Editorial

Abstract

Safeguarding within churches is the focus of this issue of Theology. It is a deeply depressing topic that needs urgent attention. The Short Notices in January 2020 highlighted three books: Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson, To Heal and Not to Hurt: a fresh approach to safeguarding in Church (London: DLT, 2019); Janet Fife and Gilo (eds), Letters to a Broken Church (London: Ekklesia, 2019); and Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys, Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse: creating healthy Christian cultures (London: SPCK, 2019). For me, they showed clearly ‘that, even after the egregious sexual abuses committed by the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Peter Ball and by the Conservative Evangelical John Smyth QC, the Church of England’s safeguarding procedures are still woefully inadequate’ (Theology Vol. 123, no. 1, p. 79).

The editorial in the following issue highlighted Stephen Bullivant’s excellent book, Mass Exodus: Catholic disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). In this he argued, among other things, that safeguarding failures were highly relevant to Western Catholic mass-going decline over the last 50 years (the Republic of Ireland is an obvious example).

Again and again senior clerics across denominations seek to cover up sexual abuse by clergy in order to protect their church or colleagues – survivors of this abuse then report their actions to the police – and finally their church is publicly shamed in the mass media when these abusive clergy are prosecuted and even imprisoned. Local news reports in the South-East of England that repeatedly mention historical clerical abuses within the diocese of Chichester do absolutely nothing good for promoting Christian belonging or belief … to the shame of successive bishops there.

Now, there are three new books that are even more disturbing:

Fiona Gardner, Sex, Power, Control: Responding to Abuse in the Institutional Church (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2021); 294 pp.: 9780718895624, £17.50 (pbk)

Julie Macfarlane, Going Public: A Survivor’s Journey from Grief to Action (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2020); 306 pp.: 9781771134750, $27.95 (pbk)

Elizabeth Koepping, Spousal Violence among World Christians: Silent Scandal (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); 184 pp.: 9781350080553, £85 (hbk)

I was asked to review the first two books for Church Times (26 February 2021) and realized that both authors have very important things to say that readers of Theology need to know. I was sent the third as a response to my review. Fiona Gardner explains that she was safeguarding adviser in the diocese to which Peter Ball eventually returned after a police caution (requiring an admission of guilt) and enforced resignation, but where he was inexplicably allowed to continue a ministry that included working with young people. The lawyer Julie Macfarlane explains that, at the age of 16, she was a survivor of the priest Meirion Griffiths’ gross sexual abuse and, in maturity, has experienced at first hand attempts by church lawyers to claim that she was complicit in this abuse. I concluded my Church Times review bluntly as follows:

Both public-shaming books are much needed. I doubt if any amount of safeguarding training or protocols will deter some highly manipulative clergy from sex abuse or senior clergy from protecting them and covering up. The prospect of public shaming might. All power to Fiona Gardner and Julie Macfarlane for shaming both abusers and their protectors.

Elizabeth Koepping’s book is about violence by men on their female partners (across nations and religious traditions), but it confirms many of the patterns of abuse noted by Fiona Gardner and Julie Macfarlane. She concludes that:

husbands (drunk or sober) hit their wives, rather than their bosses, friends or mothers, because they can. Violence against wives is less about ‘poor anger management’ (in which case an irritating boss should be the victim) than about the ongoing exercise of power over another human being. (p. 18)

So, as the other two books conclude, power is involved here as well. In addition, she gives numerous examples of religious leaders colluding with such men to the detriment of their abused female survivors: ‘the exercise of power over wives by husbands is commonly condoned by religious authorities as well as social contexts’ (p. 37). Sadly, this also results in ‘the collusion of unbeaten women as well as non-abusing men in violence against Christian wives’ (p. 60), and, she finds, ‘[c]ongregations, like families, do not want their leader’s image tarnished because his image is also theirs’ (p. 66).

Of course, churches do still need to have safeguarding policies and training. The article by Peter Sidebotham, Emeritus Professor of Child Health, on safeguarding policy carefully addresses this. Many readers of Theology will have completed advanced safeguarding training, as I have done four times. Its principles and procedures are blindingly obvious, tedious and repetitious, but, like Covid-19 protocols, they are still essential. But they are not sufficient … hence the need for public shaming.

Yet public shaming also has a cost. The article by Sarah Horsman, Alena Nash, Maureen Wright, Lynda Barley and Carl Senior recognizes this frankly and raises another important concern – namely, the damage done to the innocent three-quarters of the clergy who have been subjected to the Church of England’s Clergy Discipline Measure. Clergy are not alone here. Doctors and teachers are regularly suspended when as yet unproven accusations of malpractice are made against them, and this can inflict considerable suffering upon them. However, stipendiary clergy face an additional burden – their family home may also be put at risk.

Very properly, this issue of Theology opens with a specifically theological article – a thoughtful analysis of 1 Peter in relation to safeguarding by Ben Sargent, who has contributed creatively before (Theology Vol. 120, no. 6, pp. 424–31). Safeguarding here is seen as an issue for ecclesiological and eschatological theology. This article nicely complements Professor Oliver O’Donovan’s important ecclesiological reflections in the spring issue of the Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal (available free at <www.scotland.anglican.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-51-SEI-Journal-Spring.pdf>).

O’Donovan argues that:

And we need to be clear that when bishops and other pastors reacted weakly to the first cases of abuse to cross their paths, it was not merely a matter of self-protectiveness, typical of all institutions. It arose from the prevailing expectations of episcopacy that had sentimentalized the idea of Christian leadership. The universal demand for a ‘father in God’ to comfort and support the troubled clergy, not a figure of authority to uphold the faith and order of the church, was bound to produce precisely the mistakes that were made. A well-formed ecclesiology needs at its heart the dynamic interplay of the inner and the outer form of the church. A well-conceived church leadership needs to serve both. (p. 9)

Safeguarding can, I believe, also be seen simply as a Synoptic requirement, especially in the light of the following severe dominical castigation:

If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. (Matthew 18.6)

In Mark and Luke a similar warning is faced with some ambiguity. Who exactly are ‘these little ones’? Matthew clears up this ambiguity by moving Mark’s mention of children to a position immediately before the warning. Surely today this applies directly to priests and bishops in a position of power who prey sexually upon adolescents seeking spiritual guidance. Or, to quote Matthew again:

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? (Matthew 7.9–10)

The answer gleaned from Fiona Gardner’s book – featuring so many abusive church leaders, including Bishops Victor Whitsey and Peter Ball, Dean Robert Waddington, Chichester Priests Colin Pritchard, Roy Cotton, Gordon Rideout and Meirion Griffiths, and evangelicals John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and Chris Brain – shockingly, seems to be YES.