Introduction
Studies and debates on matters of ecclesiology are largely the domain of ‘insiders’ who are within the Church in some sense – as members or employees or working and studying in university faculties of theology. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017) is therefore significant, beyond its principal role as discussed elsewhere in this issue of Journal of Anglican Studies, in providing the most substantive secular investigation yet undertaken of aspects of the ecclesiology of the Anglican Church of Australia (ACA).
This article first outlines the various ways in which the Royal Commission engaged with the ACA’s ecclesiology. The article then offers an explanation of what the Royal Commission Papers can contribute to one well-known theme in the ecclesiological literature of the ACA, that of diocesanism. My understanding – in the absence of a formal definition – is that diocesanism refers, when applied to a national or provincial Church of the Anglican Communion, to the view that a disproportionate degree of authority and self-identity resides in the Church’s individual dioceses, rather than centrally.
The article concludes that the Royal Commission identified diocesanism and the associated dispersion of ecclesial authority as key factors constraining the ACA’s responses to child sexual abuse, and actively sought to modify its impact. The article also points to the significance of the Royal Commission’s findings to ACA ecclesiological understandings and change.
The Royal Commission’s Engagement with the ACA’s Ecclesiology
The Royal Commission probed the occurrence of child sexual abuse in institutional settings, particularly investigating the nature of the responses to the abuse by those in positions of responsibility. The contexts that shaped those responses were of great interest to the Royal Commission. In the case of the ACA, as with other religious institutions where there had been widespread abuse, the investigations into these contexts necessarily led to the scrutiny of a wide range of ecclesiological practices, including those of ecclesial structures of authority, administration and governance, and the Church’s culture.
There were detailed investigations by the Royal Commission of the ACA’s Constitution and canons; its membership of the Anglican Communion; its three-fold order of the ordained ministry, with special attention to the roles and responsibilities of bishops and their failures of leadership; the roles of its laity, of senior lay Church officials, and of women members, respectively; diocesan structures, both internally and in relation to the national Church; the General (that is, national) Synod and diocesan synods; and practices of sacramental confession and forgiveness.Footnote 2
Nearly all the Royal Commission’s investigative material was collated in its published Papers, which make up an extensive corpus comprising: a 17-volume Final Report, with a section specifically on the ACA;Footnote 3 57 Case Studies, of which nine relate to the ACA, dealing with representative examples of child sexual abuse and its management in government, non-government and Church organizations in this country; 4000 representative summary narratives from over 8000 Private Sessions conducted for survivors to disclose their abuse; 62 research reports; reports from some of the 35 policy roundtables, and sundry other material.Footnote 4
The Papers provide us with a view of the ACA’s ecclesiology informed not by religious belief or coloured by a personal identification with the Church, but from a secular body concerned with child sexual abuse, its incidence and prevention. The Papers do not in any way assess the Church’s structures and practices theologically – for example, by their fidelity to Scripture, tradition or reason – but rather judge them instrumentally by their effectiveness in responding to and preventing abuse. The Papers of the Royal Commission therefore stand in a tradition quite separate from nearly all the existing ecclesiological literature on the ACA. This makes the Papers not only novel but especially valuable, with the potential to support fresh ecclesiological analysis, and ecclesial reflection and renewal by ACA insiders. The Papers offer the possibility of a broader discourse, exposing lacunae and pointing to themes yet to be explored.
Crucially, the Papers also record the Royal Commission’s intervention in the ecclesiology of the ACA, in which it sought to be a disruptor. The Royal Commission did this in several ways. It held the ACA’s leaders to public account, principally through the public hearings associated with the Case Studies; it gave a voice to survivors previously silenced by the Church, also through the public hearings and through the Survivor Sessions; it directly and publicly exhorted organizations to make changes to their practices and policies; and it made a total of 409 Recommendations,Footnote 5 five of these specifically to the ACA,Footnote 6 and a further 28 to all religious institutions in Australia.Footnote 7
The Royal Commission was particularly concerned with the consequences of diocesan fragmentation within the ACA, which it saw as both partly responsible for inadequate responses to institutional child sexual abuse, and as deflecting effective accountability for the abuse. This interest of the Royal Commission therefore provides a unique window into what is a key feature of Australian Anglicanism – its diocesan ecclesial structure.
