"I fled in fear but I never wanted to leave," he said of his decision to depart the church in 1974, haunted by the abuse while a seminarian and junior priest. "The church is full of sinners . . . but it is God's gift to the human race through Jesus Christ . . . I have never lost the sense of vocation of being a priest."

Adelaide-based Archbishop Hepworth, 67, is believed to be the most senior church figure in the world to reveal he was a victim of clerical sex abuse.

He says he was raped repeatedly. Two of his accused abusers are dead; the third, a senior Catholic priest, runs a parish in South Australia.

He reported the abuse to the Archdiocese of Adelaide more than four years ago but the church has not stood the priest down.

Despite the experience, Archbishop Hepworth was ordained a priest and stayed with the Catholic Church until 1972, when he fled to Britain and drove trucks for Boots chemists. He became an Anglican, and then a priest in the Anglican fold, rising to be world primate of the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion.

In an attitude of extraordinary forgiveness and atonement, his prime concern, set out in a letter to Archbishop Wilson in November 2008, was that his relationship with the Catholic Church be healed before he died.

"I do not seek retribution," he wrote but he felt "deeply cheated of a priestly life that I have been exercising as it were by subterfuge, outside the communion of the Catholic Church".

In contrast to Adelaide's tardiness, the Archdiocese of Melbourne's Independent Commissioner, Peter O'Callaghan QC, has processed and resolved Archbishop Hepworth's complaint against one of the three priests, the late Ronald Pickering of Melbourne, in just over 12 months and left Archbishop Hepworth free to speak openly about it.

Archbishop Hepworth praised the independent Melbourne process, which was set up by Cardinal George Pell when he was archbishop of Melbourne, for showing him "a care that was beyond anything I thought possible".

In an apology to Archbishop Hepworth dated August 26, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart wrote: "We cannot change what has happened . . . You may never be rid of the memories or the hurt . . . On behalf of the Catholic Church and personally, I apologise to you and to those around you for the wrongs and hurt you have suffered at the hands of Father Ronald Pickering."

The consultant psychiatrist's report provided to the Melbourne Archdiocese's Independent Commissioner for sɛҳuąƖ Abuse shows Pickering's abuse was coupled with gruesome blasphemy about the Virgin Mary.

Archbishop Hepworth, who prays with the rosary daily and has a strong Marian devotion, told the psychiatrist working for the inquiry: "When I see a statue of Our Lady, that whole thing comes back and I can't get rid of it."

Nor can he get rid of the panic attacks, nightmares, sleeplessness, dizziness, feelings of terror when the doorbell rings and spontaneous tears that have haunted him for half a century. At one point he was brought close to ѕυιcιdє - he drove towards the graveside of one of his abusers, intending to take his own life there, but turned back.