Martin Ashe: Movies & Filmography

Martin Ashe (born 27 September 1953) is an Irish-Australian Catholic bishop who has served as an Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne since 2021. Born in the historic port and fishing town of Kinsale, located in County Cork, Ireland, Ashe was the eldest of eleven children and grew up in Killarney, in the neighbouring County Kerry, immersed in a deeply devout Catholic family environment. His uncle was a priest based in Australia, and several of his cousins belonged to various religious congregations, which strongly influenced his vocational path. As a young boy, he served as an altar server at the St Mary's Cathedral parish for several years, and by the age of eighteen, he had made the decision to enter the seminary. He enrolled at All Hallows College in Dublin in 1971, an institution specifically established for the training of priests destined for overseas missionary work. Ashe was ordained as a priest in Ireland by Archbishop Tomás Ó Fiaich on 11 June 1978, at the age of twenty-four, and he was immediately assigned to serve the Archdiocese of Melbourne, arriving in Australia in September of the same year. His early ministry included serving as an assistant priest in the Hadfield parish in Melbourne's north, followed by appointments in Clayton and Blackburn. From the late 1980s, he took on the role of vocations director, and in the 1990s, he pursued further academic studies at Loyola University Chicago. He subsequently served as moderator and then pastoral director of Corpus Christi College Seminary, before becoming Parish Priest of Sunbury from 1996 to 2004. In 2005, he was appointed director of ministry to priests within the Archdiocese of Melbourne, and in 2012 he became the inaugural parish priest of Christ the Light, overseeing the areas of Doreen, Kinglake, Mernda, and Whittlesea. On 14 May 2021, Pope Francis appointed him Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, conferring upon him the titular see of Muteci in Algeria, and he was consecrated by Archbishop Peter Comensoli on 31 July 2021 at St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, alongside Anthony Ireland.