UNITED KINGDOM/AUSTRALIA
The Australian
MICHAEL MCKENNA AND AMANDA GEARING THE AUSTRALIAN AUGUST 05, 2014
AN independent commission of inquiry into child sex abuse in Australia and England by one of the Anglican Church’s most powerful clergymen and its subsequent cover-up has been finalised, with the year-long probe uncovering new victims of the serial pedophile.
Archbishop of York John Sentamu said the inquiry confirmed the “seriousness of the crimes’’ committed by the late Robert Waddington, who rose to become the church’s head of education in Britain after serving as a school principal in Queensland during the 1960s.
The inquiry, ordered in May, 2013, after an investigation by The Australian and The Times newspapers exposed Waddington as a pedophile, also led to an ongoing probe into other Anglican clergy who served in the Diocese of York in the past 70 years.
The newspaper investigation revealed English church officials and senior Australian Anglicans failed to report to police the allegations of abuse made in 1999 by a former Queensland student, Bim Atkinson, and similar claims made in 2003 by Manchester choirboy Eli Ward. Archbishop Sentamu is expected to release the inquiry report, by English judge Sally Cahill, next month.
In a statement, Archbishop Sentamu said he hoped the church would learn from the “systemic failure’’ that allowed the child abuse. “Whilst it is never possible to put right the wrongs that have been done, the seriousness of the crimes which have been committed makes us determined both to acknowledge our responsibility and our shame for our failure to protect children in the past, and to respond far more positively to those victims who bravely come forward to share their experience today,’’ he said.
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