AUSTRALIA
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
August 8, 2018
By Richard Willingham and Ben Knight
Disgraced former governor-general Peter Hollingworth has been named in several complaints to the Anglican diocese of Melbourne over his continuing status as a bishop in the church.
The complaints have been made by survivors of abuse at the hands of Anglican clergy and teaching staff in the Brisbane diocese, where Dr Hollingworth served as archbishop in the 1990s.
He was forced to resign as governor-general in 2003 after an inquiry found he allowed paedophile priest John Elliot to continue working until retirement, despite Elliot admitting to Dr Hollingworth that he had sexually abused two boys.
Last year, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found Dr Hollingworth made a “serious error of judgement” in allowing Elliot to continue in the ministry, and that Dr Hollingworth failed to take into account a psychiatrist’s advice that Elliot was an “untreatable” paedophile who posed a risk of re-offending.
Yet just months after Dr Hollingworth gave his evidence to the royal commission in 2016 — including an apology to an abuse victim — his permission to officiate as Bishop was renewed by Australia’s most senior Anglican, Archbishop Philip Freier.
It was the fourth time Dr Freier had renewed Dr Hollingworth’s permission to officiate since 2007.
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