Anglican Church leader brands chastity for priests ‘unhelpful and archaic’

Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane Jeremy Greaves has defended changes to the church’s code of conduct for priests and staff. But the Archbishop of Sydney can’t see how the amendment ‘improves the standard’.

Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane Jeremy Greaves, and Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel.

Being chaste was unhelpful and archaic as a standard of behaviour for church leaders, one of Australia’s most senior Anglicans says.

Archbishop of Brisbane Jeremy Greaves was defending changes in the code of conduct for priests and church workers that have stirred renewed internal tensions over moral obligations.

He steered through amendments to the Faithfulness in ­Service requirements in 2022 in the Diocese of Southern Queensland, reframing expectations of how clergy and staff conducted themselves in intimate relationships.

These were in line with changes made in the Diocese of Perth in October, angering conservatives who said they would encourage permissiveness and undercut efforts to drive sexual predators out of the church.

Brisbane and the West Australian capital are regarded as the ­nation’s most progressive Anglican constituencies.

As The Weekend Australian reported on Saturday, the requirement to maintain “chastity in singleness and faithfulness in marriage” in the FIS was replaced by what was seen by the traditionalists as a less onerous one of priests and staff “taking responsibility for their sexual conduct”.

This was to be characterised by “faithfulness and integrity” in their behaviour.

Archbishop Greaves insisted the revised standard set a higher bar and was also more relevant, especially to church workers who hadn’t taken holy orders.

“There are many lay people in positions of leadership in our schools and Anglicare for whom the language of being ‘chaste’ and of ‘chastity’ is seen as unhelpful and archaic – it is language that comes from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer that is not widely in use anywhere in the Australian church and is not found in any of our other liturgies,” he said.

“The language of ‘relationships characterised by faithfulness and integrity’ better expresses what we would ask those in leadership to model.”

How The Weekend Australian broke the story on Saturday.

Archbishop of Perth Kay Goldsworthy, at the centre of the row, argues that the onus on “faithfulness” extends beyond sexual fidelity and strengthens the code of conduct. “It requires faithfulness of the heart and mind as well as body,” she said.

However, the Archbishop of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel, said the changes permitted sex outside marriage and “other permissiveness” contrary to church teachings. “I cannot see how removing a clear statement such as ‘You are to be chaste and not engage in disgraceful conduct of a sexual nat­ure’ improves the standard to which we want all church workers to adhere,” he said.

Archbishop Greaves pointed to a “particularly confronting” finding of national research for the church in 2017 showing that the prevalence of intimate partner violence among Anglicans was the same or higher than the community average. “Given these findings, there needs to be a higher standard than ‘marriage’ to which we would wish to hold clergy and church workers,” he said.

“The changes we brought to Faithfulness in Service in Brisbane sought to strengthen rather than water down the requirements of those to whom the code of conduct applies. Relationships ‘characterised by faithfulness and integrity’ is a higher bar than ‘faithfulness in marriage’ as demonstrated by the findings of the 2017 report.”

Archbishop Goldsworthy said Perth was the eighth of the nat­ion’s 23 Anglican dioceses to amend the FIS charter, sitting within the code of conduct for clergy and church workers.

Bishop of Grafton Murray Harvey, whose northern NSW diocese was among those cited, said the stipulation of “chastity in singleness and faithfulness in marriage” had been retained.

The row is the latest in a series of pitched theological battles between progressives and conservatives in Australia’s second largest church, brought to a head when same-sex marriage was legalised in 2017 in secular society.

Christian orthodoxy holds that people should refrain from sex – chastity in singleness – until they wed and then be faithful to their spouse. The catch for committed Anglicans in same-sex relationships is that marriage is the union of a man and woman in the eye of the church, a position traditionalists led by Archbishop Raffel sought to enshrine at the church’s General Synod in 2022, its supreme decision-­making body.

Failure of the motion to pass the General Synod gave legs to a breakaway movement known as the Diocese of the Southern Cross, headed by former archbishop of Sydney Glenn Davies, which has six churches in Queensland and one in Perth.