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	Church Plan to Pay for Past Sins By Colin James Adelaide Now October 2, 2006 http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,20508911-5006301,00.html The cash-strapped Anglican Church wants its Adelaide parishes to pay a special levy to help fund child sexual abuse compensation claims. The Diocese of Adelaide Synod this month will be asked to approve the payment of 1 per cent of each parish's annual income into the levy for 10 years. Official papers for the Synod, obtained by The Advertiser, also reveal members will be asked to approve the sub-division of the official residence of the Anglican Adelaide Archbishop, Bishop's Court, at North Adelaide. It has been estimated by the church that it could raise around $2 million by selling off a former tennis court in the mansion's 4ha grounds. That could accommodate four townhouses. Other proposed cost-cutting measures that up to 200 Synod members will be asked to vote on include the redundancy of several full-time church employees, the possible reduction of chaplaincy services in prisons and hospitals, the end of a long-running housing grants program and the sale of a campsite in the Barossa Valley. The budget cuts have been recommended by a church working party which developed a financial strategy to cover legal costs from child sex abuse by priests and church officials. That already had reached $4 million. Other moves to be presented to the Synod, following revelations of child sex abuse within the Adelaide Anglican Church over the past 50 years, include the: FORMATION of a new professional standards committee, with a permanent director, to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct. CREATION of an electronic national database of priests and church officials who have been investigated by professional standards committees. NEW rules enabling priests found guilty of sexual misconduct to be stripped of their licences once they have been convicted in criminal courts. The Synod papers reveal several of these measures first were recommended by a church sexual abuse working group in 2003. They could not be implemented, however, because of internal church protocols. The resignation of former Adelaide Anglican Archbishop Ian George also stalled the process. The working group, chaired by Synod president and Supreme Court judge Justice David Bleby, developed comprehensive internal legislation to deal with child sex abuse by priests or church officials. Moves to implement the legislation, however, were stalled when an independent inquiry by a retired judge, Trevor Ollson, and an Adelaide academic, Donna Chung, into the church's handling of child sex abuse allegations delivered its findings in May, 2004. "In the upheaval which followed, the Archbishop (Ian George) resigned," the Synod papers say. "No legislation could be passed without an Archbishop in office and, apart from the short special session of Synod held in May 2006, no opportunity has arisen for consideration of the legislation." Background papers explaining the need to urgently implement the legislation after the three-year delay say the church's "failure in the past to disclose and to do anything about information thus received (about child sex abuse) has caused untold damage to victims and to the Church, in its failure to act". The new legislation makes it compulsory for priests to report any allegation of child sex abuse to the church's professional standards committee. Priests within the Adelaide Anglican Church have been receiving training on their legal obligations to report suspected child sex abuse to police and welfare authorities. Adelaide Anglican Archbishop Jeffrey Driver yesterday was unavailable for comment on the Synod papers. The Synod will be held at St Peter's College between October 26 and 29.
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