Even now, at age 72, retired Bishop Geoffrey Robinson cannot stand being approached from behind. It floods him with terror. “I hate it, I really hate it,” he says. “That’s what he did. Sixty years disappear in a split second. In that sense, the memory never goes away.”

When the Australian Catholic Church appointed Bishop Robinson to lead its response to sexual abuse, no one knew his deep secret; that he, too, had been abused. Nor could the bishops foresee the experience would leave him so disillusioned that he would do what most church leaders have been afraid to do – speak out in defiance of Rome.

In an interview with The Weekly from his small presbytery in Sydney’s inner-west, Bishop Robinson recalls his painful personal journey – his abuse by a stranger, his doubt over some of the church’s central teachings and his struggle to find the man within the priest, amid a sense that his life was one that had been chosen for him when he was sent to the seminary as a child.

He tells how his belief in God was strengthened at the same time as his faith in the church as an institution was battered. And he describes how this journey gave him the courage, after so many years as a “company man”, to stand up to the Vatican.

This year, anger at Rome’s response to sexual abuse has reached a crescendo. One Catholic newspaper in America described it as the biggest crisis in centuries. In Australia, nine priests from one school – St Stanislaus’ College in Bathurst, NSW – face abuse charges. Scandals have erupted in the US and Ireland, and more are engulfing Europe, reaching Rome itself. Even the Pope stands accused of failing to handle allegations properly, although the Vatican has declared that his actions are “above discussion”.

The anger is fuelled by a sense that the Vatican is blocking its ears. Victims and disillusioned lay Catholics are calling on the many good men and women within the Church to call their leaders to account. One of the more senior of those to have done so is Bishop Robinson. In an explosive book, he called on the Vatican to rethink its centuries-old position on women, sexuality and marriage, and argued that obligatory celibacy was one of the reasons child sex abuse had become a problem within the church. For his outspokenness and honesty, he was effectively disowned by the Australian bishops and admonished by Rome. He has no regrets: “I want to change things.”

In his years as auxiliary bishop in Sydney, Bishop Robinson’s intelligence and devotion to victims were respected by many. His supporters acknowledge his integrity and courage in speaking out. Geoffrey Robinson began his path to priesthood earlier than most. He entered the seminary at age 12 on the wishes of his mother, who sent her youngest son to the bustling seminary at Springwood in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. While other boys were going to high school and meeting girls, he was studying theology. He missed his family.

“I was abysmally young,” he says. “I can’t believe it when I see a 12-year-old now, I’m aghast. Sending children to the seminary was quite wrong. It was cut out just a couple of years later.

“I had chilblains all winter long, I always remember that. At the time, in a way, it was fun to be with the kids. It’s only later that I realised the many, many things I missed out on by being secluded like that, missing the normal mixing with other people and, obviously, with girls.”

When he was in his early teens, Bishop Robinson was sexually abused. He doesn’t like to talk about it – “I’m still quite confused about it” – but he will say this much; it was one of the rare cases in which a child is abused by a stranger, not a relative. His abuser was not a priest. The man was middle-aged and came at young Geoffrey from behind, hence his fear to this day of being grabbed on the shoulders. “I wouldn’t recognise him if I fell over him, I don’t know his name,” he says. He did what a lot of victims do; filed the memory away. “I put it in the attic of my mind.”

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Read more of this story in the May issue of The Australian Women's Weekly. Out now with Susan Boyle on the cover.