Deacon Bill Autrey
Director of Religious Education

Deacon Bill was born in 1947 in Longview, Texas where he resided for the first five years at
which time his family moved to Lancaster, PA.  He attended St. Anne’s and Lancaster Catholic
High School and graduated in 1969 from the University of Rhode Island with a M.S. in Chemical
Engineering.  For 28 years he worked for Bethlehem Steel Corp. as a metallurgical engineer and
manufacturing supervisor.

In 1967 Deacon Bill married Carol Madonna.  Deacon Bill and Carol have four children and six
grandchildren.  One family of grandchildren is Yankee fans and the other Red Sox fans.  
The grandchildren are his motivation for trying to enable Catholics to live out their baptismal call
to spread the Good News “to make the family of man and its history more human.”

In 2000 Deacon Bill was ordained a Permanent Deacon for the Diocese of Allentown at which
time he changed his life work as a steel worker to church ministry.   He was deacon and Director
of Religious Education at Ss. Simon and Jude, Bethlehem until August 2006 when he began his
assignment in the service of deacon and Director of Religious Education at St. Ignatius Loyola.  
St. Ignatius Loyola Parish