Brisbane Archbishop Phillip Aspinall Denies His Actions LED to Youth Being Abused by Priest
By Selina Ross
Archbishop of Brisbane Phillip Aspinall has rejected claims that his actions led to a youth being abused by a paedophile priest more than 30 years ago. Archbishop Aspinall faced the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Hobart today. He came under intense questioning over what he knew about paedophiles operating in the Anglican Church and its youth group, the Church of England Boys Society (CEBS). It heard allegations from a witness known as BYF who blamed Archbishop Aspinall for the abuse he suffered at the hands of convicted paedophile Garth Hawkins in January 1982. Archbishop Aspinall, who was youth officer at CEBS at the time, said BYF told him Hawkins had made an advance on him when they were staying with the priest and he thought the priest was gay. "I didn't regard it as a serious event and I responded to BYF by saying something like 'don't be silly, he's no more gay than you are or I am' and that was the extent of the conversation," he said. Archbishop Aspinall said any reference to bed sharing would have been regarded as a joke. He was asked if it was possible he had joked around with BYF about him sleeping in Hawkins' bed that night. "It's possible that jokes could have been made, yes," he said. But when asked directly if he deliberately volunteered BYF to sleep in Hawkins' bed knowing there was a risk he would be assaulted, he said "no, I did not". Last week BYF told the hearing he was heavily involved in Anglican Church youth groups and it was common for members to stay on floors in rectories or people's homes while travelling. The witness told the commission he stayed at the rectory with then Tasmanian rector Hawkins while travelling with another youth, Phillip Aspinall, who is now Archbishop of Brisbane. BYF said Hawkins came into the living room one night and offered for one of the boys to sleep in his bed. He said Mr Aspinall volunteered him and "made a big thing of it", saying he felt he had to go with Hawkins and "did not want to look daft". BYF told the hearing that night he was forced to perform oral sex and was anally raped by Hawkins. "I couldn't believe that after I'd told Aspinall my concerns, he would deliberately send me to Hawkins' bed," BYF said. The hearing heard BYF later told Mr Aspinall that Hawkins had "done something" to him, and he was dismissive and ignored it. Aspinall 'ambivalent' about reference for paedophile priest Archbishop Aspinall was also grilled over a reference he wrote for paedophile priest Louis Daniels. The hearing was told Archbishop Aspinall was working in Tasmania as a deacon in 1992 when a former leader of the CEBS, Sue Clayton, came to see him. Ms Clayton told Mr Aspinall that Daniels had engaged in serious misconduct with respect to boys but she did not provide details. The commission heard that Ms Clayton told Mr Aspinall that she had reported her concerns to then-Bishop of Tasmania Philip Newell. "I think all I could do would be to report it to the Bishop of Tasmania, given that she had already done that I believed she had done the right thing," Archbishop Aspinall said. "I had no reason to think that it wouldn't be dealt with properly." Daniels resigned from all church positions in 1994 and called Mr Aspinall to tell him. "I said 'Lou something has happened, what has happened? You don't just walk away from everything at the drop of a hat'," he told the commission. "And he refused to tell me." Archbishop Aspinall told the hearings in Hobart he may have had a suspicion Daniels' resignation was related to impropriety with boys, but had no real evidence. "I knew something had gone on but I had no real understanding about what," he said. The Archbishop conceded he had written a reference for Daniels when he was sentenced in 1999. "I'm very ambivalent about the reference," he said. Archbishop Aspinall said at one level he thought he had done the right thing. "I gave the information about the person based on my experience with this person from a young child into my adulthood," he said. "I told the truth and it was a right and proper thing to participate in the judicial process in that way." But he said he had since spent significant amounts of time with victims of abuse and had a much deeper understanding of their pain and suffering. "I can see how my writing of such a reference would cause them deep grief and I certainly regret that, and I would give much greater weight to that now before I agreed to write such a reference," he said. "The third factor, and it's probably the most complex of all, is the way in which I have either dealt with or not dealt with my own deep, personal sense of betrayal by Daniels." Archbishop Aspinall said when he wrote the reference he still felt some sense of obligation to the paedophile. "Given that he had been a mentor and such an influential person in my life for so many years," he said. "And I think at a personal level I have wrestled with that sense of betrayal and I suppose at some level I still do." The commission heard the public was not told why Daniels resigned and that he went on to teach in the ACT.
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