The ACA’s Diocesanism
The ACA is recognized among Anglican Churches worldwide as having an extreme diocesanism.Footnote 8 The 23 individual dioceses each operate with a high degree of autonomy; they assiduously ‘guard their independence and are suspicious of centralized systems’Footnote 9 – to quote the statement of Bishop Allan Ewing to the Royal Commission. In this situation, the General Synod of the ACA and the Primate have concomitantly less power and fewer resources than is the norm in the Anglican Communion.Footnote 10
The diocesanism of the ACA is viewed as having its origins in its foundation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a series of individual dioceses, often separated by the vast distances of the continent, independent of one another and each a semi-autonomous part of the Church of England, which came together only in 1962 as one national Church.Footnote 11 John Davis, in his Australian Anglicans and their Constitution,Footnote 12 provides the definitive treatment of diocesanism in the Australian Church from the nineteenth through to the late twentieth century. He dates the beginnings of concern regarding diocesanism in Australia to the mid-1850s when it was offered as a criticism on ecclesiological grounds of the emerging view of some Anglican churchmen that their individual dioceses might alone serve all the purposes of a larger Church, which would normally comprise a number of dioceses.Footnote 13 Davis argues that the ACA’s Constitution is both a result of and itself reinforces this diocesanism.Footnote 14 The Constitution states, as one would expect from Anglican tradition, that:
a diocese shall in accordance with the historic custom of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church continue to be the unit of organization of this Church and shall be the see of a bishop.Footnote 15
More tellingly, it is only in narrow circumstances that the Constitution allows for the General Synod to pass a canon that significantly affects a diocese unless that diocese accepts the canon.Footnote 16 In almost all circumstances, any canon of the General Synod which concerns ‘ritual, ceremonial or discipline’ is deemed to affect ‘the order and good government of the Church’ and does not have force until it has been adopted by the diocese’s synod.Footnote 17 Correspondingly, under the Constitution, the Primate of the ACA may advise a diocesan bishop or a diocese on a specific matter, but has no power to direct them.Footnote 18
Frame argues that it became apparent as early as the late 1850s that churchmanship divides within the ACA were being interwoven with and magnifying the effects of diocesanism.Footnote 19 In considering the period from the 1990s, other commentators including Carnley, Hillard and Miley,Footnote 20 have observed that the churchmanship divide, now crystallized as between, on the one hand, conservative Evangelicals (led by Sydney, the ACA’s largest diocese) and, on the other hand, more liberal Catholics, has considerably strengthened and hardened. This has further exacerbated the Church’s diocesanism, making for a national ecclesial space that is paradoxically both under-powered in terms of the provisions of its Constitution and financial resources, but highly contested in terms of competition for control of the General Synod.Footnote 21
Contemporary commentators do not so much offer arguments against diocesanism derived from understood norms for Anglican ecclesiology, as was the case in the 1850s, but point to the way in which, in combination with the churchmanship divide, it militates against a spirit of national Anglican unity and effective mission.Footnote 22 The problematic combination is identified in the scholarly literature as responsible inter alia for the failure to establish a National Anglican Centre in Canberra,Footnote 23 the inordinate delay in women’s ordination to the priesthood,Footnote 24 and the failure after 25 years to revise the authorized A Prayer Book for Australia.Footnote 25
The Royal Commission’s Investigations into Diocesanism
The term diocesanism is nowhere mentioned in the Papers, and the Royal Commission nowhere says directly that too much authority and self-identity reside in the ACA’s individual dioceses. However, the Royal Commission concluded during the years of its operation – from several of the Case Studies and its own investigations – that the Church had been unable to establish a nationally coordinated and consistent approach to the management of child sexual abuse, relying instead on each diocese to implement its own regime, and this had led to deleterious outcomes for survivors. These outcomes included victims and their families being exposed to inadequate responses by bishops to their complaints of abuse, differences between dioceses in the quality of their management of abuse, and perpetrators operating unchecked across diocesan boundaries. The principal reason for the lack of a national approach was, in the Royal Commission’s view, that the dioceses collectively had failed to agree at successive General Synods, and there had been no constitutional provision that would allow the ACA at a national level to override the dioceses in this matter. In other words, the ACA’s diocesanism became of serious concern for the Royal Commission, even if it did not use that term.
