The Nation

Adelaide finding propels Hepworth to police

The Melbourne archdiocese’s process found his story of sexual abuse true; the Adelaide archdiocese’s process has found his complaint without substance.

Three months ago the Traditional Anglican Communion’s prelate John Hepworth, a former Catholic priest, went public with his tale of more than a decade of sexual abuse by older seminarians and priests from the time he entered, at the age of 15, Adelaide’s St Francis Xavier Seminary in the early 1960s, including being raped by a priest still serving in the Adelaide archdiocese.

Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson might have hoped his announcement that the archdiocese’s investigation had found no substance to the allegations, nor any basis for criticism of the archdiocese’s handling of the complaint, would be the end, or at least the beginning of the end, of a very public scandal.

Instead, the announcement heralded only the end of the beginning. The day after Archbishop Wilson informed the media, on Monday, 28 November, of the results of the inquiry by barrister Michael Abbott, Archbishop Hepworth made good on previous threats that, in the absence of satisfaction from the Adelaide archdiocese’s complaint process, he would file a police complaint.

He had wished to avoid a police investigation, he said, because his motivation was to reconcile with the Church, and involving the police was likely to draw the matter out over a period of years.

Archbishop Hepworth is the leader of a global movement of breakaway Anglicans seeking reunification with the Catholic Church. He says the abuse was the reason he fled the Catholic priesthood in 1972 and he had felt it necessary to explain his situation.

“Six months before I was due to chair a meeting of Traditional Anglicans around the world and present them a petition of unity with Rome, I realised I would have to go to the Vatican and present the petition,” Archbishop Hepworth said.

“I had already written to then Cardinal Ratzinger, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stating what my background was as a former Catholic priest. I said if my background became an issue and I was asked to step aside I would immediately do so.”

His reason for going public with his claims in September, he said, was due to the completion of an inquiry into his case in the Melbourne archdiocese, which resulted in an apology from Archbishop Denis Hart and an offer of compensation.

In contrast, he said, in Adelaide he had difficulty finding out on what basis the archdiocese proposed to proceed. In August he had been told its investigation was still preliminary – six months after he formalised his complaint, first made in writing in 2008, according to the Church’s national Towards Healing protocols.

“Initially we asked what the process was,” he said. “The archdiocese said it was the Towards Healing chapter on standards for clergy in Australia. We then pointed out that the relevant sections were not being followed. We were then told the process was a mixture of Towards Healing and Canon Law.

“At no stage did we discover what sections of Towards Healing were being applied or what the actual process was.”

He said the first he heard of the Adelaide’s inquiry findings being released was when a television reporter rang him. “I had an email from Archbishop Wilson’s secretary, dated November 28, but I didn’t see it until the next evening because I wasn’t in my office. I was in Queensland.”

Archbishop Wilson’s statement said the inquiry included interviewing 29 witnesses though did not spell out that Archbishop Hepworth was not among them.

“I was written to by the archdiocese’s solicitor requiring me to attend an inquiry being conducted by Michael Abbott QC,” Archbishop Hepworth said. “My solicitor replied challenging Mr Abbott’s appointment, on the basis of previous aggressive engagements with him and also his lack of expertise in investigating matters of sexual abuse, and asking for the terms of reference of the inquiry.

“Following that there were several months of exchanging letters, in which we failed to discover the terms of reference or scope of the inquiry, and I was told if I wanted to produce witnesses I would have to pay the whole cost myself. So we never reached that stage where I felt able to take part in the enquiry.

“I very strongly objected to a process where a Catholic archdiocese appeared to be retrying a process which had been completed by another Catholic archdiocese. Given the fact that many priest perpetrators were moved from diocese to diocese, there appears to be no protocol for dioceses to co-operate.”

The archdiocese said its investigation was complicated because the claims involved a priest who was still living, while Melbourne’s involved two priests who were dead.

Archbishop Wilson was not available for interview. The Adelaide archdiocese’s solicitor did not return repeated phone calls.

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