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.
Once again, well done. People who are traumatised through past abuse need to be helped with their trauma. Encouraging them to feel angry and punitive hinders the healing process. Changing the world so that nobody ever gets abused is an important part of the great moral task facing all society, but takes a long time and is not helped by campaigns to demonise individual sinners. Richie Scutt, I am a clergyman with PTO and would love to know who is red flagging me.
Me too Jonathan but actually licensed lay minister in my case. I have spoken publicly in front of my Bishop so happy to defend myself. I can disagree with him and most insiders on this. I wasn't slow to criticise Archbishop Justin when I disagreed amd I won't hesitate to support a man maligned without throwing Newcastle and Co under a bus in return. Highly object to threat. Bishop Jonathan Gibb is holding an urgent learning day in April amd I welcome this. We need robust and genuine debate and not vicious and I'm sorry cowardly take downs based on outrage and red mist. The abused and victims of the institutional church are a different case and category that deserve understanding and redress but are not a prop for moral outrage and self-serving misdirection by senior leadership or ordinary clergy and lairy.
Thank you for bringing some clarity to a situation which has given rise to much misrepresentation to the situation as a whole and of ++Stephen in particular.
I think you got the dates wrong Andrew. David Tudor's crimes took place in the mid-1980s and his reinstatement happened in the 1990s. Apart from that mistake I think this is a very sane article.
I’m sorry to read your comments as you are reinforcing the view that safeguarding is not that important. The Archbishop should have shown discernment and leadership and he chose to ignore the issue - it is difficult not to put this down to expediency. In my opinion this makes him unworthy of his high office.
What concrete form should his discernment and leadership have taken? I agree that he should have disdeaned and decanonised Tudor when the opportunity arose. I don't see how he could have gone further.
Hi Andrew, I feel that underpinning the reaction of the senior leadership in the CoE has been a desire to protect the reputation of the establishment rather than deal with the issue. I think that leadership should have involved him telling the individual to stand down from his post and deal with what is essentially an unresolved spiritual issue.
Thanks for getting back on the specifics. But the problem for the leadership in this case was that they could tell him to step down and he could tell them to take a hike. Impasse. They had no way to force him out of his post as vicar.
Tudor was an made an Area Dean which is post with pastoral and legal oversight of other clergy. He was also rewarded by being made an honorary Canon at Chelmsford Cathedral. Given his known record Cottrell could and should have reversed those decisions rather than wait till he offend again. Which given his record was inevitable. His promotion probably encouraged him to seriously damage for life another young person. No one has any confidence in Cottrell. He should go.
I agree he should not have been confirmed as area dean, nor canonised. But Cottrell was not waiting for Tudor to offend again. He was waiting for another victim of historical abuse to complain to the police. That's the whole point of my distinction between the two meanings of safeguarding.
We have no reason to believe that Tudor did in fact offend again. If he had done I think that the victim would have come forward in the present climate. So I don't think his record made that inevitable at all.
You’re making a huge assumption about victims here and vastly underestimate the cost of coming forward, let alone publicly.
And re safeguarding your two definitions (past and present) are inextricably linked as demonstrated by the very recent assessment of Tudor as somehow unlikely to re-offend.
Tudor settled with a complainant who says that as an 11-year-old girl she was forced to give him oral sex. He was never going to be safe in Essex. He was an egregious risk and I would be very interested to hear what information the Lucy Faithful Charity had been given at the time they made their assessment.
These kind of assumptions (crimes were committed a long time ago/ repentant sinner/ before he was married etc etc) have a huge bearing on current safeguarding.
You're arguing I think that no evidence of his reoffending is not evidence that he didn't reoffend. This is true. How much weight we should give to this lack of evidence? Obviously I think "less than you". Bearing in mind that I could be wrong, I don't think I underestimate the cost of coming forward. It has diminished sharply in the last decades. You'll see I argued in an earlier post for the appalling cost of coming forward in the last century and I really don't think things are that bad now.
No one would now return a PTO to someone like Tudor. Things really have changed there. The current guidance, as I understand it, is based on a huge reaction to the assumptions you condemn.
What is the "very recent assessment" you refer to?
I too would like to see all the documents in the case.
I should have said ‘your’ very recent assessment! You said: ‘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.’
