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	Clergyman's Long Road to Resolution By Christopher Pearson The Australian September 10, 2011 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/clergymans-long-road-to-resolution/story-e6frgd0x-1226133465850 ON Tuesday, May 13, 2008, I went to a meeting with Archbishop John Hepworth, the global primate of the 400,000 strong Traditional Anglican Communion. He was in the middle of what were to prove successful negotiations with the Holy See for his flock to be corporately reunited with the Catholic Church. Matters were at a delicate stage and his own position vis-a-vis Rome needed to be urgently regularised. He'd been originally ordained a Catholic priest for the archdiocese of Adelaide but had gone to England, married, become an Anglican cleric and in due course been made a bishop. He took me into his confidence on the years of violent sexual predation and blackmail he had endured as a seminarian and a young priest, which finally drove him to flee Adelaide. Tess Livingstone has chronicled these events elsewhere in today's paper. Hepworth told me there were two reasons he was talking to me about these matters. The first was that I was a columnist with The Weekend Australian and a Catholic convert who would not lightly write anything that might cast the church in a bad light. Even so, I could act as a form of insurance if he were to meet with procedural obstacles in his dealings with the archdiocese. The second was that I had occupied one of the flats in the large North Adelaide house where he had been periodically abused all those years ago. The house belonged to James Govenlock, the cathedral organist, who entertained a coterie of guests, some of whom were predatory homosexuals. Govenlock had tested the waters to see if I could be recruited in my first year out from university and he introduced me to some of his regular guests. They included bishop Philip Kennedy and paedophile priest Ronald Pickering, both deceased, and other clergy. At the time I was a regular communicant at Christ Church, North Adelaide. My father had just been ordained as an Anglican priest. I had spent enough time in the company of seminarians not to be flummoxed by the phenomenon of same-sex-attracted clergy and was trying to come to terms with my own sexuality. That homosexual clergy should prefer one another's company was generally seen as perfectly understandable, but even in the mid-1970s we expected that they'd do their best to live up to their vows of celibacy. By the time I moved out of the flat I had stopped going to church and - to Govenlock's dismay - become politicised as a gay activist. I've followed his and his guests' subsequent careers closely enough via newspaper reports. Before turning to the events of the past few years, it's worth noting that the Traditional Anglicans are people who felt obliged to leave mainstream Anglicanism for three basic reasons. They reject the ordination of women and practising homosexuals. Unlike many Anglicans, they're orthodox and will have no truck with the theological modernism of the ultra-liberals, which sees the resurrection as nothing more than a nice metaphor. Last, they are liturgical traditionalists who don't see the rites of the church as being in need of updating or as an opportunity for individual creativity. On all three grounds the TAC poses a threat to liberal Catholic bishops and their clergy. As well, Benedict XVI's new Ordinariate sets up a parallel hierarchical structure for ex-Anglicans, which means that they're not normally subject to the will of local bishops but are still fully fledged Catholics. The Ordinariate is one of the Pope's long-planned and cherished initiatives. For it to succeed, local bishops will have to display more generosity to an inconvenient, persecuted conservative minority than we have seen in recent years. Adelaide has long been regarded as the most liberal archdiocese in the country. The two people primarily responsible for administering it - and for dealing with Hepworth - are its archbishop, Philip Wilson, and his vicar-general, David Cappo. Wilson was previously appointed to the see of Wollongong to deal with its entrenched clerical sexual abuse problems. His zeal in that task earned him the nickname "the smiling assassin", a leading role in the peak body for Catholic professional standards and the chairmanship of the Catholic Bishops Conference. Some observers are surprised that in light of Hepworth's formal complaints no past or present priest of the Adelaide diocese has been investigated. Cappo is probably best known for having accepted a controversial secondment to the executive committee of cabinet by the Rann government in South Australia, implementing social inclusion policies. Knowing he would not be wanted in the role after Mike Rann stepped down, he resigned last week and accepted a similar part-time job from the federal government. Hepworth says that, while he has had swift justice and compensation from Melbourne and is welcomed cordially in Rome, with regular meetings with Cardinal William Levada, the second most senior curial official, in Adelaide he has experienced some delay. The detailed six-page letter in March 2008 setting out his case, which he handed to Cappo in the presence of a TAC canon and witness, has led to only preliminary inquiries because it wasn't deemed to be a formal complaint. There was no warning to Hepworth at the time or until late last year on that score, notwithstanding a written request to Wilson in late 2009 that he take his case formally to the Holy See. Wilson replied that he wouldn't do it in writing but would instead talk to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in person. Had Hepworth become a little infuriated by nearly four years of delay while he was trying to keep his worldwide flock united and manage the most significant return of dissident Christians to reunion with Rome since the Reformation, it would be quite understandable. First he was told that as the TAC primate he was a special case and need not go through the Towards Healing process. Then the fact he had not gone through the process was cited as a reason for archdiocesan inaction. The archdiocese sent all of Hepworth's file to one of those he has accused, without establishing any rudimentary confidentiality provisions governing its contents. He was then told that, were he to supply the findings of the Melbourne Process just completed, which comprehensively vindicated him, they too would have to be handed over to the person he had complained about, despite all the personal detail contained in the document. I assume those steps were taken to meet the requirements of natural justice. One notes that dealing with events this old is very complex. One consequence of Hepworth declining to disclose the new material was that the archdiocese hasn't had the benefit of its 50-page report in formally advising the Holy See of its view of Hepworth's situation, character and prospective role in the Ordinariate. The Catholic bishops of Australia are due for their five-yearly ad limina trip to Rome to report on their stewardship to the Pope and the curia. Most of them are planning to leave on September 26. In the era where the Vatican relies on the internet and scandals even in the remotest parts of the church are in the public domain, Hepworth's case will be much discussed.
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