But Anne Manne’s important book Crimes of the Cross, concerning the extensive and profoundly damaging sexual abuse of minors in the Australian Anglican Diocese of Newcastle, does raise some issues concerning the role that a rejection of traditional Christian sexual ethics may have played in that sordid history. It is a conversation we need to have, however uncomfortable that conversation might be.
By “traditional Christian sexual ethics”, I mean the moral teaching that sexual relations should only occur in the context of a marital relationship between a man and a woman. It is not an ethic that church leaders have always lived by. Any close observer of the church could point to multiple scandals down through the centuries and up until the present. Nonetheless, the church — across almost all of its denominations and ecclesiastical traditions — has at least been consistent in its teaching.
The view that sex should be confined to heterosexual marriage has become very controversial in recent years, for two reasons:
sex before marriage, or even outside the context of a committed romantic relationship, has become a societal norm;
there is now a very widespread acceptance in the community of same-sex relationships — such that, to many people, the insistence by conservative Christians (and adherents to the other Abrahamic faiths) that same-sex relations are sinful is itself immoral.
The crimes committed in the Newcastle diocese
Manne’s book is a sobering account of how a network of sex offenders was able to continue for so long in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle. It tells the story, first of the persistent pattern of cover-up and denial — a familiar feature of many other church responses — and then of the battle within the diocese to hold perpetrators to account. To a large extent, the story is told through the experiences of a courageous survivor, Steve Smith, who was abused for years by Anglican priest George Parker. The priest died before he could be held accountable for his serious crimes.
When Steve Smith first made a complaint to the church leadership, the phone was answered by one of the most senior officials in the diocese — the Cathedral’s Dean, Graeme Lawrence. Lawrence was himself a perpetrator. He was “defrocked” (that is, deprived of the status of being a priest) in 2012 after a church disciplinary hearing into his sexual activities, which included abuse of a teenage boy. In 2019, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for the rape of another boy who was 15 years old at the time. Earlier this year, he was released from prison on parole, having served four-and-a-half years of his sentence.
As Manne’s book recounts, Lawrence was one of a group of sex offenders against children and adolescents who held senior positions in the diocese. Going back some decades, one offender had been the bishop. Others were archdeacons. Successive bishops who were not offenders failed to act appropriately on complaints.
Manne’s book is not the first or only account of this sad history of abuse and cover-up. The Royal Commission’s Case Study 42 examined all this in forensic detail. However, Manne’s book brings out the harrowing human dimensions of this history and provides much additional information. It is an important account of a shameful period in the history of the Anglican Church of Australia.
Manne’s account is not only about the villains. There are heroes in this story also — first and foremost the survivors who persisted in seeking accountability, but also the journalists who reported on the issues and the police who eventually managed to bring offenders to justice. Most significant of all was the role of Michael Elliott, who as Director of Professional Standards doggedly pursued the perpetrators and supported the victims, despite huge opposition from influential figures in the diocese. He was admirably supported by other lay leaders, including the members of the Professional Standards Board that conducted the formal inquiries.
I had a role to play on the margins of this story, in two respects. First, research with which I was involved uncovered some disturbing statistics about the number of perpetrators of abuse in Newcastle or other dioceses who had received their theological training at St. John’s College, Morpeth. Second, I was involved early on in the controversies surrounding the efforts of leaders in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle to enforce professional standards by removing or disciplining priests who had engaged in various kinds of sexual misconduct.
Was St. John’s College, Morpeth a meeting ground for perpetrators?
Professor Kim Oates, Amanda Jayakody and I wrote a report for the Anglican Church in Australia on child sexual abuse in the church which was published in 2009. Church personnel in most of the dioceses either completed a detailed questionnaire on known clergy perpetrators of sexual abuse against children and adolescents, or made the files available for us to do so.
In that survey, among the many questions we asked, was a question on what theological college the alleged perpetrators had attended. For about a third of perpetrators, no information on this was provided, but of those where we knew the theological college, 25 per cent of the alleged perpetrators had trained at St. John’s College, Morpeth. Morpeth is a small town in the Hunter region. That theological college, long since closed, trained a great many of the clergy in the Anglican diocese of Newcastle, as well as providing some clergy to other regional or rural dioceses.
Although we had no firm figures on this, it seemed to us that the number of perpetrators trained at Morpeth was greatly out of proportion to the number of those who had studied at the theological colleges located in the major cities. We wondered, therefore, whether a paedophile ring had become established at Morpeth. We could not take the matter further on the data we had.
