Category: IICSA

by the Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh, Author and Blogger 

If comments surrounding the IICSA report and its findings are to be believed, and we must believe them, it seems there is little hope of real closure on this subject. But is it ‘closure’ that we really need? Closure is often thought of as being a matter of drawing a line and moving on, of forgiving and forgetting.

The idea that the wounds that have been inflicted on the survivors of sexual and spiritual abuse in the Church can simply be forgotten in one sweeping brushstroke of forgiveness is absurd and utterly reprehensible. If you are stabbed in the street you do not forget the pain, both physical and emotional, as the ambulance is taking you to hospital. Real forgetting, and the forgiving that goes with it, is only made possible by healing.

In the wake of the IICSA findings, it is clear that the Church, along with all those who have been party to the abuse, needs to be healed of its pain. At the moment we are in a kind of limbo, a place where the victims, the perpetrators, and the Church as a body, is rendered powerless in regard to how its pain can be healed. So we need to move forward into healing and then, at some point in the future, begin to talk of forgiveness.

Every member of the Church is entitled to either withhold or proffer forgiveness (John 20:23). It is a responsibility in which we all share. because as members of a single body we share in the pain of the abuse revealed through the IICSA process. Forgiveness is therefore not a clerical prerogative. Neither is it unconditional. It is contingent to healing. Forgiveness is also central to the missional task. This suggests that there are two questions which we, as Church, need to ask ourselves: Do we want to be healed? And do we want the institutional Church to survive in its present form?

When Jesus heals the paralysed man at the Bethesda pool he first asks him if he really wants to be healed (John 5: 1-15). Does he want to take responsibility for his own life? I think he is also asking this question of the Church. Do we want, as a single body, to take responsibility for our shared pain, to enter into the depths of it, and so find healing? Entering into the depths of our shared pain means facing into the shame we are all experiencing as a result of what has been revealed by IICSA. But in order to do this we must face into the shame of both the victim and the perpetrator.

Those who have experienced any kind of abuse in their lives, whether or not in the context of the Church, will feel the victim’s shame very keenly. It resonates with their own. It also lives on in countless repercussions of being controlled or dehumanised in ordinary life, even if this is unintentional and in no way related to the original abuser.

Irrespective of denial and excuses, the shame which must ultimately be experienced by the perpetrators of sexual abuse in the Church, and by those who abused their positions of power by covering up for them, also needs to be faced and felt by all of us. There is no place for the abrogating of responsibility for abuse to any one group of people, and there is no place for denying that complacency has allowed it to continue for decades. This is not to say that we are all guilty, or even guilty by association, but that we are, as members of the Church, responsible to the perpetrators as well as to the victims, and to society, for the abuse and its consequences. At the same time, the degree of responsibility will depend on the degree of power a person has in the Church’s institutional life.

All abuse is an abuse of power. While independent assessment and adjudication of abuse, along with improved safeguarding measures, may help to prevent it happening in the future, they will not heal the Church. Some safeguarding measures may even make matters worse by exacerbating the fear and distrust which already exists within a hierarchical system that is proving unfit for purpose in the 21^st century.  Fear, and the systemic distrust it generates, makes us complacent. It is easier to just ‘move on’ and ‘forget’. But moving on and pretending to forget does not bring about deep healing. So the question remains. Do we really want to be healed? Do we want to own the pain it causes us, both as victims and, in the case of a few, as perpetrators? Are we prepared to risk where that will take us?

by the Revd Canon Simon Butler, Prolocutor for the Province of Canterbury

I tell a story against myself. When I was a young naval officer, I recall the first time the ship I served in docked in a military harbour. Keen to be acknowledged as an Officer, I recall leaving the ship on some sort of made-up errand and went looking for someone to salute me for the first time. Eventually I saw a young naval rating heading down a side road and I took a detour towards him, simply so that I could be saluted.

It’s not a particularly edifying story, but it does illuminate a concern for status and acknowledgment in my young self. The insecurities of youth, perhaps.

