights groups, and with the help of the courts, the United Nations and the International Community in the Peace Process, truth began to emerge, justice began to be implemented and peace was consolidated. Archbishop Gallagher sought to support the unfolding of this important chapter in a land where there is still much poverty and insecurity. He also sought to help the local church and population when natural disasters struck during his time as nuncio there.

It is with this considerable experience and background that Archbishop Gallagher now goes to Australia as papal nuncio.