Former governor-general Peter Hollingworth faces judgment day over sex abuse crisis

Beth Heinrich wants Peter Hollingworth judged over the church’s child sex abuse crisis with a biblical sense of urgency.

Sexual abuse victim Beth Heinrich at her home. Picture: Aaron Francis

Time is running out for Peter Hollingworth over the child sex abuse crisis and Beth Heinrich wants him to be judged by his church with a biblical sense of urgency.

The former governor-general’s theological licence to officiate in basic tasks such as delivering sermons and overseeing family church events in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne has not been renewed but this is only a small part of a much bigger problem he faces.

The Anglican investigative body Kooyoora is inching closer to deciding whether Dr Hollingworth, 87, should be stripped of holy orders – defrocked – after several complaints about his conduct while archbishop of Brisbane in the late 1980s and 90s and his comments as governor-general.

Multiple victims of church abuse – like Ms Heinrich, who was abused at a hostel as a teenager in the 1950s by an Anglican minister – are relentlessly pursuing Dr Hollingworth, her victim impact statement to the inquiry a shattering account of how she was groomed and then abused from the age of 14 in NSW.

Peter Hollingworth

Dr Hollingworth’s reputation was battered in 2002 when he suggested Ms Heinrich, at the time of the offending a child at a boarding school, had instigated sex with disgraced Anglican minister Donald Shearman.

Ms Heinrich is preparing to write a book on the intimate details of how she says Dr Hollingworth and others intensified her pain, testing her will to live and destroying her relationship with the church she loved.

“You are looking at me and perhaps I look OK on the outside, but that’s not how I feel,” Ms Heinrich’s statement prepared for the Kooyoora tribunal reads.

“If I allowed myself to be me I would have to start cutting my arms to show people how much I was hurting. I am afraid to be me because it hurts too much. I feel like I am someone else.”

While Dr Hollingworth mulls what logic and fairness suggests must be the looming end of the years-long Kooyoora inquiry, Ms Heinrich wants the elderly bishop held to account for his failures, blasting the prolonged nature of the investigation.

“Of course none of this dragged out drama is necessary,” she writes. “It can easily be solved. He should find the integrity, finally do the right thing and quietly resign.”

Dr Hollingworth was never an abuser, but was exposed falling short of basic community standards in his handling of the crisis.

Dr Hollingworth’s critics argue there is enough evidence that suggests he should be banished from his church, including allowing a pedophile priest in 1993 to continue to preach against a specialist’s advice, giving incorrect evidence to a 2002 abuse inquiry and blaming Ms Heinrich for being abused by Shearman, who is now dead.

In 2002, Dr Hollingworth told the ABC the relationship between Shearman, who was a married adult, and Ms Heinrich, was “not sex abuse”.

“There was no suggestion of rape or anything like that, quite the contrary,” he reportedly said.

“My information is that it was the other way around.”

Dr Hollingworth met Ms Heinrich in 1996 and queried her evidence compared with the disgraced Shearman, who was later defrocked but not before being given an OBE.

In the foreword to the book she is writing, Heinrich laments: “Can you imagine how devastating it was to have Archbishop Hollingworth, who had by then become the governor-general, defame me, victim-blame me and lie about me on national TV?’’

“His Australia-wide lie has never been attended and resolved. It haunts me still.”

Dr Hollingworth’s office rejected the premise of several questions posed by The Australian, adding that he had been ill.

The questions included whether it was his decision to no longer officiate, whether he should be defrocked and whether he had used delaying tactics to slow down the Kooyoora inquiry.

Ms Heinrich has kept detailed notes and documentation outlining how the church treated her ­between 1954 and 2022, including a box of legal documents and a diary detailing the time of ­phone calls received and made.

Shearman began grooming her when she was 14, expelled her from the hostel in 1957, falsely accusing her of being promiscuous with boys but then was exploited by him again in 1977 when she tried to escape an abusive ­marriage.

Ms Heinrich’s victim impact statement to Kooyoora underpins the level of mental angst the sex abuse has caused her and the role of Dr Hollingworth’s public ­denunciation of her had in retraumatising her.

“I am afraid to hear things reported from him in case I lose control of myself,” she writes.

“It continues to affect my life because I am always at a certain stress level wondering what he will say next or what other people will say on his behalf for him.’’

She said the ABC’s Australian Story reporting, which Dr Hollingworth has contested, had shattered her confidence. “I was devastated,” she writes to Kooyoora.

“It made me absolutely frightened. I wanted to run away. I couldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t be believed. I was at a loss to understand.”

Professor Chris Goddard, a global expert on abuse, said the church’s treatment of Ms Heinrich had been “the most extraordinarily protracted case of abuse that I have ever seen in my career as a front line worker and later as a researcher’’.

“Almost all Beth’s life has been taken up with the continuing abuse by a large powerful organisation, the Anglican Church,” he said.

“I think it is important to stress that it is not mishandling. It’s a strategy that organisations use to protect themselves and diminish the standing of and further abuse the victims.

“The abuse has taken many forms, from the abuse that she ­suffered as a child to the ­extraordinary public humiliation by the then governor-general, where he denied on national television that she was abused and blamed her!

“A girl in a hostel preyed upon by a priest, who later expelled her from school because they claimed she was promiscuous! 

“It is almost impossible to understand how she has found the strength to keep going. The victim impact statement that she has provided gives details of her suffering and brings tears to my eyes.”

Kooyoora said it could not comment on any investigation, nor any on any particulars, but said that it appreciated any time delays in investigative and complaint processes affected those involved.

“We are also mindful that for these processes to be effective, that sound and thorough information must be provided to decision makers in order for the best possible decisions to be made at that time.

“A balance in both these areas is critical. In 2021 we saw matter resolution times decrease from 2020 (99 to 79 average days).”

The Diocese of Melbourne did not comment.