The question was eventually examined by the Royal Commission. It was unable to reach a definite conclusion, but it did confirm that six former trainee Anglican priests at Morpeth had been convicted of child sex offences, while ten more had been identified as perpetrators. That was two more than we knew about. Four of these offenders were together in residence at Morpeth in 1963.
The review of the professional standards cases
The following year, I received a phone call from Brian Farran, who was the Bishop of Newcastle at the time. He told me that there was considerable conflict at senior levels of the diocese concerning the handling of two cases against priests. He asked me if I would conduct an independent review of the processes to advise on whether I thought the matters had been handled appropriately. I agreed. My report was strictly confidential at the time, but it is referred to in Case Study 42 and forms one of the exhibits. I am free, therefore, to say something about the material which is already on the public record.
Manne’s book fills in some detail about the controversy. She records Bishop Farran as saying that, at that time, there were eight members of the diocesan council, out of twenty, whom he thought were very ambivalent about professional standards. There were those who wanted the Professional Standards Ordinance, which had been in place since 2005, repealed entirely.
The cases of the two priests had galvanised this opposition. Neither case involved the sexual abuse of children. Both concerned alleged misconduct with or towards adult women. One was a case in which it was alleged that the priest had had sexual relations with a woman to whom he had been providing pastoral counselling and support. The other was a case involving unwanted sexual advances toward a woman in the congregation. The Professional Standards Board had recommended that “Priest A” be defrocked. “Priest B” was given a reprimand after a long suspension. I formed the view that the outcome was appropriate in both cases. As I said about the first case:
In my experience, a person who engaged in the behaviour complained of would not be allowed to remain as a licenced minister in any other denomination of the Christian Church.
I agreed with the view of the Board that the behaviour of Priest B did not reach the level of misconduct that would have justified removal from ministry. There were also some extenuating circumstances. In both cases, I considered there were aspects of the process that could have been handled better, and gave advice accordingly.
The rejection of Christian sexual ethics
The two cases, as I said, were quite different, but they had one feature in common: neither priest accepted traditional Christian ethics concerning sexual relations. Priest A defended his conduct on the basis that as long as the woman concerned was not formally a member of the parish, his sexual relations with her were none of the church’s business. As a single man, if he chose to pursue consensual relationships of an intimate kind that did not conflict with his pastoral responsibilities, that was a matter for him. As I wrote in response:
Ministers are not prohibited from dating members of their congregations. They are prohibited from sleeping with them outside of the context of marriage. To the extent that this prohibition relies on traditional Christian moral teaching about sexual matters, it is a prohibition that extends to all members of the congregation, not just the minister; but the minister must lead by example.
Priest B, likewise, did not seem to accept traditional Christian teaching on sex. He had told the women who gave evidence to the inquiry that God imposes no requirements concerning sexual behaviour. They complained that he spoke about sex in a crude manner. He also lived with his second wife prior to their marriage — a matter which he disclosed to his supervisor, apparently without consequences.
These were not cases of priests who knew what was right but had failed to live by the church’s teachings. There are many examples of male ministers of religion who have done that. No, here were two priests who, it seems, had simply rejected the Christian moral and ethical framework when it came to sexual relationships. There was a connection between their theology and their practice. For this reason, one of my recommendations to the bishop was:
The Bishop should reiterate his expectations of all his clergy concerning their public teaching on issues of sexual morality, and their adherence to that public teaching in their private lives.
I was puzzled that the outcome of these two cases had caused such controversy within the diocesan council. Newcastle was well-known as a theologically liberal diocese within the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the church, but was there not at least some consensus around basic Christian teaching on sexual ethics? There might have been arguments about process, to be sure; but as I understood it, the division in the diocesan leadership was about much more than issues of process. There was anger that these two priests had been called to account. As I understood it, the bishop was in trouble with at least some of the leading figures in the diocese for enforcing Christian standards in relation to sexual behaviour.
Manne does not discuss these cases in her book, nor does she mention my report. Perhaps this is because neither case concerned child sexual abuse. However, these two cases played a role in subsequent events involving Dean Graeme Lawrence and several other clergy.
