"I have always tried to act correctly in these areas, and to do what's right, and I have such an abhorrence of this," he said.
"The thing is I was 25 in 1975 when I was ordained as a priest. I thought maybe people had difficulties of virtue in regard to sexuality and so on in the priesthood, but I didn't know there were such people as paedophiles. In my life, I had never seen anything to raise suspicion this was happening."
Archbishop Wilson, who heads the national body of Australian bishops, has been accused of not doing enough in response to clerical sexual abuse when he was an office-holder in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese.
Peter Gogarty, a victim of abuse by priest Jim Fletcher, has complained to police about a "conspiracy of silence" because he was preyed on in an upstairs bedroom in the same house in the diocese in which Archbishop Wilson lived at the time.
Mr Gogarty, who was 12 when the abuse began, told ABC TV's Lateline this week he would often see Philip Wilson as he was led in and out of the house by Fletcher, who died in jail in 2006.
Archbishop Wilson has been accused by Mike Stanwell, a former principal of St Joseph's Primary School in Merriwa, NSW, of covering up a sexual assault of an eight-year-old girl by priest Denis McAlinden in 1985.
Archbishop Wilson was a teacher at St Pius X High School in Adamstown in the late 70s, at the time pedophile priest John Denham was abusing students.
He has denied knowledge of abuse, and rejected claims he mishandled the 1985 primary school investigation, but conceded: "It seems to me we were slow and late in getting our act together."
The archbishop said his first involvement in sexual abuse cases involving fellow clergy was in 1985, when then bishop Leo Clarke sent him as his secretary to investigate allegations McAlinden had been abusing an eight-year-old girl.
Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/i-never-covered-up-abuse-says-archbishop-philip-wilson/story-e6frf7l6-1225869833616
See also: http://www.abc.net.au/news/documents/scribd.htm?id=31465251&key=key-acklz5l9vdxnj3mfdkq
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