We examine here first how the Royal Commission came to these conclusions, and second, its actions in response, for we will see that the Royal Commission was prepared to offer a vigorous challenge to diocesanism.
The Royal Commission was alerted to the problem by November 2013, in the first year of its operation, through the evidence of the then Primate Archbishop Phillip Aspinall at the public hearing for Case Study no. 3 on the Diocese of Grafton’s response to abuse at the North Coast Children’s Home.Footnote 26 Archbishop Aspinall was required to explain at length to the apparently incredulous Hearing Chair and Special Counsel, respectively, of the Royal Commission that as Primate he was authorized by the Church’s Constitution only to advise, not direct, the diocesan bishop of Grafton to offer a more satisfactory response to former residents of the Home as they sought an apology and redress from the diocese.Footnote 27 The ACA, Archbishop Aspinall observed, might represent itself as a unified national body, but it did not operate in a unified way.Footnote 28 Further, Archbishop Aspinall acknowledged that each diocese of the ACA had different protocols for managing child sexual abuse – there was no nationally unified approach.Footnote 29
Other Case Studies highlighted for the Royal Commission the practical implications for managing child sexual abuse of the ACA’s diocesanism. Case Study no. 36 into the Church of England Boys Society (CEBS)Footnote 30 was described by Royal Commissioner Fitzgerald as ‘the Royal Commission’s most disturbing’, for its evidence of the operation of a paedophile ring comprising lay and ordained CEBS youth leaders who shared information on boys whose families moved across diocesan boundaries.Footnote 31 The ring operated with impunity across several dioceses, because although a 2009 report commissioned by the ACA’s Professional Standards Commission had identified a high rate of offending among CEBS leaders, this had not elicited a nationally coordinated response within the Church.Footnote 32
Case Study no. 36 as well as Case Study no. 42 on the Diocese of NewcastleFootnote 33 detailed a range of inappropriate responses by bishops to complaints of institutional child sexual abuse, including dismissing, disbelieving or minimizing the allegations;Footnote 34 protecting clergy and lay perpetratorsFootnote 35 and even threatening complainants and their family members.Footnote 36 A number of these instances came from the 1980s and 1990s when many diocesan bishops were carrying an unshared responsibility for responding to child sexual abuse, but they nevertheless highlighted the problem of a lack of accountability for diocesan bishops in the ACA which was still evident during the period of the Royal Commission’s operation. The Special Tribunal provisions of the Constitution and Canons of the ACA,Footnote 37 enacted so that the national Church could consider allegations against diocesan bishops, were used only twice between 1962 and 2017Footnote 38 – in neither case for a matter relating to child sexual abuse – and were considered unsuited to these kinds of situations.Footnote 39
None of this was acceptable to the Royal Commission. Its Ten Child Safe Standards,Footnote 40 which it developed from the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child,Footnote 41 and with the clear influence of contemporary models of corporate governance and organizational management,Footnote 42 specified that a child safe organization was inter alia one with unified and appropriately structured governance arrangements, free from conflicts of interest, with unambiguous lines of responsibility and accountability, staff adequately trained, a regular auditing process and so on. Above all, a child safe organization needs uniform and consistent policies and programmes because otherwise a culture of child safety cannot be properly embedded and individual survivors of abuse are likely to be treated differently and therefore inequitably. In the Royal Commission’s firm view, if policies and practices for the management of child sexual abuse remained the responsibility of individual dioceses, the ACA could not be a child safe organization.
