In defence of Stephen Cottrell
When enough is quite enough.
About William Nye I have no opinion. He may even be good at his job; he’s certainly not going to be as bad as it as one of his predecessors, universally known as Derek, an alcoholic gay man whose live in lover, after he retired, got their chauffeur killed in a cocaine deal that went wrong. Derek was also implicated in what we’d now call a safeguarding scandal: a close friend of his, Patrick Gilbert, was abusing a fourteen-year-old boy whom he took round the world on the expenses of a charity that he ran, and where Derek, who knew all about it, sat on the board.
That was real corruption. That’s what a boys’ club really looks like. But it’s impossible to imagine the Reverend Canon Sir Derek Pattinson or anyone like him flourishing in the Church of England today. William Nye is the target of much hatred on Anglican twitter, and if Stephen Cottrell is forced out, along with all the bishops named in the Makin report, he’ll be the next target. That’s the dynamic of a revolution; like a hungry shark it must keep moving or die.
The current uprising is fuelled by rage and outrage, as well as shame and scapegoating so it may look perverse to think that an intellectual mistake lies behind it. But the rage and the outrage would not be effective if the word “safeguarding” weren’t used to mean two very different things. It can mean the detection and prevention of abuse today: to be safe in that sense is not to be abused nor threatened with abuse. But it also refers to the effort to make good damage done in the past. The two meanings are used interchangeably but we can’t think clearly without keeping them separate.
When someone like Gavin Drake says that the Church of England is not a safe place, they do not mean — at least I hope they do not mean — that children or vulnerable adults are at risk right now, but that survivors of historic abuse, some of it really terrible, do not feel safe in the Church of England today. That’s a matter for shame and compassion, but it is also very difficult for bishops or anyone else to fix.
When every bishop mentioned in the Makin report has been sacked along with every civil servant in the central church, the awful wounds inflicted by abuse will still be there. Perhaps they can be healed but the injuries can’t be undone. Least of all can they be undone by ritual execration. The Israelites no doubt felt great after the scapegoat had been driven into the desert, but next year they had to do it all over again.
The campaign against Stephen Cottrell1 depends entirely on the confusion between the two meanings of “safeguarding”. The basis of the attack on him is that when he was bishop of Chelmsford he permitted David Tudor to work as a priest for eight years despite knowing that he was a convicted sex offender who had served six months in prison before being released on a technicality.
The basis of his defence is that he had no choice in law. He had inherited Tudor from two preceding bishops of Chelmsford, one of whom had granted Tudor the freehold. Since he had twice been acquitted of the offences that no one doubted he had committed, he could not even be suspended until or unless fresh charges were brought against him. As soon as that happened, in 2018, Cottrell suspended him. He should not be blamed for failing to do what was legally impossible.
Both these accounts confuse or blur the two meanings of safeguarding. In the first sense the church would not feel safe to survivors while Tudor was still a priest anywhere. Possibly they would never feel safe so long as he was alive. I know one survivor of clerical abuse who felt a surge of relief on the news that her abuser was dead. Tudor’s employment was a scandal to his victims, but only a victim could get the law to end it. Had one of them not gone to the police thirty years after the offence he would still be in office.
But in the second sense of safeguarding it is just as important that Tudor was not an egregious risk to young people when a priest on Canvey Island. He had been assessed as a low risk by the (independent) Lucy Faithful safeguarding charity. He was banned from entering schools. Cottrell had given him an assistant minister, whose brief, among other things, was to ensure that he kept to the conditions given.
Blurring the two meanings suggests that Stephen Cottrell was indifferent to the damage Tudor had caused and so far as I know that’s not true.
When Roy Williamson, then the bishop of Southwark, reinstated Tudor as a priest in 1986 he made a bad mistake. Tudor may have been a genuinely repentant sinner. He may even have been reformed. His crimes were committed when he was a curate and a youth worker in the Seventies; as a married man and priest over the next forty years he behaved well so far as we know. Williamson (whom I knew slightly) was the kind of simple-minded and old fashioned evangelical who believed that Christians were in the business of forgiving the repentant sinner. Perhaps he felt that the six months Tudor served in prison, treated no doubt as a nonce in a dog collar, were a punishment sufficient to expiate his crimes. Perhaps he was right, but forgiveness is not forgetfulness and the nature of Tudor’s crimes meant he was always a scandal in waiting and that should have kept him from public office as a priest.
I would criticise Cottrell for two related things, neither a resigning matter. While he inherited Tudor’s position as an area dean, he did not block its renewal, which I understand happens every five years. Similarly, the post of honorary cathedral canon was automatic for area deans. This is a meaningless bauble but one that looks meaningful to the outside world. Cottrell should have broken than link but for reputational reasons, not because it would have made anyone safer at the time.
Sooner or later someone has to blow up the insatiable shark. The Church of England cannot be run by Twitter storms and petitions on Change.org. Time, effort, and money are all limited resources for a bishop, and to govern is to choose.
If you have to choose between expending effort and money on preventing present wrongs, or trying to right past ones, you should choose what you can change now. If — for instance and quite hypothetically — you are a bishop in a shrinking, almost bankrupt, diocese whose safeguarding officers have all quit under an NDA or taken sick leave, that is a problem more urgent than the sins your brothers may have committed in the past.
I have known him on distant but friendly terms for many years. When I lived in Essex he was my local bishop and I would sometime take him to lunch in cheap Chinese restaurants to discover how he thought about the problems of shrinking local churches.
Thank you for your clarity and good sense. In the atmosphere of fear and hysteria surrounding reports about safeguarding in the CofE, it must take some courage to speak so reasonably. I have very much valued your posts in the past weeks. I speak as a parish priest in a parish where my predecessor was convicted of sexual abuse of minors, and I really do not take the plight of victims lightly. But I also am very aware not only of how difficult it is to remove offending priests against their will, but also of the way they use their charisma to stop people challenging them.
That hypothetical bishop? Been vocal lately has she?