THE newly installed Archbishop of Brisbane, the Most Revd Jeremy Greaves, has revealed that, as a teenager, he was the victim of sexual abuse, in Adelaide.

In a media interview published on Saturday, the day of his installation in St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane, Archbishop Greaves, aged 54, said that it had taken more than three decades for him to reveal that he was abused by a leader in the Scouts. He did not reveal the abuse, even to his parents or his wife, until seven or eight years ago, he is reported as saying. He has since sought redress, and has received a financial settlement. He is quoted as saying that his own experience of the process has informed his belief “that all churches need to get better at this stuff”.

He also said that he believed that Brisbane diocese — a liberal Anglo-Catholic diocese — had been targeted by the so-called Gafcon Diocese of the Southern Cross. Five of the seven churches that the diocese has created since it began in August last year are in Brisbane diocese. It was a “zero-sum exercise”, Archbishop Greaves said. “The parishes that are affected when a Diocese of the Southern Cross parish opens are our Evangelical parishes. No one’s going to to leave a more progressive or more Catholic parish to go to a Diocese of the Southern Cross parish.”

He said that he wanted to engender a “sort of big tent, broad-church Anglicanism that could make space for the breadth of the tradition”.