Philip Wilson

Philip Edward Wilson (2 October 1950 – 17 January 2021) was an Australian Roman Catholic prelate who was the eighth Archbishop of Adelaide from 2001 to 2018. He was president of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference from 2006 to 2010. From 1996 to 2001, Wilson was bishop of the Diocese of Wollongong, where he gained a reputation as a "healing bishop" for handling child-abuse scandals. By his mid-teens, Wilson had decided to enter the priesthood, and on his completion of high school, at the age of 18, he entered St Patrick's Seminary, Manly. In 1977–78 he undertook studies in religious education in New York City. In 1978, he returned to Australia where he was appointed Director of Religious Education in the Diocese of Maitland (now the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle). After being appointed parish priest of Maitland in 1983, he was promoted to vicar general, Diocesan Management and Administration in 1987. and was made a Prelate of Honour by Pope John Paul II.

During his time as Bishop of Wollongong, Wilson was tasked with dealing with an alleged culture of inadequate responses to child abuse by clergy within the diocese. Wilson's predecessor, Bishop Murray, had been criticised during public hearings of the Wood Royal Commission for not acting on allegations of sexual misconduct within the diocese and had admitted publicly that he did not know how to deal with them. Upon the delivery of the findings of the Wood Commission, Wilson issued a formal apology to the victims of abuse by clergy within the diocese. The announcement of Wilson's promotion brought praise from public figures in Wollongong, with the Lord Mayor saying he had "played a leading role in restoring the credibility of the Catholic Church here". Archbishop Faulkner described him as "a very pastoral man and a man of the people and very gifted academically".

Wilson's welcome Mass, held at Adelaide's St Francis Xavier's Cathedral on 1 February 2001, was the first Mass in Australia to be broadcast on the internet, recording a reported 40,000 views. Wilson spent most of 2001 learning about the archdiocese while acting as coadjutor, and was installed at a Mass on 3 December, which was attended by about 35 bishops, more than 200 priests and the Governor of South Australia, Marjorie Jackson-Nelson. He celebrated Mass for the first time at St Francis Xavier's Cathedral on 9 December 2001.

In 2018, Wilson was charged, convicted and later acquitted on appeal of concealing child sex abuse. He was alleged to have been told in 1976 by a victim who had been sexually abused four years earlier.

Wilson submitted his resignation to Pope Francis on 20 July, following conviction for failure to report child sexual abuse. Its acceptance was announced on 30 July 2018. His conviction was overturned by the District Court of New South Wales in December 2018.

Alleged failure to report child sexual abuse

In May 2010, Wilson came under scrutiny for his handling of charges of clerical sexual abuse in two cases in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

The first case originated in 1985, when Father Dennis McAlinden, a priest in that diocese, was alleged to have sexually assaulted two girls. Wilson, the diocese's vicar general at the time, was sent to speak to parents at the school where the assault was alleged to have taken place. The principal told the media that Wilson responded by removing McAlinden from his position and providing help for him. Ten years later, in 1995, Bishop Leo Clarke (1923–2006) asked Wilson to take statements from McAlinden's alleged victims. Wilson took the statements and returned them to the bishop. The ABC reported that the statements were never provided to police and that Clarke defrocked McAlinden with the promise "that his 'good name' would be protected".

The second allegations were made in mid-May 2010 by a victim of convicted child sex offender James Fletcher, who had also been a priest in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese. According to the ABC, "[The victim said] Archbishop Philip Wilson was a priest living in the bishop's house in Maitland when Fletcher was also living there in the late 1970s, and that Philip Wilson should have been aware that he was being sexually abused in Fletcher's upstairs bedroom." The details of the charge were that Wilson should have remembered the 1976 disclosure to him, and reported it in 2004 when Fletcher was charged with other child sex abuse crimes.