Well, almost. As part of my duties as one of the six Officers of the General Synod, I have the privilege in taking part in some big ecclesiastical occasions. Just occasionally, I catch myself feeling a little self-important. The big processions with their subtle hierarchies, the loud organ music telling everyone present that something important is going on, full cathedrals of expectant worshippers – it’s difficult not to be seduced into occasionally thinking it’s all about you. If I’m usually near the front of the procession (the subtle hierarchy telling me I’m not quite as important as the people behind me), pity the poor dean, bishop or archbishop at the back with all the weight of that expectation and projection.

“I have seen afresh the insanity of clericalism and of a deferential culture and how we have to struggle against that.” These were some of the most pointed remarks of Archbishop Justin, in his evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) last month. It’s difficult not to agree with him. Without naming names, some of the clergy giving evidence to that important Inquiry demonstrated from their own mouths how separate and elitist the clerical profession can become. We do well to remember the remedy offered to clericalism by Pope Francis that is the call to service and mercy. Criticising the clergy, “Clericalism”, he said, “leads to the functionalisation of the laity, treating them as ‘errand boys [or girls]’” He calls for a renewed commitment of the clergy to serving the people of God, showing mercy, helping ordinary baptised people live their faith in everyday situations. “It’s never the shepherd who tells the laity what they have to do or say in public life, they know it well or even better than us.”

Clericalism inverts the God-given order of the baptismal covenant. Through it the People of God come to think their job is to support the clergy doing the work of God, rather than the clergy enabling the whole church to fulfill its baptismal calling.

But there is another side to the coin. The obverse side is the way in which the people of God treat the clergy in a way that only feeds into such unhealthy clericalism (I have a personal dislike for the word ‘laity’, for which see the provocatively-titled R. Paul Stephens’ The Abolition of the Laity). Whatever the source of clericalism, its presence is not confined to the clergy. The unnamed ‘elders’ of 1 Samuel 8 press the prophet Samuel, “give us a king to govern us.” Despite the warnings of the Lord against such a course of action – “And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day” – the elders press for a king. The parallel is not exact but the effect is strikingly similar. Just as the Lord warns the elders of the dangers of kingship, so today we have become urgently aware of the impediment to mission that comes when a call to service becomes a caste with clerical status. Even those whose ecclesial tradition sit light to concepts of ‘priesthood’ can easily create an equally deferential culture around the role of the ‘leader’. The cult of the leader is clericalism’s bastard child.

I was touched by an email I received from a member of my PCC the other day, in the context of a disagreement between us. Having set out her stall to me about why she thought I was wrong, she sent a second email saying, “Simon, do you have any idea how wonderfully rewarding and refreshing it is to be able to have a genuine conversation with clergy (you!) who doesn’t consider me as automatically lesser or second-rate just because I don’t have a Revd title.” Having told a story against myself at the beginning, permit me this little moment of gratitude. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that I treat everyone quite as well as she feels I do her. But I work on it as a priority in ministerial development.

But I take no ease on this matter. I’m currently chairing a national working group on clergy well-being and we can see the danger that clericalism is not just to the church but to the minister herself. If IICSA can do something life-giving for the church (as well, naturally, to the survivor), it will be to remind us that one of the fruits of our repentance from the sins of child abuse and institutional failure, one of the gifts of the ‘world’ to the church will be to challenge us to deal with the cult of the cleric and the culture of deference. This is an urgent task for the whole church.

How can you play your part?

by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

For the time being, the Church of England’s excoriation before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) is over.  We are all left trying to come to terms with the dreadful things we have heard and to work out why and how such things happened.  But it’s too easy to reach for ready-made explanations, for ‘buzz words’ that seem to carry everything before them and need only to be uttered to be taken as pinning down definitively what the particular malaise affecting the Church of England has been.