The Lucy Faithful charity made its assessment of Tudor in 2005/ 6. It did not have the full picture (I’ve contacted them today about the case, it will be interesting to see what they say.)
And this is from the CDM ruling: “It can properly be said that the Respondent himself made no acknowledgment of his involvement with X and Y until his Basis of Plea was submitted. Whilst he could not be said to be under any obligation to make disclosure, it weakens his submissions about repentance and rehabilitation. A distinction can be drawn between criminal and church proceedings. He had the opportunity when admitting misconduct under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure to accept that there were other girls, X and Y, with whom there had been misconduct. Likewise fuller disclosure could have been made to the Lucy Faithfull Foundation when they were considering the risks posed in 2005/6.”
We just don’t know if there were other victims (Tudor is not going to tell us!) and we cannot assume.
If everything has changed in recent years why was Cottrell unable to remove the PTO when he learnt about the £10,000 settlement in 2012? Why did Tudor have to remain in post until a new victim came forward?
It’s sickening that Tudor was allowed to practice as a priest for so long - the leadership could have changed the legal constraints. They did not.
Re the cost of coming forward- I’d be very happy to talk to you in private about what it meant for me and the women in the case I was involved with (not the Tudor case I should add).
Thank you for coming back so thoughtfully. And the CDM ruling is illuminating.
When I said "everything has changed in recent years" I meant attitudes and policies, both inside and outside the church, towards reports of abuse. I didn't mean the legal framework. It really is an enormous procedure to change the church's legal framework. Any change has to go through numerous hoops in synod, and then parliament as well. It's very time consuming and certainly not something bishops can simply do on their own. Anything that gave bishops power of arbitrary dismissal would be regarded with scepticism and suspicion by the parish clergy — with some reason. The law could be better and it's obvious that it must be improved. But that process has been under way for some years now.
The sense in which general social attitudes have changed came up very sharply for me last week when I was talking about this case with a friend who was herself at a middle class girls' school in the late Seventies. Her memory is that quite a number of the younger male staff were taking advantage of the 15-16 year olds, and people thought this was just the way things were. If you babysat for a couple, she said, you were always careful not to let the husband drive you home.
Such a school would be scandalous today (and rightly) but people just didn't think about age the same way then as they do now, and to call the victims "children" would have struck them as absurd. I'm a little older than my friend, but I was myself the gratified if sometimes frightened object of sexual interest to three women more or less twice my age when I was 17-18. I'm not saying that to claim I was an abuse victim, or to minimise anyone else's suffering; just to point out how far we've come in my lifetime.
Ruth you are absolutely correct. Mr brown has lost sight of three things. First lives have been severely damaged by Tudor and Cottrell contributed to that damage by the sin of omission. Mr Brown really doesn't get how bad abusing children is. You cant just wash it away with money in Tudors case, and a grudging apology in Cottrell's case. Second we are supposed as Christians, not to mention clergy, to set the personal highest of standards and admit our failures. While we all fail, yet by repentance we may be restored spiritually and socially . However once a position of trust has been abused and in both Tudor's and Cottrell's cases; many times, just the same as many other professions, they should not be allowed to continue. Third Cottrell's intransigence and his "not me guv" defense is damaging the Church's reputation and undermining any authority he may have within the Church or the nation as a whole.
It’s not arbitrary dismissal we’re talking about though - it’s the ability to dismiss priests who have been accused credibly (with multiple accounts) of sexual abuse.
Have you listened to the File on 4 programme? We’re talking about a priest who settled with a woman who says he forced her into a sex act when she was eleven years old. Cottrell was aware in 2012. He says he inherited a dreadful situation. Twelve years later the legal framework has not changed. It is not good enough and survivors have been pushing for change for many, many years.
From my memory since the Chichester scandal, and it has been survivors leading - not the church leadership. The defensiveness and surprise from bishops at the recent outrage is unbelievable.
It's difficult, though, to frame a law which will do what you want. It has to answer questions like: Who is to decide what is a credible accusation? What process should be used to make that determination? What is the standard of proof? If it gets those answers wrong, then either it makes it too hard to punish the guilty or it makes it too easy to punish the innocent. (The present CDM appears to do both). Horrible things did happen in Chichester, but in the reaction to those horrors another injustice was perpetrated to the memory of George Bell.