Trial and conviction In March 2015, NSW Police issued Wilson with a future court attendance notice. He faced a charge of "concealing a serious offence regarding child sexual abuse in the Hunter region" in 1976. Wilson immediately took indefinite leave and issued a statement saying he would "vigorously defend my innocence through the judicial system". Wilson returned to work at the beginning of 2016. His attorneys made several requests to have the court proceedings quashed or permanently stayed, including that Wilson had Alzheimer's disease and should not be tried on medical grounds. These were refused by a magistrate in February 2016, and the appeal was rejected by Justice Monika Schmidt in the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 14 October 2016, clearing the way for the trial to be heard. One of the alleged victims of abuse asked for the non-publication order on his name to be lifted, and spoke of having told Wilson of the abuse in 1981 when he was 15, five years after it occurred.

On 22 May 2018 the Newcastle Local Court found Wilson guilty of the charge of failing to report allegations of child sexual abuse by Fletcher in 1976. Wilson remained on bail pending his sentencing. The prosecution requested a custodial sentence for Wilson, for reasons of "deterrence" and "denunciation". The maximum penalty was two years' imprisonment, which could be suspended. After calls to resign as archbishop, the day after his conviction Wilson announced he was stepping aside from his duties, after putting in place administrative arrangements to manage the affairs of the archdiocese. Sentencing arguments were heard by the magistrate on 19 June 2018, with a decision reserved until 3 July 2018. The prosecution submitted documents that stated that 16 per cent of those convicted of concealing a serious indictable offence receive a full custodial sentence. Wilson's lawyers argued that Wilson could be the target of violence in prison, and sought a recorded conviction and good-behaviour bond. On 3 July 2018, Wilson was sentenced to 12 months' detention, eligible for parole after 6 months. The matter was adjourned until 14 August while a home detention order was assessed, whereby he would serve the sentence at a family member's home in New South Wales. Following his sentencing, Wilson appealed, and said he would not resign from his position until all legal avenues open to him were exhausted. On 19 July, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he wanted "the ultimate authority in the church to take action and sack him".

Resignation There were many calls for his resignation, but Wilson had said that he would not step aside until his legal options were exhausted. Pope Francis accepted Wilson's resignation on 30 July 2018 while his appeal against conviction remained in progress. As an archbishop, Wilson became the most senior Catholic cleric convicted of not disclosing abuse by another priest to police; earlier cases involved bishops Pierre Pican in France and Robert Finn in the U.S.

Sentence On 14 August 2018, Magistrate Robert Stone determined that Wilson was not a threat and ordered him to serve home detention for the remainder of his one-year sentence. Wilson did not apply for bail following the ruling and immediately began serving his sentence. He would have been eligible for parole on 13 February 2019.

Appeal and acquittal On 6 December 2018, Wilson was acquitted of all the charges of which he had previously been found guilty. Judge Roy Ellis of the Newcastle District Court, when handing down his decision, said that suspicion was not a substitute for proof and that Wilson was an intelligent and articulate witness that did not attempt to blacken the name of his accuser in his defence. Judge Ellis determined that for a conviction, the prosecution needed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the conversation had taken place in 1976, that Wilson had believed it at the time, and remembered it in 2004. The District Court gave more weight to a written statement by another priest (Glen Walsh) who stated that in 2004 he had sought advice from Wilson about how to respond to being directed by the bishop at that time to hide another allegation against Fletcher. Ellis found it inconceivable that Wilson would advise Walsh to go to the authorities, if he also held information himself about another victim. In September 2019 the fourth previously unreleased volume of the 2014 Special Commission of Enquiry into allegations of cover-up of sexual abuse claims in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle commissioned by Margaret Cuneen found that Wilson was an "unsatisfactory and unimpressive witness" and that he gave evidence the commissioners considered to be "untruthful" as well as "self serving and implausible".

Views In 2017, during the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey regarding same-sex marriage, Wilson was on the "No" side, defining marriage as being only "between a man and a woman" with "its fundamental role in raising children as part of God’s divine plan for the human family".

Death Wilson died on 17 January 2021. His health had been poor during his last years and he suffered from cancer, but his death was described as "sudden".