Mgr John Hepworth,67 ans, de la TAC, abusé par des prêtres et des séminaristes de 1960 à 1972


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Abused Archbishop John Hepworth ready to forgive

EXCLUSIVE Tess Livingstone
From: The Australian
September 10, 2011 12:00AM


AN Australian archbishop leading a breakaway Anglican faction that wants to reunite with Rome has revealed that he fled the Catholic priesthood after experiencing systematic sexual abuse over more than a decade.

Archbishop John Hepworth, the primate of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a 400,000-member Anglican breakaway group seeking reconciliation with the Vatican, broke decades of silence after securing an apology from the Catholic church and an offer of $75,000 compensation.

The revelation of his private pain, known until today only to family, a few close friends and senior church leaders, adds an extraordinary personal twist to the creation of Anglican ordinariates that have opened the way for the largest mass defection to the Catholic Church since the Reformation.

Despite what he suffered over a 12-year period from 1960 at the hands of two priests and a fellow seminary student who went on to be ordained, Archbishop Hepworth said he was determined to continue his mission to bring the churches together.

"I fled in fear but I never wanted to leave," he said of his decision to depart the church in 1974, haunted by the abuse while a seminarian and junior priest. "The church is full of sinners . . . but it is God's gift to the human race through Jesus Christ . . . I have never lost the sense of vocation of being a priest."

Adelaide-based Archbishop Hepworth, 67, is believed to be the most senior church figure in the world to reveal he was a victim of clerical sex abuse.

He says he was raped repeatedly. Two of his accused abusers are dead; the third, a senior Catholic priest, runs a parish in South Australia.

He reported the abuse to the Archdiocese of Adelaide more than four years ago but the church has not stood the priest down.

Contacted by The Weekend Australian yesterday, the priest laughed and said: "I can't discuss matters that are confidential." Asked if he had read Archbishop Hepworth's allegations against him, he giggled and said: "Good try but I won't say anything."

Documents obtained by The Weekend Australian show Archbishop Hepworth's ordeal began in 1960 when he was 15 and newly enrolled at Adelaide's St Francis Xavier Seminary.

The matter took another twist years later when one of Archbishop Hepworth's assailants tried to use the Seal of the Confessional to silence him, by confessing the abuse to him.

Despite the experience, Archbishop Hepworth was ordained a priest and stayed with the Catholic Church until 1972, when he fled to Britain and drove trucks for Boots chemists. He became an Anglican, and then a priest in the Anglican fold, rising to be world primate of the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion.

In an attitude of extraordinary forgiveness and atonement, his prime concern, set out in a letter to Archbishop Wilson in November 2008, was that his relationship with the Catholic Church be healed before he died.

"I do not seek retribution," he wrote but he felt "deeply cheated of a priestly life that I have been exercising as it were by subterfuge, outside the communion of the Catholic Church".

In contrast to Adelaide's tardiness, the Archdiocese of Melbourne's Independent Commissioner, Peter O'Callaghan QC, has processed and resolved Archbishop Hepworth's complaint against one of the three priests, the late Ronald Pickering of Melbourne, in just over 12 months and left Archbishop Hepworth free to speak openly about it.

Mr O'Callaghan also accepted that Archbishop Hepworth suffered "many other instances of sexual abuse by members of the clergy in South Australia".

Archbishop Hepworth praised the independent Melbourne process, which was set up by Cardinal George Pell when he was archbishop of Melbourne, for showing him "a care that was beyond anything I thought possible".

In an apology to Archbishop Hepworth dated August 26, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart wrote: "We cannot change what has happened . . . You may never be rid of the memories or the hurt . . . On behalf of the Catholic Church and personally, I apologise to you and to those around you for the wrongs and hurt you have suffered at the hands of Father Ronald Pickering."

The consultant psychiatrist's report provided to the Melbourne Archdiocese's Independent Commissioner for Sexual Abuse shows Pickering's abuse was coupled with gruesome blasphemy about the Virgin Mary.

Archbishop Hepworth, who prays with the rosary daily and has a strong Marian devotion, told the psychiatrist working for the inquiry: "When I see a statue of Our Lady, that whole thing comes back and I can't get rid of it."

Nor can he get rid of the panic attacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, dizziness, feelings of terror when the doorbell rings and spontaneous tears that have haunted him for half a century. At one point he was brought close to suicide - he drove towards the graveside of one of his abusers, intending to take his own life there, but turned back.

He remains angry and frustrated that his complaint has not received attention in Adelaide. In 2007, he and Lay Canon Cheryl Woodman, chairwoman of the TAC professional standards committee, met the Vicar-General of the Adelaide Archdiocese, Monsignor David Cappo, who is the retiring Social Inclusion Commissioner to Premier Mike Rann and incoming chairman of Julia Gillard's new Mental Health Commission.

Archbishop Hepworth says he named his initial abuser in the Adelaide seminary as the late John Stockdale, who worked as a priest in Bendigo. Stockdale died on December 31, 1995, reportedly in a sex cubicle at Club 80, a "men-only" club in Collingwood, Melbourne.

Archbishop Hepworth further complained to the Adelaide archdiocese about being violently raped by a priest on a beach at a seaside town and at other centres when he was a junior priest.

He also complained about that priest's unseemly behaviour at the funeral of a relative.

Earlier this year, frustrated by the lack of progress and again accompanied by Lay Canon Woodman, he spoke to Monsignor Cappo. They were told inquiries in Adelaide were still at a "preliminary stage" because he had not lodged a "formal" complaint.