The Royal Commission therefore gave considerable attention to the progress through the ACA’s General Synod towards developing national, uniform mechanisms for responding to and preventing child sexual abuse.Footnote 43 The Commission recognized that the General Synod of 2004 had set out to establish a comprehensive, national framework, following several years of increasing awareness and active concern within the Church. At that Synod, the Church’s Child Protection Committee tabled its Making our Church Safe report, recommending uniform policies and procedures across the entire ACA for the screening and training of clergy and church workers, for pastoral responses to victims, and ministry support for clergy.Footnote 44
This recommendation and others in the Committee’s report were all accepted and passed as resolutions of the Synod.Footnote 45 The Synod also resolved to urge all dioceses to adopt the Model Professional Standards Ordinance,Footnote 46 developed by the General Synod Standing Committee’s Sexual Abuse Working Group: some dioceses did this, but many did not.Footnote 47
The Royal Commission then traced the pattern of further proposals and recommendations for the management of child sexual abuse in the three General Synods which followed that of 2004 – those of 2007, 2010 and 2014, respectively. The Commission acknowledged that there were some commendable initiatives, but it also observed that by early 2017 there was still only a patchy uptake among dioceses of many of the resolutions of the 2004 Synod. This meant that after 13 years had elapsed, and four sessions of the General Synod, the goal of uniform policies and procedures across the ACA was still not achieved.Footnote 48
The Royal Commission also gave attention to the General Synod’s attempts in that period at reforming the mechanism for handling complaints made against diocesan bishops. By the time that the Synod of 2004 met, there was a widely held view that the Special Tribunal system for determining complaints against bishops was out of date, in that it did not incorporate the principle of fitness to hold office and was therefore unsuited to managing complaints that related to the handling of child sexual abuse. Three years later the General Synod passed the Episcopal Standards Canon 2007 and then in 2014 a resolution for a Model Episcopal Standards Ordinance. However, legal problems emerged for both measures and by early 2017 there was, as with policies and procedures relating directly to child sexual abuse, no uniform episcopal standards process within the ACA. This meant that the principle deriving from the Child Safe Standards of accountability for bishops as senior managers with responsibility for managing child sexual abuse, could not be assured.Footnote 49
The reasons for the patchy uptake by dioceses of all these measures of the General Synod between 2004 and 2017 were complex and included concerns that the measures were too broad in scope, or did not fit with State laws, or made diocesan bishops accountable to the national Church rather than simply to their own dioceses, or that implementing the measures was beyond the financial and people resources of some small dioceses.Footnote 50 The immediate cause of the situation was that the General Synod did not have the constitutional power to require dioceses to adopt its Canons and the other standards designed to achieve a uniformity of practice across the ACA.
The Royal Commission Tackles Diocesanism
In early 2017, the ACA was the subject of an Institutional Review by the Royal Commission, designated as Case Study no.52.Footnote 51 At the public hearings for the Case Study, ACA representatives – including bishops, senior officers and lay leaders – were questioned about what, from the perspective of the Royal Commission, remained the Church’s most outstanding challenge in managing child sexual abuse: its lack of a consistent national approach.
As part of the public hearing, several bishops and lay leaders explained, either verbally or in written submissions, the nature of the ACA’s diocesan-based power structure, which they characterized as a long-standing, if imperfect situation, and one which would be highly unlikely to change.Footnote 52 The bishops also discussed the reality of the churchmanship divide in the Church, with the Royal Commission summarizing their view as being unanimous in agreeing that ‘theological differences were not, and should not be, a barrier to the protection of children’.Footnote 53 We may note that the Final Report of the Royal Commission – whether because of the view of the bishops just cited, or because of other parts of its investigations – did not conflate the impact of diocesanism with that of the churchmanship divide, but rather focused its concern on diocesanism alone.
