Clergyman's long road to resolution

Christopher Pearson From:The Australian
September 10, 2011


ON Tuesday, May 13, 2008, I went to a meeting with Archbishop John Hepworth, the global primate of the 400,000 strong Traditional Anglican Communion. He was in the middle of what were to prove successful negotiations with the Holy See for his flock to be corporately reunited with the Catholic Church.

Matters were at a delicate stage and his own position vis-a-vis Rome needed to be urgently regularised. He'd been originally ordained a Catholic priest for the archdiocese of Adelaide but had gone to England, married, become an Anglican cleric and in due course been made a bishop.

He took me into his confidence on the years of violent sexual predation and blackmail he had endured as a seminarian and a young priest, which finally drove him to flee Adelaide. Tess Livingstone has chronicled these events elsewhere in today's paper.

Hepworth told me there were two reasons he was talking to me about these matters. The first was that I was a columnist with The Weekend Australian and a Catholic convert who would not lightly write anything that might cast the church in a bad light. Even so, I could act as a form of insurance if he were to meet with procedural obstacles in his dealings with the archdiocese. the rest