Colin Coward Unadulterated Love Accurate reporting versus fake news – how do we tell the difference between truth and lies?
Gavin Drake Church Abuse Too little, too late: Charity Commission reminds General Synod of charity trustee’s safeguarding duties
As if on cue to illustrate Gavin Drake’s point the Bishop of Liverpool made it onto Channel 4 last night for reasons he would have preferred not to. Maybe this is part of what Martine Oborne of WATCH had in mind last year when she wrote about abuse of women within the Church being an impending crisis. So- the bishop didn’t do anything wrong.( They don’t, especially if male) The police didn’t take one case any further. CDM was ruled out of time by a retired judge …. And a serving female bishop is being offered support for seeing herself… Read more »
One fix that is desperately needed – is that Bishops should have the power to fire clergy. Because everyone “outside” of the inner-circles assumes they do already. So they are held accountable for that. ++Stephen should have fired this Bishop before (or even after) he got to Liverpool – but instead the process involves reaching for a lawyer. Now – – maybe +Stephen would still not have done it – but at least he could. It feels to me that even if there were saints as this man’s Bishops they wouldn’t have had the power to do anything more than… Read more »
You’ve made a crucial point – ‘they wouldn’t have had the power to do anything more than launch a media fight to get rid of him.’ And instead of taking this option, they covered it all up. The cover-up always makes it so much worse.
A much more useful innovation than giving Bishops the power to fire clergy would be to give clergy the power to fire Bishops.
Approx 90% of the problems related to historic abuse in the C of E stem from 106 Bishops & Archbishops, bar one, (& also with the AC to be fair), their actions and, mainly, inactions.
Indicatively 10% of the problems lie with 15,000 other clergy, most of whom are utterly fed up with their Bishops’ failings that undermine the typical priest’s very good local work day in, day out.
I like Gavin Drake’s analysis of ‘independence’.
This did make me wonder — so is it more “good” to reject all these proposals as they are not good enough. Thus keeping the status quo? – – or better to accept something than nothing?
Or will there/should there be lots of amendments from the floor?
It’s not clear to me what action General Synod members could be expected to take at the moment.
Saying no to any change that isn’t good enough feels a bit similar to the Redress-scheme being postponed because it wasn’t quite ‘good enough’.
Re Gavin’s post and independent bodies – isnt the problem that the CofE is not a statutory body (unlike teachers, nurses and medics)? Voluntary bodies cant do safeguarding in the same way – who would fund the independent body?
Funding isn’t an issue. The Archbishops’ Council currently wastes millions of pounds each and every year to sustain a complex structure which isn’t working.
Gavin, Firstly thanks so much for your blog (donated some coffee to the cause). We have a really similar situation in Australia and you Janet Fife Gilo Graham and other survivor advocates are really inspirational. Also Thinking Anglican admins for keeping the light shining with posts. If somehow Parliament could legislate a complete Firewall between the Independent service and the Church could that solve the problem? We are truly lucky that in Australia given our Colonial History we never allowed Bishops into our Parliament. I think its a bridge too far to legislate for their removal and not being a… Read more »
The full #4 piece is on Youtube & the CofE comes out it even worse than from the printed accounts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4q0efal-Ig
Towards the end of the piece comes an interview with the Bishop of Dover, which is embarrassing. She is clearly very uncomfortable & irritated with the line of questioning, & can do little more than repeat the party line that ‘due process’ must be followed.
Interesting that the Bishop of Dover was wheeled out when her equivalent in the York diocese is the Bishop of Selby. I wonder why the Archbishop of York didn’t ask Bishop Winfield to present the CofE’s position?
Colin just reminded me, in his comments about Trump, of the late, much unlamented Josef Goebbels who once said that if you’re going to tell lies, make sure you tell big ones; the bigger the lie, the more certain you are to be believed. I’ve reached similar conclusions about various anti-Trump channels on youtube – indeed, yesterday challenged one of them about a story which was contradicted by the BBC. And, sadly, I’ve done the same about a lot of US evangelical books which I’ve read over the years – and some UK evangelical media sources as well. There was… Read more »
The Charity Commission letter raises the issue that trustees of bodies like PCCs and Diocesan Boards of Finance cannot delegate their safeguarding responsibilities wholly to an “independent” body. What happens if a trustee body takes the view that the independent body is not providing an adequate service?
As a second point “independence” is a relational world. There is a phenomenon known in other regulated sectors of “regulatory capture”, where the functional relationship between regulator and regulated becomes distorted and regulation ceases to have the intended impact. Functional independence will not be secured wholly by what is written in law, or said in papers or debates, or desired by the well-meaning: it also has to be enacted. Questions like who pays, and who sets the budget (and how) are not fully answered in the papers And this is just one example of how the relationships have to be… Read more »
Finally, the accountability of office-holders, including bishops, is a long-time theme of mine. Many of the issues at local level have been dealt with, and we have industrial levels of training and paperwork to cope with. However, most of the lessons (un)learned reports involve at least some poor decisions/ bad actions at senior levels, and it is unclear how these have been addressed. Accountability does not, for example, necessarily involve bishops becoming employees (and a change of that kind should start at the top). But the absence of any functional action to deal with poor behaviour which falls short of… Read more »