A Flurry of Abuses, by Charles Waterstreet, Sydney Morning Herald, September 18, 2011

A Flurry of Abuses

By Charles Waterstreet
Sydney Morning Herald
September 18, 2011

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-flurry-of-abuses-20110917-1kevx.html

Illustration: Michael Mucci.

THE Senate was packed with two senators, one of whom seemed to be asleep. The other, on his light feet, Senator Xenophile, gravely outed, as his melancholy duty, Monsignor Ian Dempsey. It was a script that could have been written by Dan Brown. He alleged that Archbishop John Hepworth - of a splinter Anglican group, the traditional Anglican Communion - was the victim of violent rapes at the hands of two priests and a trainee priest that started in 1960, when he was 15.

Xeno, a word of Greek origin, ironically used in combination with other words, means "alien", "strange" or "guest", as in xenogamy or xenophobia. The Archbishop sat on his own hands until 2007 before he told the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide of the attack.

Last week Senator Xeno said he would wait no longer than the following Tuesday, make it noon, for the church to stand down the monsignor or he would name him. A couple of days after 51 years seemed self-serving, especially as the church had only been given the allegation four years ago. Calling for immediate suspension did seem to fly in the face of Xeno's purported tortured decision - "as a former lawyer he strongly believes in the presumption of innocence".

Xeno claimed that the church did nothing and said nothing but the church's lawyers wrote to him before his self-appointed, self-anointed D-day, citing procedural fairness, canon law and that the allegation was denied by Dempsey.

Urgency did not seem in anybody's interests, even those of the victim, who preferred that Dempsey be stood down, rather than named and shamed. Nothing has been heard from the two dead priests in this cute triangle. Xeno the Worrier Man would fight to the death for their right to remain silent. Xeno seems to be the only loose cannon in his church.

The monsignor is an Officer of the Order of Australia, served as director-general of the Naval Chaplaincy, but there is no statute of limitations in Xenoland. He used the royal plural when referring to himself as he said, "We have to act in the interests of parents and children in the parish."

Now hang on. There is more to the story than Xeno has let on. Buried in the Hansard text is that there were different incidents and we find that the victim was about 18 at the time the monsignor is alleged to have first given unholy communion. It is not only an essential component of the crime that there was no consent, it is also necessary to show the alleged offender knew there was no consent, beyond reasonable doubt.

Don't get me wrong, Archbishop Hepworth looks like goodness manifest but waiting 47 years before unpacking your luggage leaves one thinking that it was best left under lock and key.

Parliamentary privilege is used as the WikiLeaks of sex scandals more than anything else. Under its banner, Craig Thomson was named as the misuser of his union credit card on brothels. Senator Bill Heffernan falsely accused the great High Court judge Michael Kirby of using his Commonwealth car to pick up rent boys. Kirby accepted the ungracious apology and held out his hand in the "spirit of reconciliation". Deirdre Grusovin named the late John Marsden as a paederast when it was clear the accuser was more saucy than source, causing Channel Seven to pay lawyers more money than they did in the network's failed Foxtel case.

Women and men in Parliament get their knickers in a knot about gays. Franca Arena outed retired judge David Yeldham before he committed suicide by car. South Australia does bat above its weight with gay accusations made by its representatives. Liberal Mark Brindal pointed the finger at Ralph Graham as a paedophile, "I believe Ralph Graham has predated at least two or three of the boys he raised" and "gossip in the gay community certainly confirms my statement" Brindal told the South Australian Parliament in 2005. Brindal himself had dated a 24-year-old-man.

In Britain, a super injunction, protecting soccer star Ryan Giggs's affair with model Imogen Thomas, was broken by an MP in Parliament. Who wouldn't want an affair with Thomas, a former Miss Wales? She is a classy act, refusing money to name Giggs, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for a children's hospice and quarantining herself in a flat after contracting swine flu on a holiday in Marbella. I would have risked it, in this time of swine, to swash my buckle in her flat.

I cannot understand Giggs's motive to keep Thomas a secret but the reality of Twitter and other cross-border networks means courts cannot keep secrets any more than the gay community in Adelaide can contain its gossip.

And Xeno's attitude makes horse sense when you discover he said in his maiden speech to Parliament that Woody Allen was "my role model, some might say my kindred spirit". Presumably Xeno has no problem with the filmmaker's own famed peccadilloes. And anyone who looks up to Allen is very short indeed.

When he came to power on a platform of "no pokies", I thought it was about the poker machines not the sex lives of priests. Woody and Xeno are both Worrier Men.