The problem of achieving a consistent national approach within the ACA to managing child sexual abuse was extensively canvassed during Case Study no. 52, including in relation to professional standards regimes, training in theological colleges and the accountability of diocesan bishops. Archbishop Phillip Aspinall confirmed that ‘the constitution is structured effectively to leave the power in the hands of the dioceses. So it effectively enshrines diversity, and that’s the issue we’re wrestling with in relation to the matters of interest to this Commission.’Footnote 54
A partial defence of the current lack of consistency between dioceses in managing child sexual abuse was offered by Archbishop Glen Davies of the Diocese of Sydney:
In my view, consistency is a second-order issue. It is important, but it is far more important to have children protected … I recognize that there has been a failure of the national church to have consistency across the board, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that there are a number of robust systems of child protection in place in most dioceses in the national church, and we are still working towards getting the consistency and raising the bar, having those minimum standards accepted across the board, that’s true, that is still work to be done, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that good work has been done.Footnote 55
This is evidence from the Papers of a counter-discourse to that of the Royal Commission on diocesanism, but one which was unconvincing, particularly as Archbishop Davies acknowledged in response to a follow-up question that there were some dioceses that did not have robust systems.Footnote 56
At the public hearing on 17 March 2017 for the Case Study, the Commission Chair, the Hon. Justice Peter McClellan said to the ACA representatives who were present:
You can assume that the six Commissioners are of one mind: there should not be inconsistency of approach to these issues in one part of Australia different to another. That’s as much in your church as it is in any other church.Footnote 57
The Royal Commission was signalling its intention actively to seek to modify the impact of the ACA’s diocesanism on its managing of institutional child sexual abuse. There were by now only nine months before the Royal Commission’s Final Report was due to be completed and presented to the Governor-General. Public interest and media reporting on the issue remained at high levels, and the ACA was aware of the distinct possibility of its appearing to be less than fully committed to becoming a child safe organization. The then Primate Archbishop Philip Freier and Ms Anne Hywood, the General Secretary of the ACA, both indicated the strong commitment that was coalescing in the Church around passing legislation for core minimum standards for safe ministry to children at the next General Synod.Footnote 58
In the six months to September 2017 when the General Synod was due to meet, there were intensive efforts by the Standing Committee and its Working Groups,Footnote 59 resulting in a suite of bills relating to child protection being introduced into that Synod. The bills were approved with large majorities and by Synod members who came from all 23 ACA dioceses,Footnote 60 although they needed subsequently to be adopted by each of the diocesan synods in order to come into force.
Three principal canons in this suite concern us here. The first was the Safe Ministry to Children Canon 2017.Footnote 61 This provided for a single code of conduct for safe ministry to children across all dioceses of the ACA, as well as minimum standards and guidelines for conduct in relation to screening, training and the practice of ministry to children.Footnote 62 The second canon was the Episcopal Standards (Child Protection) Canon 2017,Footnote 63 which legislated for a national approach to the accountability of current and former diocesan bishops and episcopal assistants to the Primate – not comprehensively, but only in respect of child protection matters.Footnote 64 The Canon deals with fitness for office (rather than discipline) in the matter of ‘examinable conduct’ – defined as including child abuse, the failure to respond adequately to allegations of child sexual abuse, and the failure to comply with a law requiring the reporting of child abuse to the police or another authority. The canon also provides for a new Episcopal Standards (Child Protection) Board. Finally, the Redress for Survivors of Abuse Canon 2017 Footnote 65 provided for the registration of a company through which the more than 250 dioceses and other organizations which make up the ACA would be enabled to participate in the Commonwealth government’s National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse.Footnote 66 ACA dioceses had begun to operate their own individual Redress Schemes from the early 2000s onwards, but the Royal Commission had found that many survivors of abuse felt personally unable to directly approach the ACA, or any other organizations where there had been abuse, for redress. The Royal Commission had therefore recommended in its Redress and Civil Litigation Report in 2015 that the Commonwealth government should establish a single national redress scheme.Footnote 67 The legislation for this was foreshadowed by the end of 2017 and it was enacted by the Commonwealth Parliament six months later.Footnote 68
Conclusion: The Royal Commission’s Contribution to the ACA’s Ecclesiology
This section asks three questions. First, what did the Royal Commission conclude about the influence of the ACA’s diocesanism on its responses to child sexual abuse? Second, how may we assess the effectiveness of the Royal Commission in seeking to modify the ACA’s diocesanism? And third, where to from here? What does the Royal Commission’s critique of the ACA’s structure and practices point to for future ecclesiological consideration?