You may say that wronging the memory of a dead man is less serious than ignoring the plight of living victims. But legislation must take into account that priests are subject to false accusations as well as true ones — there was a very lurid case in Chelmsford diocese a few years ago when the victim only cleared his name after three court cases but Andrew Graystone, for example, went all in on the accusations.
I haven't myself got any well formed thoughts on what the law should say about disciplining clergy. But Ian Paul was in these comments earlier, saying that the new framework would be an improvement and he's welcome to elaborate.
Thanks for this assessment. I think you are right on the technicals. The question for many is whether someone who has showed little interest in pressing for reform *for ten years* when in a diocese is the right person who can credibly lead reform now.
If the Archbishop of York were to resign*, we would still need another interim ABC until 2026. Would you consider the Bishop of London sufficiently credible to lead reform in the mean time? Or, if she were then defenestrated in turn, the Bishop of Winchester? Or would you be pushing for someone else to take over as acting ABC?
The reforms that we now have in place that means Tudor would not have been allowed to return to ministry, and every aspect of the case would be different. And how can one claim the situation was 'intolerable' when renewing the Area Dean licence and giving and honorific (which Guli immediately removed)?
Of course things are better done now than in 1986. But what, I wanted to know, were the reforms you'd like to see now which would have made the situation easier to deal with? Agree about the honorific canonry, and said so.
He should resign because of the terms of the recent letter he wrote to the Bishop of Newcastle. He made it clear he does not take safeguarding seriously.
Tempted to sue for defamation regarding your comments on Makin. Didn’t bother to read this but making sure that we monitor your comments field and also make sure that anyone with PTO in the UK who supports you is red flagged. You’re a danger to the church survivors and our families and should hang your head in shame.
Glad your safely chastened enough to refrain from comment on the current situation with York Liverpool and the other cases about to make mainstream media. I would take it as a badge of honor to be banned and hope your little blog fails to be reposted to pass your poisoned pen so called journalism to a wider audience.
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?
Once again, well done. People who are traumatised through past abuse need to be helped with their trauma. Encouraging them to feel angry and punitive hinders the healing process. Changing the world so that nobody ever gets abused is an important part of the great moral task facing all society, but takes a long time and is not helped by campaigns to demonise individual sinners. Richie Scutt, I am a clergyman with PTO and would love to know who is red flagging me.
Me too Jonathan but actually licensed lay minister in my case. I have spoken publicly in front of my Bishop so happy to defend myself. I can disagree with him and most insiders on this. I wasn't slow to criticise Archbishop Justin when I disagreed amd I won't hesitate to support a man maligned without throwing Newcastle and Co under a bus in return. Highly object to threat. Bishop Jonathan Gibb is holding an urgent learning day in April amd I welcome this. We need robust and genuine debate and not vicious and I'm sorry cowardly take downs based on outrage and red mist. The abused and victims of the institutional church are a different case and category that deserve understanding and redress but are not a prop for moral outrage and self-serving misdirection by senior leadership or ordinary clergy and lairy.
Thank you for bringing some clarity to a situation which has given rise to much misrepresentation to the situation as a whole and of ++Stephen in particular.
Thank you for your clear thinking, as ever.
I think you got the dates wrong Andrew. David Tudor's crimes took place in the mid-1980s and his reinstatement happened in the 1990s. Apart from that mistake I think this is a very sane article.
Noted. I think — of course I'd think — that was a typo. I'll edit accordingly. Thank you.
I’m sorry to read your comments as you are reinforcing the view that safeguarding is not that important. The Archbishop should have shown discernment and leadership and he chose to ignore the issue - it is difficult not to put this down to expediency. In my opinion this makes him unworthy of his high office.
What concrete form should his discernment and leadership have taken? I agree that he should have disdeaned and decanonised Tudor when the opportunity arose. I don't see how he could have gone further.
Hi Andrew, I feel that underpinning the reaction of the senior leadership in the CoE has been a desire to protect the reputation of the establishment rather than deal with the issue. I think that leadership should have involved him telling the individual to stand down from his post and deal with what is essentially an unresolved spiritual issue.
Thanks for getting back on the specifics. But the problem for the leadership in this case was that they could tell him to step down and he could tell them to take a hike. Impasse. They had no way to force him out of his post as vicar.
Sadly true ….
