AUSTRALIA
Crux
Christopher White
NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
May 14, 2018
In recent months, the Australian Catholic Church has been in the spotlight, primarily due to news that the former Archbishop of Sydney and the pope’s current finance minister, Cardinal George Pell, will stand trial for “historical sexual offenses” amid continuing fallout from the Church’s clerical abuse crisis.
As the Church attempts to change the narrative about its role in public life, Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane has been elected as the new head of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Serving as his vice-president will be Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney.
Soon after their election, Bishop Richard Umbers, an auxiliary bishop of Sydney, tweeted that with the election of Coleridge and Fisher, the Australian bishops had “put forward the two most articulate bishops in the conference.”
In an interview with Crux, Coleridge describes how he intends to navigate the tensions between the Church and various political and ecclesial battles in Australia – and in a way that puts Jesus Christ at the center of his work.
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