Peter Hollingworth: ‘Ex-governor-general not fit to function as priest’, say lawyers

The tribunal investigating disgraced former governor-general Peter Hollingworth rejected moves to block him from acting as an Anglican minister.

Former governor-general Peter Hollingworth. Picture: Valeriu Campan

Former governor-general Peter Hollingworth should have been stripped of his permission to officiate as an Anglican minister due to serious misconduct and deficiency of character, according to lawyers for the internal investigation into his wrongdoing.

Counsel for the church-created professional standards committee submitted that Dr Hollingworth’s failings were so deep that he should not be able to function as a priest and that if his mission were ratified it would erode trust in the vocation.

But the Anglican-inspired tribunal that judged Dr Hollingworth ultimately decided that, despite finding multiple counts of misconduct, the former Archbishop of Brisbane had been ignorant of the needs of child sex abuse victims rather than wilfully negligent.

The Anglican Diocese of Melbourne set up a complex and slow moving response to the child sex abuse royal commission, which led to a five-year complaints process and examination of whether Dr Hollingworth should have been defrocked for a series of failings while running the church in Brisbane in the late 1980s and 1990s.

The report into three complaints against Dr Hollingworth found he had failed to adequately care for and support two abuse victims, permitted an offender to remain in ministry despite knowing he was a risk to children and green-flagged another offender to remain in ministry despite knowing he had sexually assaulted a child.

Under the investigatory process, the diocese’s professional standards committee presented a case to the Professional Standards Board, which was overseen by Robin Brett KC.

Counsel for the PSC Diana Price submitted that Dr Hollingworth, 88, had shown “such deficiencies of character that he was not an appropriate person to be held out to not only the church community but the community in general”.

The report, handed to affected parties this week, quotes and paraphrases some of the submission.

“She (Ms Price) pointed to the fact that if he were to retain permission to perform the duties he currently performs, he would not only be standing before the world as fit to minister in his local parish and other local or private places but at St Paul’s Cathedral, the centrepiece of the diocese, where she submitted, he was presented as a figurehead or role model,’’ the ruling says.

“If that were to continue to happen following this hearing, she submitted, trust in the church (and) its priests as guides and moral leaders would be eroded.

“She submitted that it was important for it to be clearly understood by all that there were consequences for breaches of expected standards of behaviour.”

The tribunal was required to decide whether Dr Hollingworth was a fit person to function as a minister under church legislation. It had the power to defrock the former governor-general.

Counsel for the PSC said that Dr Hollingworth had failed substantially over the now dead priests Donald Shearman and John Elliot, where he had allowed both to remain in the church despite knowing they were abuse offenders.

But the tribunal found that Dr Hollingworth had not acted out of malice but ignorance of the impact of sex offending on children.

“We consider that the respondent’s grave mistakes were ultimately due to his failure to understand the lifelong effects that sexual abuse can have on a child and did have on the victims of Elliot and Shearman,” the ruling says.

“This led to his fundamental error in treating the interests of the perpetrators as at least equal to those of the victims and the consequential decisions to permit them to remain in ministry.”