In regard to the first question, the Royal Commission convincingly showed through its investigations that the autonomy and independence of ACA dioceses – that is, the Church’s diocesanism – obstructed an effective response to child sexual abuse within the Church. Case Studies nos. 3, 36 and 42 were important in demonstrating this. In each of these Case Studies, the diocesanism was largely played out through the inappropriate and unaccountable responses of bishops and other Church leaders, though in Case Study no. 36, diocesanism also contributed to the ACA’s failure to identify the existence of a group of nationally organized perpetrators. Further, the Royal Commission had a strong adherence to uniform standards as a way of ensuring that all survivors of child sexual abuse were treated equally. This led the Royal Commission to identify the most critical failing of the ACA as inhering in its lack of uniform standards for managing child sexual abuse across the whole national Church, and this was a consequence of diocesanism.
In its Final Report, the Royal Commission identified a number of factors contributing to abuse in the ACA as well as responses to that abuse. These factors were listed as the barriers associated with structure and governance, failures of leadership, especially by bishops and senior Anglican Church personnel; clericalism, the existence of powerful lay elites unsympathetic to issues of child sexual abuse, beliefs and practices of forgiveness and confession, and the poor selection, screening and supervision of clergy and others involved in ministry.Footnote 69 Only the first two of these factors – structural barriers and Church leadership – are very clearly and obviously associated with diocesanism, but the breadth and depth of the discussion in the Final Report identifies these two factors as the most significant in the list. In addition, diocesanism played a contributing role in two of the other factors: the existence of powerful lay elites, and the poor selection and supervision of those involved in ministry.
Turning to the second question, how effective has the Royal Commission been in modifying the ACA’s diocesanism? As we have seen, this diocesanism is bolstered by the Church’s Constitution, has persisted for more than a century and a half, and reinforces itself. This made it very challenging for the Royal Commission to stimulate any changes in the ACA’s structures or practices implicated in diocesanism.
In this regard, the passing of the three Canons at the ACA’s General Synod of 2017 at the strong instigation of the Royal Commission, were a significant achievement, while not delivering all that the Royal Commission had asked for in the public hearing of Case Study no. 52. The passing of the Safe Ministry to Children Canon 2017 did not amount to the nationally consistent approach asked for, but it did represent a significant step – previously unachievable – towards a single code of conduct for safe ministry to children and core minimum standards across the Church. Likewise, the Episcopal Standards (Child Protection) Canon 2017, does not apply to the full scope of a bishop’s actions but at least in matters of child sexual abuse it ensures the accountability within the national Church of diocesan bishops. The Redress for Survivors of Abuse Canon 2017 provided for the registration of Anglican Representative (National Redress Scheme) Ltd (ARNRS), the company through which Anglican entities in Australia were enabled to participate in the National Redress Scheme.
