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Bishop Bill Wright
Most Reverend William (Bill) Wright is the eighth Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle and is the pastoral leader of more than 150,000 Catholics in the region.
On the face of it, I shouldn’t have much enjoyed this trip to World Youth Day with seventy others from our diocese. I’m not really made for group touring. ‘On your right… And now on your left… Keep together, please.’ I like to poke around on my own and search out little curiosities that no one pays much attention to, to spend the time as I want.
In my five years as Bishop of the Diocese, this is the second commission of inquiry before which I have appeared. There is a very considerable difference in scope between the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (‘Royal Commission’) and the Special Commission of Inquiry into matters relating to the police investigation of certain child sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.
I have an old grievance about the way a relatively small group has appropriated to itself, in Australia at least, both the designation and the popular image of ‘Christians’.
I have an old grievance about the way a relatively small group has appropriated to itself, in Australia at least, both the designation and the popular image of ‘Christians’.
Everybody seems to think that I should write about going to World Youth Day. I’m inclined to believe it would be more useful to write about it while I’m there, or even afterwards, but perhaps there’s something to be said for laying out my expectations, hopes and foreshadowings. People seem to think so. By the time you read this, I and the other 70-odd pilgrims will be about to depart.
Everybody seems to think that I should write about going to World Youth Day. I’m inclined to believe it would be more useful to write about it while I’m there, or even afterwards, but perhaps there’s something to be said for laying out my expectations, hopes and foreshadowings. People seem to think so. By the time you read this, I and the other 70-odd pilgrims will be about to depart.