Two new bishops for Sydney

Sydney
27 July 2003

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Two new bishops for Sydney

By Marilyn Rodrigues

Pope John Paul II has appointed two new bishops for Sydney and a new bishop to head the Military Ordinariate.

Dominican Fr Anthony Fisher, a bioethicist, and Fr Julian Porteous, rector of the Good Shepherd Seminary, Homebush, are Sydney’s new auxiliary bishops.

And Defence Forces chaplain Mons Max Davis will succeed retiring Bishop Geoffrey Mayne as the new Military Ordinary Bishop of Australia.

The two new Sydney bishops will join Bishop David Cremin and Bishop Geoffrey Robinson as auxiliary bishops.

The Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, welcomed the new bishops, saying: “The appointment of new bishops is always a happy occasion.

“I look forward to working with Bishop Porteous and Bishop Fisher.”

Bishop-elect Anthony Fisher, at 43, will be Australia’s youngest bishop.

He is the founding director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Melbourne, and a professor of bioethics and moral theology.

Fr Julian Porteous, 54, was the parish priest at Dulwich Hill when he was appointed as rector of the seminary at Homebush 18 months ago.

Both men were born, raised and educated in Sydney.

Bishop-elect Fisher worked at the Sydney law firm Clayton Utz before joining the Dominican order.

He was preparing to say Mass when he took a call from the Apostolic Nuncio in Australia, Archbishop Francesco Canalini, which left him awe-struck.

He admitted to having “very mixed feelings” about the news.

“It’s exciting but it’s a wrench for me to leave my Dominican community in Melbourne and my work in the institute, which has only been open two years,” he said.

“I love it here, so there’s that side of for me that will find it hard to let go.

“But on the other hand I’m coming home to Sydney.”

The young bishop-elect said he looked forward to continuing his involvement in the on-going debates surrounding bioethics, and marriage and the family.

“The challenges up here in NSW are probably bigger, if anything, than they are in Victoria, because at least in Victoria there is some regulation of those areas,” he said.

“Here it’s largely a free-for-all and in many ways Sydney sets the tone for the rest of the country, so to be part of the debate will be a great challenge and will be interesting.”

Bishop-elect Porteous said that his appointment was a complete surprise.

“I had no inkling that I was even being considered, and I assumed that because I’ve only been rector for 18 months I wouldn’t be considered for anything else,” he said.

While he was not certain, when he spoke to The Catholic Weekly, exactly what form his work would take, the bishop-elect said that his bishopric would have an emphasis on encouraging priestly vocations and supporting the new ecclesial movements such as the Disciples of Jesus and the Emmanuel community.

“I’ve had a long association with these ecclesial movements in the Church since 1979, and I think they are very important in the Church,” he said.

“Naturally, in whatever work I will be involved in, such as when I go into parishes for Confirmations, I will be interested in promoting vocations to the priesthood.

“The Pope, in his encyclical, Ecclesia in Oceania, specifically refers to the new evangelisation and the new ecclesial movements, and I will be involved in encouraging them as well.”

The two new auxiliary bishops will be ordained at St Mary’s Cathedral on Wednesday, September 3.

As auxiliary bishops they will assist Archbishop Pell in his governance of the archdiocese. They will also be members of the Church’s College of Bishops at the international level.

Bishop Geoffrey Mayne, who has retired as Military Ordinary, welcomed his successor, Bishop-elect Max Davis.

The monsignor, who was born in Townsville in 1945 and grew up in Perth, where he was educated by the Christian Brothers, will be the first Australian Catholic military bishop to have served in the Defence forces before being ordained a priest. He was in the Navy from 1962-64.