Tudor was an made an Area Dean which is post with pastoral and legal oversight of other clergy. He was also rewarded by being made an honorary Canon at Chelmsford Cathedral. Given his known record Cottrell could and should have reversed those decisions rather than wait till he offend again. Which given his record was inevitable. His promotion probably encouraged him to seriously damage for life another young person. No one has any confidence in Cottrell. He should go.
I agree he should not have been confirmed as area dean, nor canonised. But Cottrell was not waiting for Tudor to offend again. He was waiting for another victim of historical abuse to complain to the police. That's the whole point of my distinction between the two meanings of safeguarding.
We have no reason to believe that Tudor did in fact offend again. If he had done I think that the victim would have come forward in the present climate. So I don't think his record made that inevitable at all.
You’re making a huge assumption about victims here and vastly underestimate the cost of coming forward, let alone publicly.
And re safeguarding your two definitions (past and present) are inextricably linked as demonstrated by the very recent assessment of Tudor as somehow unlikely to re-offend.
Tudor settled with a complainant who says that as an 11-year-old girl she was forced to give him oral sex. He was never going to be safe in Essex. He was an egregious risk and I would be very interested to hear what information the Lucy Faithful Charity had been given at the time they made their assessment.
These kind of assumptions (crimes were committed a long time ago/ repentant sinner/ before he was married etc etc) have a huge bearing on current safeguarding.
You're arguing I think that no evidence of his reoffending is not evidence that he didn't reoffend. This is true. How much weight we should give to this lack of evidence? Obviously I think "less than you". Bearing in mind that I could be wrong, I don't think I underestimate the cost of coming forward. It has diminished sharply in the last decades. You'll see I argued in an earlier post for the appalling cost of coming forward in the last century and I really don't think things are that bad now.
No one would now return a PTO to someone like Tudor. Things really have changed there. The current guidance, as I understand it, is based on a huge reaction to the assumptions you condemn.
What is the "very recent assessment" you refer to?
I too would like to see all the documents in the case.
I should have said ‘your’ very recent assessment! You said: ‘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.’
The Lucy Faithful charity made its assessment of Tudor in 2005/ 6. It did not have the full picture (I’ve contacted them today about the case, it will be interesting to see what they say.)
And this is from the CDM ruling: “It can properly be said that the Respondent himself made no acknowledgment of his involvement with X and Y until his Basis of Plea was submitted. Whilst he could not be said to be under any obligation to make disclosure, it weakens his submissions about repentance and rehabilitation. A distinction can be drawn between criminal and church proceedings. He had the opportunity when admitting misconduct under the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure to accept that there were other girls, X and Y, with whom there had been misconduct. Likewise fuller disclosure could have been made to the Lucy Faithfull Foundation when they were considering the risks posed in 2005/6.”
We just don’t know if there were other victims (Tudor is not going to tell us!) and we cannot assume.
If everything has changed in recent years why was Cottrell unable to remove the PTO when he learnt about the £10,000 settlement in 2012? Why did Tudor have to remain in post until a new victim came forward?
It’s sickening that Tudor was allowed to practice as a priest for so long - the leadership could have changed the legal constraints. They did not.
Re the cost of coming forward- I’d be very happy to talk to you in private about what it meant for me and the women in the case I was involved with (not the Tudor case I should add).
Thank you for coming back so thoughtfully. And the CDM ruling is illuminating.
When I said "everything has changed in recent years" I meant attitudes and policies, both inside and outside the church, towards reports of abuse. I didn't mean the legal framework. It really is an enormous procedure to change the church's legal framework. Any change has to go through numerous hoops in synod, and then parliament as well. It's very time consuming and certainly not something bishops can simply do on their own. Anything that gave bishops power of arbitrary dismissal would be regarded with scepticism and suspicion by the parish clergy — with some reason. The law could be better and it's obvious that it must be improved. But that process has been under way for some years now.
The sense in which general social attitudes have changed came up very sharply for me last week when I was talking about this case with a friend who was herself at a middle class girls' school in the late Seventies. Her memory is that quite a number of the younger male staff were taking advantage of the 15-16 year olds, and people thought this was just the way things were. If you babysat for a couple, she said, you were always careful not to let the husband drive you home.
