Mark Coleridge was born in
Melbourne, Victoria. The third of five siblings born to Bernard and Marjorie (née Harvey) Coleridge, he was educated at Saint Joseph's School in
Tranmere, South Australia,
Rostrevor College in Adelaide and
St Kevin's College in Melbourne. Contemplating a career in the Australian diplomatic service, he graduated from the
University of Melbourne in 1968 with a
Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French. As a Melbourne seminarian, he entered
Corpus Christi College, then in Werribee and later in Glen Waverley and Clayton. After some time in Rome devoted to doctoral studies and another stint in Melbourne, in 1997 he was appointed to a position in the Roman Curia at the
Secretariat of State, where he spent four years.
Episcopate On 3 May 2002,
Pope John Paul II appointed Coleridge as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Melbourne. On 19 June 2006,
Pope Benedict XVI named him as Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn. On 29 December 2011 he was appointed a member of the
Pontifical Council for Social Communications for a five-year renewable term. On 2 April 2012, Pope Benedict XVI named him Metropolitan Archbishop of Brisbane and he was installed on 11 May 2012. As of 2015 he was a member of the
Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference. Coleridge serves on that body's permanent committee, chairs its Commission for Evangelisation and is a member of its Commission for Church Ministry. The Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference elected Coleridge one of its two delegates to the Synod on the Family in Rome in October 2015. There he served as the relator (reporting secretary) for one of the four English-language working groups. In November 2017, Coleridge was elected by Australia's bishops to head their commission that organised a plenary council of the church in Australia in 2020. On 4 May 2018 he was elected to a two-year term as president of the bishops' conference. Coleridge is the grand prior of the Queensland Australia Lieutenancy of the
Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.
Opposition to same-sex marriage In 2017, during the national postal survey on
same-sex marriage, Coleridge said he personally believed that the love shared by a same-sex couple could only ever be simply "the love of friends". He noted that children were not permitted to marry their parents, nor siblings permitted to marry one another, though he agreed that the cases of same-sex couples and close relatives were different. He said: "That is not to say that [same-sex couples] are not equal. It's simply saying that they are not the same and that they don't qualify for what we call marriage." ==Gallery==