Been meaning to blog about my sister for… well, since I started this site, actually, but particularly since we caught up in Adelaide last month. Clare is three years younger than me and we have no other siblings. We are close, with the prickly, gloves-off competitiveness of same-sex only siblings, a lifelong history of shared jokes and resentments, and a capacity for deep support in hard times. She is the mother of the much-beloved Shiara, owns a house in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast but has recently (and most inconsiderately, from my point of view) married for the second time and moved north to Armidale to be with her university-researcher husband.
When she was twelve and I fifteen, I left home to study at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. Full of vain ambition and immersed in a new world, I don’t think it occurred to me to miss her; she was a part of me I would always have. Years later she told me she would come into my room to share something with me, only to remember I was a thousand kilometres away. Never as close to Dad as I had been, and perhaps on some level wanting to impress Mum, whose churchgoing example both parents held up as worthy, Clare became deeply involved with the youth group at our local church.
The Anglican Church in Australia (as the Church of England became here) is, like any large religious group, divided into factions ranging left to right across the political spectrum. Generally, the Anglican Church in comparison to other Christian denominations could be characterised as centrist, perhaps centre-left, but the Diocese of Sydney – the most powerful diocese in the country by a significant margin – is distinctly (some might say notoriously) right-wing. In fact, at times of acute conflict between Sydney diocese and the rest of the Anglican church, the possibility of secession has been discussed. Obscenely wealthy due to judicious management of huge colonial land grants, it is in fact the corrupt heart of a national organisation struggling to do the right thing.
As it turned out, the minister at our local church was something of a charismatic firebrand and (though it would have meant nothing to us even had we known at the time) a significant player in the Anglican Church League, the conservative lobby group and internal powerbroking unit of Sydney synod. He was also a passionate, avuncular, affectionate, active man with a certain rather overwhelming charm and an unbounded arrogance securely cloaked in the authority of his position. Can you see where this is heading?
In the briefest and most brutal detail, the good reverend taught Clare to kneel before him after service each week. First he took her through a general softening-up and seduction period, beginning by singling her out for special praise when she was a painfully naive thirteen-year-old. By a few months after confirmation (a ceremony affirming the promises made on one’s behalf at baptism) the relationship consisted mainly of her going down on him pretty much any chance they got, an activity she didn’t enjoy but accepted in her anxiety to please. In later comments he made to other ministers, it’s clear he considered the absence of vaginal penetration and the fact that she never saw him come to be mitigating or even excusing factors. She, on the other hand, thought they were in love, and that in the fullness of time he would divorce his wife and marry her.
You now have the option to jump to her website to explore the detail of the story and the issues, her remarkable journey, and the wonderful resource she now provides…
clergyabuseaustralia.org
…Or you can skip the extras and fast-forward through ten years of litigation to the results Clare and her many supporters and admirers are now celebrating:
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