Graeme Lawrence and the gay priest network
The report of Case Study 42 of the Royal Commission, and Anne Manne’s book Crimes of the Cross, both have much to say about the disciplinary case brought against Lawrence, his long-term male partner who held a lay role in the Anglican Church, and three other clergy in 2010. Lawrence had been Dean at Newcastle Cathedral for 24 years. Manne records that he had wielded enormous power and influence both in the diocese and the life of the city. He served on church committees that were responsible for dealing with cases of sexual misconduct and was a member of a national committee that drafted processes for maintaining professional standards. In 2010, he and three other priests found themselves subject to a disciplinary inquiry by the Professional Standards Board. These priests had all been curates to Lawrence when he was rector of a parish in Griffith. All were gay men.
The complaint against these men was made by a young man who subsequently gave evidence to the Royal Commission. In the report of Case Study 42, he was given the name “CKH”. He told the Commission that he was sexually abused from the age of 14 by a trainee priest and continued to have sexual relations with him for years afterwards. He reported that this was known to Graeme Lawrence, and that he had sex with Lawrence from when he was 16. He also had sex with Lawrence’s long-term partner Gregory Goyette, from the age of 17. CKH said that thereafter, he had sexual relations periodically with both Lawrence and Goyette — sometimes separately and at other times together.
The incident that involved other clergy occurred when CKH was 19. He had group sex with Lawrence and another priest in the presence of a third priest and a highly intoxicated 17-year-old boy.
Lawrence and the other clergy involved refused to engage with the disciplinary processes of the Professional Standards Board inquiry, citing the treatment of Priests A and B as evidence that the whole process was not to be trusted. The Board eventually recommended that Lawrence and the other priests be defrocked. Goyette was banned from church roles also. After a long delay occasioned by a failed application to the Supreme Court challenging the jurisdiction and findings of the Professional Standards Board, the bishop gave effect to almost all the recommendations of the Board.
Manne’s book indicates that the group sex which led to the disciplinary charges in 2010 was not an isolated incident. Earlier in Crimes of the Cross, Manne records that Michael Elliott, the Director of Professional Standards, had been made aware of allegations that Lawrence had organised “Men’s and Boys’ Parties where homeless teens would be picked up, plied with alcohol or drugs, and abused by priests”. These allegations were not subsequently tested in a disciplinary hearing or criminal trial. She records also an account from a young priest who was invited to participate in group sex with Lawrence and another young man. He declined, and was persona non grata with Lawrence from that point on.
Manne identifies this as part of a larger pattern in the Newcastle diocese. In the late 1980s, a priest had run a brothel of underage male sex workers in one of the city’s main streets. The bishop was made aware of this. Another notorious sex offender against children, Father Peter Rushton, was rumoured to hold wild parties of men and boys at his rectory. “Busloads of men were said to come up from Sydney”, reports Manne. “They went to the local spas and bathed naked.” It is very hard to see how none of this could have come to the attention of the diocesan leadership of the time. Rushton was eventually promoted to the position of Archdeacon.
It emerged from the work of the Royal Commission that St. John’s College, Morpeth was a site where the network of gay priests gathered recruits. In its final report, the Royal Commission recorded the observations of another bishop, Greg Thompson, that the culture of the diocese had allowed St. John’s College “to be a place where older offending clergy could nurture young emerging ordinands” and that recruitment occurred through these “sexualised relationships”. He went on to observe that “people are compromised early on in their ministry by older men, and are groomed to accept this as the normal rights or the entitlements of a priest”.
Another witness to the Commission reported that when she was involved in supporting St. John’s College in the 1970s, it was known as “Satan’s playground”. She was aware that “a lot of homosexual and sexualised behaviour” took place at Morpeth at that time. This raises questions about what these ministry trainees were taught about Christian sexual ethics at Morpeth in this period. Were they given a coherent, theologically grounded, explanation for the church’s teaching, as well as guidance on how it should be lived out in practice in their own lives?
Distinguishing gay sex from sexual abuse
Among the gay priest network, how much was just “gay sex” and how much was the sexual abuse of children? It would be easier to talk about this if the two were completely separate, but the picture presented in Manne’s book is that they were intertwined. There was not one group of priests who had sex with boys and another distinct group who had sex with men. These groups had an overlapping membership. Manne says of Peter Rushton’s Anglo-Catholic group that some were sexually involved with one another and all were sexually abusing children. Of Lawrence and his friends, Manne writes that:
they existed in an alternative moral universe that reversed widely held community values. Puritanical attitudes to sex were bad. Sex was highly pleasurable, so any sex was good. There was nothing wrong with introducing an underage boy to something so pleasurable.
