Home Page - Save Our Kids - Anglicans worse than Catholics

Church of Rome is not the only ecclesial body to have a serious pedophile problem within its ranks. Crossing an ocean, the equator and denominational lines brings one down under to Australia and the Anglican Church of Australia, where the priests marry and are not bound to a celibacy rule, yet that church is embroiled in a pedophilia scandal which is sending shock waves across the Anglican world.

Fed up with the dark secrets, deceptions and cover up by high ranking Anglican officials, Bishop Thompson became one of several whistleblowers to knock the lid off of a culture steeped in deceit, which has kept sexual misconduct secrets and fostered an atmosphere where several well-organized pedophile rings could be developed, grow and flourish. The various clandestine, interconnected pedophile networks reportedly included Catholic and Anglican priests -- including bishops -- politicians, physicians, attorneys, businessmen, community leaders and children's homes management, who interlaced with each other and remained silent to provide harrowing houses of horror spreading terror in the region including Wallsend and Hunter Valley.

The skeletons which tumbled out of the closet include wide ranging sexual abuse at the hands of trusted priests at St. Alban's Boys' Home, an orphanage and abandoned boys' home in New South Wales, within the confines of the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle with links to St. John's Theological College and the Church of England Boys' Society.

Multiple names surfaced, such as now defrocked Anglican priests Andrew Duncan, Bruce Hoare, and Graeme Lawrence; inhibited Anglican priest Graeme Sturt; deceased Anglican priest, Peter Rushton; former Anglican seminarian Ian Barrack, disgraced former music teacher, Gregory Goyette, jailed lay youth worker, James Michael Brown, and another unnamed Anglican priest. Especially the late Peter Rushton, who was the Archdeacon of Maitland and a known predatory pedophile priest, who sexually offended children for more than four decades, from 1960s all the way to 2000s.

In 2010, three years after his death, Fr. Ruston was identified as the linchpin in the pedophile ring. He is the one who arranged for boys to be passed around and sexually abused by others; he coordinated activities, he destroyed evidence of inappropriate sexual activity, and he protected the abusers. However, he was well liked by his parishioners, who knew nothing about his pedophilia life, so he never was caught.

Anglican abusers were worse than the Catholics abusers because the Anglicans cooperated with each other to perpetuate continued abuse. According to Standard Michael Elliot:

"My experience in the Anglican Diocese is that the abusers tended to be better organized, more cooperative ... it was a larger scale of child abuse and they cooperated together, If you want to call it a 'pedophile ring' ... certainly there were groups of child sex abusers that were working together to facilitate their abuse of children, without a doubt."

One of Fr. Rushton's early victims was his own godson, Paul Gray, who at the time was a 10-year-old acolyte and living with his family. Young Gray was neither an orphan nor an abandoned child and did not reside at St. Alban's. Fr. Rushton brought him to St. Alban's and left him there to be abused by unknown people.

"The worst part with all the abuse that Father Peter (Rushton) did with me was he actually took me to the boys' home (St. Alban's) in Aberdare, which was only a little way from where I lived, and he left me there with three unknown men," Gray recalled. "And I remember calling out to him to not leave me there, and he did. And I was taken there many, many times."

Gray wasn't the only boy raped at the Anglican boy's home. Ruston and his gay lover, James Michael Brown, also preyed on boys at Church of England Boys' Society campouts.

"The [Boys' Society] camps were infiltrated by a pedophile network in Newcastle, and at the heart of it, Anglican priest Fr. Peter Rushton, "Anne Connolly uncovered the shocking details of the story.

Gray also remembers being stalked by five men at one Boys' Society camping trip.

"[You] run to try and get away," Gray explained. "[there's] people abusing you, that haunts your mind for the rest of your life ..."