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The Anglican Church in Australia plans to put the names of clergy who engage in extramarital affairs on a register of sex offenders.

The morally conservative Sydney Diocese of the Church is behind the move, which will require married clergy from Iraq to have their names included on the register even if they are only accused of infidelity.

Clerical chastity — a ban on extra-marital affairs — is already in the voluntary code of conduct for clergy. The inclusion of extramarital affairs on the Church’s register of sexually inappropriate conduct would block the renewal of licences for ministers.

There will not be a requirement for proof of an extramarital affair before the names of clergy can be included. Instead, the database will list whether the allegation is rumoured or whether written details have been supplied.

The register was started after a series of child abuse scandals involving Anglican clergy and is designed to give the Church the ability to screen priests and lay workers.

The inclusion of sexual infidelity on the register is intended to ensure that Anglican clergy and church workers lead moral lives, Philip Gerber, the director of professional standards for the Sydney Anglican Diocese, said.

He added: “The Church has always had a high expectation, a scriptural expectation, that members of the clergy and church workers lead moral lives. It is part and parcel of being that. We expect our ministers to be above reproach in that area.”

Mr Gerber said that he believed marital infidelity was rare within Anglican clergy in Australia, but that it did happen. “Often people that come into touch with clergy are vulnerable because they are in a pastoral situation and the minister is, in a sense, in a position of power because they provide pastoral care and spiritual care.

“We just want to make sure that whenever people come into touch with the Church, they are safe,” Mr Gerber said.

He denied that the register amounted to a blacklist based on innuendo, saying: “We are not going to set up a bureau of investigation, but obviously when these sorts of things happen, either the person concerned or the people [who] know the facts, sometimes can be concerned and they come forward and make a complaint. So it is based on complaints.” He added: “We don’t want to go snooping around in people’s bedrooms. On the other hand, both the people in the Church and, presumably, in the community, expect ministers will be faithful to their spouses.”

Access to the register will be restricted to only the most senior of the Church’s hierarchy, including the bishop or archbishop of each diocese.The inclusion of clergy involved in extramarital affairs on the register is expected to be approved this week by the General Synod when it meets in Canberra, but not all Anglicans are in favour.

Dr Muriel Porter, a member of the Synod, said yesterday that it was wrong for the Church to rank extramarital affairs alongside sexual abuse. She said: “If it was an affair involving a parishioner or someone under their power and control, if you like, in a parish or pastoral situation, then that could certainly be termed abuse.

“But there might be other situations . . . we’re getting to the point where people, for almost winking at somebody, could end up being on a register. And I think that is quite serious.”

Those who strayed

1997 The Rev Clifford Williams, 49-year-old Rector of Benllech, was stripped of holy orders after an ecclesiastical court in Wales found that he had had a six-year adulterous affair with a married music teacher in his Anglesey parish. Iris Green, 56, told the court that he seduced her on her sofa when she was vulnerable after the death of her teenage son

2000 The Rev Nigel Williamson left his wife and resigned from St Margaret’s in Swinton, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, after allegations that he had an affair with Sarah Smith, a married chorister whose child he had christened

2001 The Rev Martin Perry, 57, resigned from St Anne’s, Bristol. His affair with a university lecturer was uncovered when her husband found e-mails on their home computer. The jilted husband, Simon Waddington, entered the church during a service, marched up the aisle and loudly accused Mr Perry of being “a fornicating adulterer”

2006 The Rev Keith White, 52, an evangelical vicar from St John the Baptist in Ipswich, resigned along with his curate, the Rev Lynne Thorpe. The couple, both married with children, had allegedly been having an affair