At last, Anglican Church sorry for decades of abuse

AUSTRALIAN and British child sex victims have finally been vindicated after years of cover-up by the Anglican Church.

AUSTRALIAN and British child sex victims have finally been vindicated after years of cover-up by the Anglican Church, with an ­official admission that one of its most senior clergymen was a pedophile who had been ­“allowed’’ to abuse children.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu has written to victims of the late Robert Waddington — a ­former Queensland headmaster who later ran hundreds of Anglican schools in Britain — saying he was “deeply ashamed’’ the church had not listened and acted on complaints of child sex abuse.

The extraordinary admission follows a year-long inquiry into Waddington, the former dean of Manchester who died in 2007, and the mishandling of abuse allegations in 1999, 2003 and 2005 against him from former choirboys and students in England and Australia.

The inquiry, sparked by a joint investigation of The Australian and The Times of London that showed Waddington’s trail of horrific rapes and beatings of boys over five decades and inaction by senior church officials, was headed by sitting English judge Sally Cahill QC. It also investigated the former archbishop of York, now Lord (David) Hope of Thornes who last year expressed regret at not reporting the allegations to police or other child protection agencies.

Archbishop Sentamu wrote in his letter to Waddington’s victims that “we in the Church of England should face up to the wrong which has been allowed to be done to those children who were abused by the late Robert Waddington’’.

“Above all it is for the Church of England to face up to where it has failed to protect children from sexually predatory clergy,” he wrote. “Apologies given years later are unlikely to be satisfactory, but I want you to know that for my part I am deeply ashamed for those times when the church has failed either to listen or to act where children were at serious risk.’’

Judge Cahill’s unreleased report, which victims are demanding should be made public, is likely to be critical of Baron Hope, a life peer in the House of Lords awarded a knighthood for services to the sovereign.

In his letter, Archbishop ­Sentamu also opens the door to compensation and says the findings of Judge Cahill’s report will be made public when the church receives responses from victims and others named in the report.

Bim Atkinson, who was sexually abused and beaten by Waddington in the 1960s while a student at St Barnabas boarding school in Ravenshoe, north Queensland, said it was a “shameful indictment’’ on the church that it did not act until 15 years after he first reported the abuse.

“If my efforts in 1999 had been responded to, we now know that some children would have been saved from Waddington’s continuing offences in England,’’ Mr Atkinson said in a letter to Archbishop Sentamu.

It is understood more victims came forward to the Cahill ­inquiry alleging abuse by Waddington from when he began as a curate in London in the 1950s through to the early 2000s, when he was molesting a former ­Manchester choirboy.

North Queensland Bishop Bill Ray said he had referred the allegations against Waddington to the federal royal commission into child abuse and would hand over the Cahill report once he had received it.

Bishop Ray last year confirmed that all the files relating to the students and staff at St Barnabas, where Waddington was headmaster from 1961 to 1971, were missing and believed to have been thrown down a disused mine shaft.

“The inquiry has taken a very long time, it has been frustrating but it is important to get all of the truth and I believe there has been other victims from Australia and England that have come forward,’’ Bishop Ray said.