Pat Comben Admits His Treatment of Abuse Victims Was Unchristian

By Jamie Walker
The Australian
February 12, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/pat-comben-admits-his-treatment-of-abuse-victims-was-unchristian/story-e6frg8h6-1226824974721#mm-premium

Pat Comben is a former Anglican, estranged from the church by his own doing. So bitter was his exit that he’s not sure he is even a Christian. The ex-deacon has had a lot of time to think since he let go of his holy orders on November 22 last year, the day he entered the witness box at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Comben had been registrar of the Diocese of Grafton when a letter arrived in the winter of 2005 detailing how kids had been starved, bashed, indecently assaulted and raped at an Anglican children’s home in Lismore, northern NSW, in the 1950s and 1960s. He professes to have been horrified. Yet he took point position in the protracted compensation negotiations that followed, driving the hardest bargain he could, seemingly without compassion for the victims. Now, he runs a caravan park and takes in people who would otherwise be out on the street.

When he looks into his heart, as he does a lot these days, he wonders where God was while he went toe-to-toe with the complainants’ lawyer, haggling over what compensation should be paid, if at all. This is not about ducking responsibility for his actions, he insists. Comben knows he let the victims down - and it wasn’t only by being miserly. Two priests accused of molesting children were allowed to settle into comfortable retirement without facing church disciplinary proceedings, let alone criminal prosecution.

Comben accepts he should have done more to pursue them. Somehow, he lost sight of what was important and right, and he could only see this “great wood, instead of the individual trees”. Or maybe, as chief commissioner Peter McClellan put it, once he got into the fight, Comben stayed there, consumed by winning it. “I was wrong,” Comben told the inquiry, and the intervening period has only strengthened that belief.

“I feel ashamed,” he says quietly, sipping his coffee on this hot, humid afternoon in Coffs Harbour, where he has started a new life. “I don’t know if I can say any more than that ... I feel shame that people we were supposed to help, that I wanted to help, weren’t helped in the way they needed to be.” The response was “over-legalistic”, inappropriate and outside church rules - nearly anything, when it came down to it, except Christian.