The Anglican Church’s reckoning with child sexual abuse is akin to the nation’s ongoing indigenous reconciliation project, Anglican Bishop of Tasmania Richard Condie says.
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Bishop Condie’s comments come two weeks after he outlined his plan to sell 120 church properties to fund the Anglican Diocese’s contribution to the national redress scheme for survivors of child sexual abuse.
The Anglican Diocese’s estimated liability is roughly $8 million.
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Of the proceeds from the proposed property sales, 25 per cent will go to a redress fund, another 25 per cent will go to a ministry development fund and the remaining 50 per cent will remain locally, according to Bishop Condie.
The Diocese is yet to come up with a definitive list of properties to be sold – which will include churches, as well as vacant land – but says such a list will be made available on May 7.
The plan will be detailed at the Synod, an annual meeting of all parish representatives in June.
Representatives for a parish in which a property is being proposed for sale must approve a sale before it is allowed to go ahead.
The diocesan council will meet at the end of the year to examine any applications for review of sale proposals and then make its final decisions.
The properties will then be put on the market at a staggered rate.
Bishop Condie said many parishioners were questioning his plan, asking why they needed to pay for the sins of their forebears.
I’m a theologian and the Christian message, in a nutshell, is that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world as a sinless man [and] rose again to new life so that people could be forgiven and restored.
- Bishop Richard Condie
“I think it’s a very interesting question that Australia grappled with with the apology to the indigenous people,” he told Fairfax Media.
Bishop Condie detailed his experience watching former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s public apology to the stolen generations.
“I was moved to tears because I felt so proud to be an Australian at that moment as we took responsibility for our history,” he said.
“And I think part of the reason this is so painful, selling property, is that people acknowledge they are part of the long-term history of the Anglican Church in Tasmania.”
Bishop Condie described his proposal to sell church properties as “a reconciliation process” and an act of “collective responsibility”.
“My predecessors, who established a lot of churches, did a lot of good things; they also did a lot of bad things,” he said.
“My predecessors were involved in the annihilation of the indigenous people in Tasmania.
“One of the [other] bad things they did was abuse children.”
Bishop Condie said Anglicans in Tasmania had to share the heritage of the bad things the church had done, just as they shared the good.
“I’m a theologian and the Christian message, in a nutshell, is that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world as a sinless man [and] rose again to new life so that people could be forgiven and restored,” he said.
“I think what we’re doing is a profoundly Christian thing to do, to pay sacrifice for the sins we didn’t commit.”
Bishop Condie will spend next week driving to parishes that could be affected by the proposed property sales, where he will talk to parishioners to “help them make sense of it”.
Last Friday, the Anglican Diocese announced it had convened a Diocesan Tribunal to deal with the matter of former Bishop Phillip Newell’s alleged conduct in dealing with complaints of institutional child sexual abuse.