Some of these priests, at least, were not paedophiles. This is a matter on which there is a lot of confusion in the community. There is no connection between paedophilia and homosexuality. Many paedophiles have heterosexual adult relationships, and in any event, far more girls than boys are sexually abused in the course of childhood. However, a paedophile is defined typically as a man who is intensely sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. The word is often used, wrongly, in popular discourse to describe sex offenders who abuse any minor under the age of consent. Sexual attraction to a post-pubertal adolescent — male or female — is within the range of normal heterosexual or homosexual attraction from a biological perspective. Acting upon that attraction is socially unacceptable and legally forbidden, because we take a view about the age at which an adolescent has capacity to give consent to sexual relations and we are appropriately protective of childhood. However, a man who is sexually attracted to a post-pubescent and reproductively mature adolescent, and acts upon that attraction, is not a paedophile.
Much sexual abuse of boys in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle seems to have been of this latter kind, as has been true also of other churches. In Newcastle, as elsewhere, priests who were homosexually active in promiscuous ways either involved underage adolescent boys in their activities or ignored age restrictions when it came to sexual advances on teenage boys.
Ambivalence about Christian sexual ethics
Manne’s account demonstrates that prior to the development of a rigorous process for enforcing professional standards, the diocesan leadership had adopted a somewhat ambivalent approach to traditional Christian sexual ethics. Certainly, it accepted non-celibate homosexual clergy. There was nothing closeted about Dean Lawrence’s long-term domestic partnership with Gregory Goyette.
The development of a rigorous professional standards regime, which dealt with complaints under the national code of conduct, Faithfulness in Service, began a transformation in how the diocese dealt with alleged sexual misconduct. Perhaps this is why there was such visceral opposition to the Professional Standards Board when it started holding priests to account and defrocking them over sexual matters. This, according to Manne, represented something of a U-turn in the culture — in particular, because the professional standards regime operated openly and with independence from the bishop.
Manne characterises the conflict over the new professional standards regime from 2009 onwards as being between the puritans and the progressives. Some people understood the disciplinary action taken against Lawrence and his colleagues as a witch-hunt against gay clergy. It wasn’t, but it is understandable why the issues might have been framed this way given that so many allegations that emerged in this new period of transparency and accountability involved gay men.
What had been the attitude in the diocese towards traditional Christian sexual ethics prior to the development of its professional standards regime? To what extent was fidelity to those ethics required of priests? No doubt, it was a mixed record. It should be acknowledged that Bishop Roger Herft introduced an “Ethics in Ministry” code in 1999 and a new policy on “Principles and Procedures for Dealing with Allegations of Sexual Misconduct” in 2002. However, the Ethics in Ministry document said nothing about traditional Christian sexual ethics. Indeed, it began by stating: “Christian morality cannot be reduced to following moral rules.” Its guidance on sexual matters was limited to saying that “clergy and church workers must not take advantage of their position to gain sexual favour from a parishioner or any other person”. It then went on to address sexual harassment and abuse. The Royal Commission found that earlier in his episcopate, Herft had been made aware of the most serious allegations against priests Lawrence, Rushton and Parker, and failed to act upon them. As a consequence, he was eventually defrocked by the Episcopal Standards Board of the Anglican Church.
If the diocese did accept non-celibate gay clergy who were open about their sexuality — and it seems clear that they did, at least from the appointment of Graeme Lawrence as Dean of the Cathedral from 1984 — what exactly did the diocese say were the ethical boundaries of same-sex relations? It does not seem that a theologically informed and revised understanding of Christian sexual ethics was articulated to replace the traditional sexual ethics that were discarded.
The battle over Christian sexual ethics
There is now an intense battle within the Christian church worldwide, and particularly within Protestant churches, on whether traditional Christian sexual ethics should be revised. In secular culture, that issue has long since been resolved. The prevailing, if not universally held, secular ethic is that all sexual relations between adults, heterosexual or homosexual, are fine as long as there is consent. Real consent; enthusiastic consent; consent to all aspects of the sexual engagement — but otherwise, no strict moral rules other than the boundaries that individuals choose to adopt for themselves. Those boundaries, of course, should be respected.
For the church, issues of sexual morality are much less easily resolved because we derive authority from the Bible and, in some churches at least, from tradition and natural law theory. There is considerable debate on whether there should be acceptance of non-celibate same-sex relationships. It is an issue on which some denominations are deeply divided. This includes the worldwide Anglican communion, and it is far from clear that it will manage to stay together.