Such a school would be scandalous today (and rightly) but people just didn't think about age the same way then as they do now, and to call the victims "children" would have struck them as absurd. I'm a little older than my friend, but I was myself the gratified if sometimes frightened object of sexual interest to three women more or less twice my age when I was 17-18. I'm not saying that to claim I was an abuse victim, or to minimise anyone else's suffering; just to point out how far we've come in my lifetime.
If you want to talk to me in private, try andrew@thewormbook.com
Ruth you are absolutely correct. Mr brown has lost sight of three things. First lives have been severely damaged by Tudor and Cottrell contributed to that damage by the sin of omission. Mr Brown really doesn't get how bad abusing children is. You cant just wash it away with money in Tudors case, and a grudging apology in Cottrell's case. Second we are supposed as Christians, not to mention clergy, to set the personal highest of standards and admit our failures. While we all fail, yet by repentance we may be restored spiritually and socially . However once a position of trust has been abused and in both Tudor's and Cottrell's cases; many times, just the same as many other professions, they should not be allowed to continue. Third Cottrell's intransigence and his "not me guv" defense is damaging the Church's reputation and undermining any authority he may have within the Church or the nation as a whole.
It’s not arbitrary dismissal we’re talking about though - it’s the ability to dismiss priests who have been accused credibly (with multiple accounts) of sexual abuse.
Have you listened to the File on 4 programme? We’re talking about a priest who settled with a woman who says he forced her into a sex act when she was eleven years old. Cottrell was aware in 2012. He says he inherited a dreadful situation. Twelve years later the legal framework has not changed. It is not good enough and survivors have been pushing for change for many, many years.
From my memory since the Chichester scandal, and it has been survivors leading - not the church leadership. The defensiveness and surprise from bishops at the recent outrage is unbelievable.
It's difficult, though, to frame a law which will do what you want. It has to answer questions like: Who is to decide what is a credible accusation? What process should be used to make that determination? What is the standard of proof? If it gets those answers wrong, then either it makes it too hard to punish the guilty or it makes it too easy to punish the innocent. (The present CDM appears to do both). Horrible things did happen in Chichester, but in the reaction to those horrors another injustice was perpetrated to the memory of George Bell.
You may say that wronging the memory of a dead man is less serious than ignoring the plight of living victims. But legislation must take into account that priests are subject to false accusations as well as true ones — there was a very lurid case in Chelmsford diocese a few years ago when the victim only cleared his name after three court cases but Andrew Graystone, for example, went all in on the accusations.
I haven't myself got any well formed thoughts on what the law should say about disciplining clergy. But Ian Paul was in these comments earlier, saying that the new framework would be an improvement and he's welcome to elaborate.
Thanks for this assessment. I think you are right on the technicals. The question for many is whether someone who has showed little interest in pressing for reform *for ten years* when in a diocese is the right person who can credibly lead reform now.
If the Archbishop of York were to resign*, we would still need another interim ABC until 2026. Would you consider the Bishop of London sufficiently credible to lead reform in the mean time? Or, if she were then defenestrated in turn, the Bishop of Winchester? Or would you be pushing for someone else to take over as acting ABC?
*which I do not think he should
What reform should he have been pressing for? Who, if anyone, was then pressing for a reform of the CDM?
The reforms that we now have in place that means Tudor would not have been allowed to return to ministry, and every aspect of the case would be different. And how can one claim the situation was 'intolerable' when renewing the Area Dean licence and giving and honorific (which Guli immediately removed)?
Of course things are better done now than in 1986. But what, I wanted to know, were the reforms you'd like to see now which would have made the situation easier to deal with? Agree about the honorific canonry, and said so.
He should resign because of the terms of the recent letter he wrote to the Bishop of Newcastle. He made it clear he does not take safeguarding seriously.
Tempted to sue for defamation regarding your comments on Makin. Didn’t bother to read this but making sure that we monitor your comments field and also make sure that anyone with PTO in the UK who supports you is red flagged. You’re a danger to the church survivors and our families and should hang your head in shame.
You really didn't need to say the quiet part quite so loud. But now you've made your point (and mine) I'll ban you if you comment again.
Glad your safely chastened enough to refrain from comment on the current situation with York Liverpool and the other cases about to make mainstream media. I would take it as a badge of honor to be banned and hope your little blog fails to be reposted to pass your poisoned pen so called journalism to a wider audience.