AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
Toni Hassan
“It takes a village…” was perhaps Hillary Clinton’s most memorable line. It was given a macabre twist in the Academy award-winning movie Spotlight, about the cover-up of sexual abuse by Catholic Church clergy in Boston. One of the actors observed that “if it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one”.
We are about to learn more about the NSW “village” of Newcastle, in which an extraordinary number of respected citizens appear, through action or inaction, to have helped cover up allegations of sexual abuse.
Four years after, Julia Gillard announced the royal commission into institutional responses to abuse, the Anglican Bishop of Newcastle, Greg Thompson, will take the stand on Wednesday in Sydney when the commission reconvenes for case study 42. He has already given evidence privately, as perhaps the most senior clergyman to do so. He grew up in the Hunter Valley and was sexually abused while a student in Newcastle. After serving as a priest in many parts of Australia, including Canberra, he returned to Newcastle as bishop in 2014.
He says he was greeted by senior community figures keen to “groom” him. One legal figure recommended a system of internal reviews; an opportunity for the new bishop to “learn” but also, he realised, be potentially compromised. Thompson went straight to the police.
Within months he issued a formal apology to victims and announced he wouldn’t live in the “house on the hill” traditionally occupied by the bishop, as the stately mansion had come to represent all that was wrong with religious power. It’s since been sold.
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