At the heart of this debate in the Protestant churches is a theological argument about how to interpret certain passages of the Bible, and argument about the extent to which the church should remain committed to its tradition when it comes to sexual conduct. Whatever one’s views on this, there are also important pastoral issues about how churches respond to gay and lesbian Christians in their congregations and how they can reach out to others who are interested in matters of faith. All this is well beyond my pay grade. However, there is something that should be said about the need for a coherent and theologically informed view of Christian sexual ethics. If the traditional views on homosexual relations (and much else) are to be abandoned, what sexual moral code will church leaders teach, and what norms will they enforce in terms of clergy behaviour?
Imagine a situation where a “progressive” diocese openly acknowledges that it has a different view on same-sex relationships to the traditional Christian teaching and has no problem at all with having non-celibate gay priests. If that is its publicly articulated position, then it needs also to articulate a revised Christian sexual ethic that includes same-sex relationships. Some theologians have, of course, done so. There are versions of a Christian sexual ethic that take the biblical teaching seriously but make room for a faithful and monogamous same-sex partnership. Robert Song’s book Covenant and Calling: Towards a Theology of Same-Sex Relationships is one such attempt at this, allowing for “covenant partnerships” which are characterised by faithfulness, permanence and fruitfulness.
It is difficult to see how any authentically Christian view of same-sex relationships could accept the kind of sexual promiscuity evident among at least some of the gay priests in Newcastle. Any sexual morality that seeks to describe itself as “Christian” inevitably must speak of values of monogamy, sexual fidelity and long-term commitment. A church might accept same-sex relationships, but it cannot accept the morality of the bathhouse. Nor can it bless orgies. When it comes to heterosexual relations, it might relax the restrictions on sex before marriage, but it could not condone hedonistic casual sex.
So if a diocese or other church body were to articulate a new Christian sexual ethic, it would also need to articulate a new set of rules or standards by which at least its priests and other church personnel should be required to live. Otherwise, it would be doing no more than accepting whatever goes for sexual morality in the secular world — and beyond the need for consent, that seems to be very much up to the individual to determine their own boundaries.
Sexual ethics and the protection of children and young people
I suspect that the abandonment of traditional Christian sexual ethics without a theologically informed replacement created an environment where the sexual abuse of adolescents became more likely in Newcastle; and this remains a continuing vulnerability for churches that depart from traditional Christian sexual ethics or that allow this to occur in a subterranean way.
This is because a clear moral code on sexual ethics in terms of private behaviour plays a role in preventing the sexual abuse of minors. If you internalise, and live by, a strong conviction that sex is only morally acceptable within the bounds of marriage between adults, you may be accused of being prudish, unrealistic about human sex drives, even hopelessly naïve; but you are safe. Safe for young women, safe for young men, safe for post-pubertal adolescents who are reproductively mature, but who are not legally old enough to give consent to sexual relations.
Safer for children, at least, even if you have a paedophilic disorder. In one of his most influential early essays, David Finkelhor, perhaps the world’s leading expert on child sexual abuse, indicated that there are four preconditions for the sexual abuse of children to occur:
the man has a desire to do so (it is almost always men);
he overcomes his internal inhibitions of conscience or fear of being caught;
he overcomes external inhibitors in order to be given the opportunity to be alone with the child;
he can entice or coerce the child to engage in the sexual activity.
The stronger the internal inhibitor of conscience, or the fear of repercussions if caught, Finkelhor argues, the safer children will be from a paedophilic male’s sexual predations.
The risks of ethical ambivalence
From Manne’s account in Crimes of the Cross, and Case Study 42 of the Royal Commission, it does not seem that there was, in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle, any clear articulation of a revised sexual ethic which reflected the actual practices that leaders condoned or to which they turned a blind eye. Perhaps it was too difficult for them to do so in the first decade of the 2000s, or before this. Perhaps they were required to be, in some sense, dishonest about what they believed and practiced, in order not to exacerbate a theological rift within the Anglican Church of Australia and beyond.
Let’s suppose there had been a clear articulation of a revised sexual ethic. Let’s suppose the diocese had articulated a well-thought through revision of Christian sexual ethics which it taught to those training for the Anglican ministry at St. John’s College, Morpeth, and which was expressed in its code of conduct for clergy. To do so, it would have to provide clarity, not only on what was now ethically permitted, but what remained sinful in the eyes of the church leadership.
