AUSTRALIA Ordinariate beset by leadership crisis


Mark Brolly In Melbourne


THE SETTING up of an ordinariate in Australia has been postponed because of con- cerns in Rome that the favourite to lead the new body was once a Catholic priest. It was expected that Australia would be second in the world to have an ordinariate after Britain and that it would be one of the biggest groups, with the 800 members of a breakaway Anglican group joining it en masse. Archbishop John Hepworth, leader of the


Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) was tipped to become the ordinary but this week he admitted that his past role as a Catholic priest was proving an obstacle. He left the Catholic Church and was eventually ordained


an Anglican priest, but his opposition to women’s ordination and homosexuality led him to found the breakaway TAC. This week Archbishop Hepworth told The


Tablet that talks had been held with the Catholic Church for several years about his status, even as he led TAC. “I could not pos- sibly, as primate, lead some substantial thousands of people into the Catholic Church and obey the authority of the Catholic Church without being under that authority myself, and I am. Once my position is resolved, I will do what Rome says,” he said. His position is complicated by the fact that he has been divorced and has re-married. Bishop Peter Elliott, the Australian Catholic bishops’ delegate for the ordinariate, has refused to speculate on who may lead the


ordinariate, though it has been suggested that he would favour the bioethicist Fr John Fleming – a former Anglican priest who was received into the Catholic Church in 1987 and ordained a priest eight years later. Bishop Elliott, an auxiliary bishop in


Melbourne and a former Anglican, said he could not name a date when the Australian ordinariate – which some potential members would like dedicated to St Thomas à Becket – would be established, and admitted the process was moving slowly. However, at a festival in Perth last month


he exhorted Anglo-Catholics to “stop wasting their time” and join the ordinariate. He told the 100 or so attendees that some Anglo- Catholics “are tempted to make a desperate last stand by just staying where they are”.


Bishop may retire early, blaming ‘conservatives’ for Church’s failings


ONE OF THE most progressive members of the Australian hierarchy, Bishop Patrick Power, is considering early retirement, saying he is disappointed with the Church, writes Mark Brolly. Bishop Power, an auxiliary bishop in Canberra and Goulburn since 1986, told The Canberra Times this week that he was thinking seriously of stepping down when he turned


70 next February, five years earlier than required by canon law.


Bishop Power’s immediate concern has been prompted by the parlous situation of the Diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes, which covers more than half of New South Wales but has only 20 parishes and about 15 priests, and has been without leadership since Bishop Chris Toohey resigned in June 2009.


“I maintain that what is happening in Wilcannia-Forbes is going to progressively become the situation in other Australian dioceses,” Bishop Power said. He told the newspaper he had written to Pope Benedict XVI about the situation in November but had yet to receive a reply. Bishop Power said that the Second Vatican Council had


offered great hope, but he felt the Church had retreated into narrow positions. “I just think it is a shame the potential we had to be a source of inspiration within the whole community has been diminished,” he said. Bishop Power attributed the crisis in the Australian Church in part to its being “undermined” by conservative Catholics reporting to Rome on more liberal developments.


Victims’ groups dismiss abuse compensation plan as a mockery GERMANY


AN OFFER by the German bishops’ confer- ence to pay victims of clerical sexual abuse up to €5,000 (£4,300) each in compensation has been dismissed as a mockery by victims’ organisations. The figure is the equivalent of a priest’s monthly salary in Germany, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. Since cases of abuse at a Jesuit boarding school in Berlin became public a year ago,


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hundreds of people across the country have come forward claiming to have been abused. Earlier this month, the bishops’ conference agreed that written compensation claims could be filed after 10 March even if the alleged abuse had taken place so long ago that their cases are statute-barred under German law. Victims’ organisations have derided the €5,000 offer as in no way proportionate to the suffering the victims had experienced. The bishops explained that claimants must declare on oath that they had been abused by clergy as minors, even if they had already gone through the traumatic process of detail- ing their claim. Each case would then be looked at anew by the Office for Questions of the Sexual Abuse of Minors in the Church. Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier, the conference’s special commissioner for sexual abuse issues, told journalists that compen- sation monies would not be taken out of church tax income. Under German law the perpetrator must pay, but Bishop Ackermann


said that if this proves impossible – for exam- ple if he is dead or has taken a vow of poverty – dioceses or religious orders would finance the compensation from “other church assets”. Names of lawyers, psychologists and theolo- gians responsible for deciding compensation levels would not be revealed, he said. “There will certainly be dissatisfaction,” Bishop Ackermann said. Further payments might be allotted in “particularly serious cases”, and the Church was prepared to pay for ther- apy, but victims would not be able to appeal because the compensation offer was voluntary. The unveiling of the compensation package coincided with publication of German church income from church tax for 2010. Last year some €4.794 billion was collected, a drop of 2.2 per cent in comparison with 2009 but still the third-highest income since the tax was introduced under the Weimar regime after the First World War. Germany’s 25.5 million Catholics must pay between 8 and 9 per cent of their income tax to the Church.


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