Three and a half years later, in mid-2021, 21 of the 23 ACA diocesan synods have adopted the Safe Ministry to Children Canon, although in one of the 21 dioceses the canon is not in effect. Twenty-two dioceses have adopted the Episcopal Standards (Child Protection) Canon. Footnote 70 All 23 dioceses, plus a further 159 Anglican organizations affiliated with the ACA, are participating organizations in ARNRS.Footnote 71 ARNRS is the first corporate entity sponsored by the ACA in its 50-year history legally enabled to represent all Anglican organizations that are affiliated with the Church. We may conclude that the 2017 General Synod represented a high-water mark of ACA diocesan cooperation.
The experience of the Royal Commission shows that diocesanism is amenable to a partial relaxation within the ACA if it is in the immediate interests of everyone, whereas it comes into play whenever that is not the case, as with the National Anglican Centre, the ordination of women or the revision of an authorized Prayer Book. Our example also shows that an agent from outside the Church – in this case, the Royal Commission – can impact on diocesanism where insiders’ efforts had failed. On the other hand, a fully integrated national approach to the management of matters of child sexual abuse for the ACA, as is envisaged in the Royal Commission’s Child Safe Standards, would have required either a thorough revision of the ACA’s Constitution or an unprecedented ceding of power by dioceses, and the reworking of the ACA structure into that of a modern corporate organization, and none of these occurred.
Finally, let us consider what the Royal Commission’s critique of the ACA’s structure and practices might point to for future ecclesiological consideration. This article has focused on the way in which the Royal Commission provided a cogent analysis of the impact of diocesanism on the ACA’s ecclesial authority. The Royal Commission also identified other aspects of ecclesial authority – in addition to diocesanism – as contributing to poor responses to abuse, though it gave these less attention. Two of these particularly warrant further examination.
The first is identified by the Royal Commission as the tardiness and incoherence of responses to child sexual abuse brought about by the sharing of intra-diocesan authority between bishop, diocesan synod, registrar and other parties, in Case Studies nos. 3, 36 and 42 in the Dioceses of Grafton, Adelaide and Newcastle, respectively.Footnote 72 Clearly the Royal Commission viewed this intra-diocesan dispersion of authority through the lens of its normative framework of the modern corporation as best for a child safe organization, but it challenges the high value placed by Anglicanism on a shared polity of clergy and laity, bishops and synod.Footnote 73 How may this shared polity be maintained in late modern society with its increasing expectations for the Church of accountability and compliance?
The second and related aspect of ecclesial authority worthy of further examination is the progressive ‘domestication’ of episcopal authority documented by the Royal Commission through its examination of the role of bishops in responding to child sexual abuse in the 40-year period from the late 1970s to 2017. Bishops acting individually during the early part of this period brought poor outcomes for complainants, while bishops constrained in the last two decades by professional standards regimes, produced better, if not ideal, outcomes.Footnote 74 Anglicanism has always had a nuanced view of its episcopé – as exercised individually and collegially, rather than collectively, concurrently with synods, but not too fettered by ecclesial bureaucracy.Footnote 75 How do the Royal Commission’s findings on the inadequacy of ACA bishops’ leadership through the study period impact on this understanding?Footnote 76 Further, the ecclesiological literature has frequently expressed regret and concern at the managerialist turn in episcopacy in recent decades:Footnote 77 how will it reconcile this concern with the groundshift of secular expectations as evinced by the Royal Commission’s work?
This article underscores the significance of the Royal Commission in providing a secular window into the ecclesiology of the ACA, holding it to account for egregious failings in relation to child sexual abuse. The Royal Commission’s critique of the integrity of the ACA’s ecclesiology points to the need for a brave scrutiny, as well as a theologizing, of the structural and cultural roots of the ecclesial suppression over decades of the voices of child sexual abuse survivors. This scrutiny and accompanying internal reflection will need to address the vertical dispersion of authority and accountability within dioceses, as well as the geographic dispersion of authority and accountability across dioceses.
