AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Anne Connolly
Bishop Greg Thompson says members of the Newcastle Anglican diocese acted like a Sopranos-style protection racket when it dealt with sex abuse complaints.
“What’s particularly distinctive about the story of abuse in this diocese is the habituated protection of perpetrators and the undermining of survivors as they came forward. It was like a religious protection racket,” Bishop Thompson told 7.30.
“You could call it like a religious Sopranos, people who pretended to be religious behaved appallingly. An organised crime against survivors.”
The bishop also told how he was abused by two senior priests — including former bishop Ian Shevill — at an R-rated movie in the 1970s.
“The abuse was groping and touching and grooming me to see sexual assault as a normal thing, as an acceptable thing and as part of becoming a person in the church. That’s how corrosive it was in that moment,” he told 7.30.
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