He has since done so, although he had always regarded the highly detailed six-page statement he provided in March 2008 as a formal complaint.

It was followed up with several other detailed statements.

He would not say which of his three abusers tried to use the confessional to gag him, or when it happened. "The Seal of the Confessional is the last barrier, never to be broken," he said.

Neither Monsignor Cappo nor the Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, responded to a series of written questions put to them yesterday by this newspaper.

Documents provided to the Melbourne inquiry and Adelaide Archdiocese claim Archbishop Hepworth's ordeal of abuse, trauma and blackmail began a month after he entered the seminary. Other students, and later a member of senior staff, threatened him with expulsion if he spoke out.

Dozens of American seminarians who found themselves in similar positions and walked out found themselves barred from other seminaries and had to wait decades to be ordained, if ever.

"I felt trapped," Archbishop Hepworth recalled this week.

"My sister soon noticed that I looked 'thin and haunted' but I kept quiet."

The documents show he tried to discuss the problem with a senior member of the seminary, who threatened that any mention of sexual experiences could disqualify him from ordination. Adelaide's then-auxiliary bishop Philip Kennedy, who has since died, later warned him that if any of his friends were implicated in complaints, he would "destroy" him.

When Father Hepworth, as a young priest, finally confronted the former Archbishop of Adelaide, James Gleeson, who has since died, he was told: "If you have come here to say that, you can go now." He did - he left for Britain.

After returning to Australia, he served as an Anglican priest in Ballarat and Adelaide before leaving the Anglican church in 1992 to join the newly formed TAC. He was elected its world primate in 2002. Officially, he is excommunicated from Catholicism under Canon Law for being consecrated a TAC bishop in 1996.

John Hepworth was the oldest of five children and his father, a soldier, served as a Rat of Tobruk, in Japan and Korea. His mother, a World War II army nurse, cared for the wounded from the epic desert war battle of El Alamein. He grew up on a war service estate in Adelaide and is now married with three children.

As a child and teenager, he only ever wanted to be a Catholic priest but as his statement to Monsignor Cappo in March 2008 sets out, his nightmare began at the minor seminary where he completed Years 11 and 12 and where a prefect took him to the room of John Stockdale. The older seminarian plied him with wine, cheese and fruit and the prefect left, leaving him alone with "Stoker". Stockdale warned he could be expelled for being there and his touches quickly became sexual before "he began painful and vigorous sex", Archbishop Hepworth recounted in a statement to the Adelaide Archdiocese on March 25, 2008.

He said he went to bed that night confused and in pain after the violent anal rape. By his account, he wondered if what had happened was sinful and whether he should receive communion the next morning and confess it.

He was warned by the prefect next day that he would be expelled if he mentioned the encounter. The prefect later befriended Hepworth's father, who used to tell his son, "Stick with (the prefect) . . . and you'll be OK".

The pattern of abuse was to be repeated at monthly intervals for about two years until the prefect who had introduced him to Stockdale "passed him on" to a Melbourne priest visiting Adelaide, Ronald Pickering.

"He expected and forcefully demanded sex," Archbishop Hepworth recalled in the same statement. The encounters continued, in Adelaide, Melbourne and in Oxford during a liturgy conference to which he was sent by his then-archbishop.

Working in several Adelaide parishes - Goodwood, Colonel Light Gardens and Glenelg - after ordination, Archbishop Hepworth recalled in his statement how he "had learned some resistance" in rebutting the homosexual approaches of Pickering and others and began studying at Flinders University, a process he found "liberating". He holds several degrees.

But as a young priest, he was invited to the beach by two priests. According to Archbishop Hepworth's statements, after walking on the beach one night, one of the priests "stripped off and began wrestling with me".

"He was stronger than me," Hepworth said. "Or perhaps I was just weary of it all . . . I remember cold, wet sand and forced sex."

The statement recalled that the foray to the beach had been "my conscious last attempt to 'belong' among the diocesan clergy". It was also the turning point that made him determined to escape.

"I have had a vivid memory of that event, and of the guilt the next day as I drove back to Adelaide," Hepworth said.

"By then, I had an awareness of the illegality of homosexuality, a sense of gross sinfulness, but also a sense of the glamour of the group with which I had been involved."

His fear of prosecution under the law, he said, prevented him going to the police.

"I want to state quite clearly that I never fully consented to sexual activity with (the priest still working in Adelaide)."

Archbishop Hepworth said that he left the priesthood "out of fear of disclosure, out of a fear of the blackmail threats made in the case of Pickering and Stockdale, and out of a desire to be accepted and to have friends".

"I remain with a strong sense of guilt over my involvement with him, even after nearly 40 years, and even though I know intellectually that I was a victim of someone more powerful than me," he said.

He also realised he felt "deeply repulsed" by homosexual sex and was more fearful of other men than anything else.

Despite this, Archbishop Hepworth alleges that the priest sexually assaulted him up to seven more times. He said he felt "so weakened physically and emotionally" that he did not resist.

For all his suffering, Archbishop Hepworth retains a passionate love for the church, with which he is determined to be reconciled in full sacramental communion.

In his March 2008 statement, he wrote: "Perhaps I have been too driven in my search for redemption, for acceptance by a church that I did not know how to approach. I ran away from that church, but I have never lost my love for it."

Despite the fact that he has been married, divorced and remarried and has three children, he also wrote: "Perhaps it is the only real love that I have ever known, and it is a love distorted and beyond my reach over all of my adult life."
ICI
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Clergyman's long road to resolution

Christopher Pearson
From: The Australian
September 10, 2011 12:00AM


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.
LA

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