Shane Mackinlay was born in Brunswick, Melbourne, on 5 June 1965. He studied at the Corpus Christi College and obtained a bachelor's degree in theology from the Melbourne College of Divinity and a degree in physics from Monash University. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2005. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Ballarat on 6 September 1991. He was parish vicar in Colac from 1992 to 1997 and then at the Cathedral of Ballarat. In 1998 he became a parish priest of Sebastopol, secretary to Bishop Peter Connors and lecturer at the Australian Catholic University. He served as a member of the diocese's College of Consultors from 1999 to 2013. Until he was named a bishop in 2019, he served a parish in Bungaree from 2005 and another in Gordon since 2009, and headed the Advisory Council of Ballarat since 2010. Since 2010 he has served as Master of the Catholic Theological College of Melbourne. From 2012 to 2014, during the inquiry conducted by the Parliament of Victoria into how the Catholic Church and other institutions had handled child abuse, Mackinlay served as spokesperson for the Church. In September 2012, when the Church submitted its report to the inquiry, Mackinlay said it had been difficult for the Church to recognize the reality and extent of child abuse because "We had a very strong clerical culture which made it very difficult both for laypeople, for the families of these victims, for people in our schools, for people in our parishes and certainly for people in leadership and authority to accept that priests and religious could do these evil things." The next year he was criticized by inquiry officials after he traced the origins of the abuse crisis to the social mores of the 1960s and 1970s and attempts to lower the age of consent. One called his remarks disingenuous. On 23 July 2019, Pope Francis appointed Mackinlay the Bishop of Sandhurst. He was consecrated and installed on 16 October 2019 by the Archbishop of MelbournePeter Comensoli at the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo.