That would inevitably have required disapproval of the casual sexual relations between gay priests. To the extent it was known, it would also have required disapproval of the sexualised gay activity at St. John’s College, Morpeth, and the grooming by older priests of ministry trainees into homosexual relations.
If the diocesan code of conduct had demonstrated a clear intention that priests be required to live within the new ethical boundaries, then Graeme Lawrence and the other gay priests would have been clear about the rules or norms that they were expected to follow in their private lives and the values they were required to teach in their public ministry. It may be that some of these men, uninterested in having only a sexually faithful monogamous relationship with one long-term partner, would have realised that the Anglican ministry was not for them. This might have spared some victims who would not have come into contact with them, but for the priestly role of these men. Even if men like Lawrence had stayed in the ministry, a knowledge that the new sexual rules would be enforced and that they could be expected to be defrocked if they breached them, might have been enough to constrain at least some of their behaviour.
Or perhaps it would not have restrained them. It certainly wouldn’t have prevented the forcible rape or molestation of teenage boys. But a clearly articulated and enforced sexual ethic would at least have given greater moral clarity to the diocesan council in 2010 when the controversies about the professional standards regime first erupted. Among them, it seems, were people angered by the treatment of priests, both heterosexual and homosexual, who had rejected the constraints of traditional Christian sexual ethics. What ethical rules, grounded in the faith they professed, replaced what they rejected? A diocesan council will find it difficult to deal with sexual misconduct by clergy if it does not have a shared understanding of, and commitment to, clear ethical standards of behaviour.
Having a code of professional ethics for clergy is a good start, and Newcastle did have this from 1999 with its Ethics in Ministry document. Typically, such codes provide that ministers of religion should not have sexual relations with people they are counselling or to whom they are a pastor. That is a professional code of ethics shared by doctors, psychologists and others. It is not a distinctively Christian sexual ethic.
The problem with churches that quietly condone or turn a blind eye to behaviours that depart from traditional Christian sexual ethics without articulating a theologically coherent revision of those ethics is that they do not merely expand Christian teaching to embrace same-sex relationships and non-marital heterosexual relations — they also abandon traditional teaching without replacement.
Lawrence, Rushton and their friends were given the message that they were not bound by traditional Christian sexual ethics that confined sexual relations to a heterosexual marriage. By outwardly appearing to hold to traditional values, but accepting same-sex relationships without a new ethic to accompany it, Newcastle diocese was in a position of accepting whatever sexual behaviours the non-celibate gay priests chose to engage in, including an apparently unconstrained licentiousness that would not have been accepted for heterosexual priests. It seems these men were in practice free to do what they want — and they evidently did not feel constrained from involving underage boys in their sexual pursuits.
Is sexual abuse in churches a thing of the past?
Towards the end of Anne Manne’s book, there is one last shocking story. It was an event that occurred in mid-2018, a year after the Royal Commission concluded. A 23-year-old man who was interested in training for the priesthood was introduced to Lawrence, who at this time was on bail, awaiting trial. The introduction came from his parish priest, a friend and acolyte of Lawrence. This priest, who is in a heterosexual marriage, believed that it was wrong for Lawrence to be defrocked.
This young adult man accepted a lift home from Lawrence after their meeting. Lawrence sexually assaulted him continuously on the journey. He told the young man that he liked having sex with young boys and thrust his phone in front of his face to show him videos of child sexual abuse. The young man managed, eventually, to get away and told his parish priest of the assault. The priest, he later recounted, showed no surprise or indignation and subsequently minimised and normalised the assault. He is reported to have told another clergyman that Lawrence just showed the young man some gay pornography at a café. The parish priest was eventually defrocked after a professional standards inquiry, but, according to the current bishop, showed no contrition, railing against the professional standards process.
Anyone who thinks the problem of sexual abuse in churches is a thing of the past needs to reflect on the fact that, even in 2018, there was a clergyman in Newcastle prepared to defend Lawrence and to minimise the sexual assault of a young member of his own congregation. The problem of sexual assault and misconduct in churches is not just a thing of the past, any more than it is in the rest of the community. Young people remain at risk if we do not have a clear and coherent set of Christian ethics around sexual conduct — ethical standards that church leaders are prepared to require their clergy to live by.
Patrick Parkinson AM is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Child Sexual Abuse and the Churches and many articles and reports on the sexual abuse of children and young people, including various reports for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.