1 Bangor Cathedral
The Church Times and the BBC reported yesterday that the Archbishop of Wales, the Most Revd Andy John, who is also the Bishop of Bangor, has ordered a visitation of Bangor Cathedral because of safeguarding concerns.
There are also these earlier reports at Nation Cymru.
2 Anthony Pierce
In unrelated news, Anthony Pierce, a former bishop of Swansea and Brecon, was convicted last month of indecent assault on a child.
BBC
Church Times
There are two statements on the provincial website.
Happy St. David’s Day.
I wish there was a like button!
If churches were sensible, they would have started a complete investigation of past events in 2017. John Smyth’s activities had been made public by Channel Four, and Peter Ball had been sentenced following a succession of extremely unsatisfactory investigations and reports that amounted to a coverup. Anne Atkins’ article of 2012, talking about a barrister that she later confirmed was Smyth, showed that his activities were not an ancient secret known only to a handfui of by then elderly posh blokes, but had spread out to children and other bystanders. Like all secrets, neither Ball nor Smyth were not really… Read more »
Isn’t this supposed to be what happened with the ‘past cases review’ that Dioceses did a couple of years ago?
Was that anything other than performative posturing? Did it reach to the “everyone knew, but no-one did anything?” cases that were festering in the undergrowth?
There was a PCR in 2007, which was risibly less than thorough, followed by PCR2 which published in 2022 & was better, but cover-up culture undoubtedly still persists.
Which culture leads to the manner of producing records being deliberately opaque if anyone from outside tries to review them
‘Rev Jo Bloggs has been managing well since the last unfortunate incident’
Great! But was it 1) 3rd degree burns from his barbecue, 2) bursting into tears in his sermon because his dog had died or 3)being found assaulting a choir boy in the vestry after servicw?
Any outside reviewer is never intended to know
Indeed, and the chances are that after thirty or forty years no-one still in employment in the parish knows either. But the tree remembers what the axe forgets, and the survivor can still come forward and raise the issue. At which point, as in the instant case, it all comes to a head.
It’s not even a cover up, in the sense of there being a large pile of documentation which has not been actioned because of the excuses that were found. It’s the cases where there are a lot of people who have knowledge of bad things, but have been persuaded, convinced, suborned into saying nothing. Evidential standards for abuse cases have changes, as have social attitudes to such abuse. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago, a young person who had been abused by a priest might not be believed, and even if they were believed they would be subject to explicit and… Read more »
Had they been intended only in relation to the emerging, multifaceted, Bangor scandal your opening words would ring with the deepest irony:
“It’s not even a cover up, in the sense of there being a large pile of documentation which has not been actioned because of the excuses that were found. It’s the cases where there are a lot of people who have knowledge of bad things, but have been persuaded, convinced, suborned into saying nothing.
“Croeso i’r Eglwys yng Nghymru”
Welcome to the Church in Wales.
The Past Cases Reviews took place in the Church of England. Did they extend to the Church in Wales?
Yes …they had to go through all the personal files but some dioceses did not do them properly the first time round and everyone had to do them again……which turned up quite a few problems that had been missed due to the uncommitted way the exercise had been carried out in some dioceses.
amen
Agreed. But don’t forget the cases were not only about sexual abuse, at least not directly.
Ancient secrets? I was told by a Swansea and Brecon ordinand some time around the mid 1990s that Anthony Pierce had committed a minor sexual offence, but that the Church in Wales had decided to overlook the matter. I wasn’t greatly interested – he hadn’t yet been elected bishop and I have no connections with that diocese – and I supposed that he had perhaps been arrested for ”cottaging” many years earlier. I certainly didn’t seek to find out more from my informant. I now wonder whether this was in fact the previous allegation. If so, it was hardly a… Read more »
I’ve been waiting for this to break since last October. Sadly, there is a very long list of poor appointment decisions in Bangor, particularly in and around the Cathedral and Diocesan Office, and badly handled situations when such appointments have gone wrong (which they seem to have done on more occasions than they haven’t). From what I gather, most, if not all of them seem to be able to be traced back to the door of a single Episcopal residence. It will be very interesting, should the details of this case reach the public domain, to see if that holds… Read more »
It is essential that these things reach the public domain. If a fraction of the all-too-believable stories swirling about are true, people need to be told where money has gone and by whose authority. It is not enough that the former Acting Dean has simply vanished without explanation. The diocese needs to be told why the former Power-behind-the-Throne has been brought low.
It would be unusual for a scandal, let alone a cover-up, in the Church in Wales to see the light of day. The provincial bureaucracy is well practised at managing the reputation of the brand. Press releases and public statements are usually significant for what they do not say and try to make it appear that no one in the Church’s governing class ever knew anything about any possible wrongdoing. The version of events published in the Church Times is a classic of the species. I am wondering when the alleged extraordinary financial shenanigans at Bangor Cathedral/diocese are going to… Read more »
You have far more experience of it all than I do, but just from what I learn from reliable people in different places, if the accounts are accurate, some of the things that have gone on across the Province and the cover-ups make the Church of England look like rank amateurs at the ‘arts’ of scandal and cover up.
“You may very well say that. I could not possibly comment.”
Martin Shipton has written quite extensively about Bangor on the Nation.Cymru website, some of this may also have appeared in the “Western Mail”.
The situation at Bangor was a car crash waiting to happen. What on earth did the Archbishop think he was doing? It is hard to see how he can remain.
I imagine this will be solved – yet again – by the Provincial chequebook in exchange for no one being held to account.
If the information in the National Cymru reports is correct, Andrew John’s position is untenable and the Charity Commission should be investigating.
Although the Church in Wales seems to be under the radar, which is perhaps not surprising as attendance is so low that they have stopped publishing the figures!
The Charity Commission also needs to look back to previous scandals and how they were managed by use of RB funds.