I suspect ‘clericalism’ is one of these words.  In a church with an ordained ministerial hierarchy, with separate training for ordination at colleges and on courses, with distinctive dress, with all the private jokes and private language that goes with any assembly of clergy (and anyone who’s attended a gathering of clergy will know what I mean), it’s very easy to assume that our ills come essentially from clergy seeing themselves as a “specialized, privileged elite”.  These are those for whom the rules are different – those who   need no advice from anyone, who look out for each other (or at least they believe they ought to), and so on.  For all I know, that is what happened in the Diocese of Chichester – a lot of the IICSA evidence certainly points that way.

But it’s curious, this leaning on the idea of ‘clericalism’., For in a way the whole history of the Church of England – and in a sense, even its very identity – has been a long battle to rid itself of clericalism.  At the Reformation clerical exemption from secular law and taxation disappeared.  The ‘parallel world’ of the religious life was abolished.  Mandatory celibacy, that badge of clerical apartness, was ended.  Clergy largely ceased to be part of a separate, privileged professional ‘order’: they were one profession amongst many.  In time, one of the more devastating indictments of Anglican clergy was the accusation of worldliness: they were too much like everyone else around them, preoccupied with property and patronage, and enjoying too much of the same worldly pleasures as others.  At a stretch one could even argue that the Evangelical and High Church revivals were in part a reaction against this ‘worldliness’, in favour of a certain kind of clericalism – an earnest, self-sacrificing kind.

Yet even then much in the modern history of the Church of England has worked against that.  Even in the nineteenth century parishes were not run by clergy only, but by cooperation between clergy and vast teams of lay co-workers.  Lay assemblies have become an intrinsic part of church governance.  University theology departments have been emptied of the clergy who once staffed them; academic theology is mostly now a lay enterprise.  The recruitment of clergy has leant more and more heavily on those who have already had other careers: the average age at ordination has crept up into the thirties.  The Church nationally, and dioceses locally, have emphasized the importance of lay ministry, and sought to build it up.

This is a strange background to the assumption that the Church of England has yet to purge itself of some presumed, residual ‘hangover’ of clericalism.  Of course, all professions have their codes and private language, and their defensive strategies.  I’m sure, as IICSA turns its attention to other areas of national life, we’ll see these things emerging in social work and social care, in medicine, in education, in the police, in local government, and in politics, to name but some.

We have to get beyond the buzz words and try to understand what has really happened, from within the institution.  If we really want to understand clerical pathology – and therefore just why abuse could be handled so incompetently as it seems to have been – then we have to understand the social milieu and social implications of the various strands of theology abroad in the Church.  This is a very big question, and I can’t hope to cover it here.  Maybe I’ll try in a future blog.  But as I say constantly to my students, it’s not enough to attribute motives to people, from the outside, as it were.  You also have to try to get inside their heads, and understand how they themselves see things.  The vast majority of clergy genuinely try to live out what they believe.  Perhaps ‘cover ups’, the failure to deal with or confront problems adequately, the readiness to hand over responsibility to someone else, come as much from a misplaced attempt to be kind to colleagues, to be reluctant to assume the worst, to be truly collegial, and so on.

I’m reminded of the cardinal who, in the late nineteenth century, fearing the damage to the Church, is said to have resisted opening up the Vatican archives to wider access on the grounds that ‘charity always comes before truth’.  He wanted to protect the Church he loved, and perhaps to protect colleagues.  But as we know, that is a fatal capitulation to a mistaken assumption that people have to be shielded from the truth.  On the contrary, truth must come first.  Only when we face the truth honestly can we begin to tackle our difficulties.

Clergy, I have no doubt, do often avoid tension and conflict, and fail to act effectively.  But I’m not sure I believe – except in some hard cases – that it happens because of an inherent assumption of superiority, so much as from a fear of being seen to be hard and critical, and so of undermining the ethic of love that stands at the heart of the Gospel.  We have to keep reminding ourselves of the indivisibility of love and truth.  That’s why IICSA has been so sobering, and so necessary.

We have to learn all over again how avoiding the truth usually ends up harming those very people we think we’re trying to protect.

by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Member of the General Synod

It has been an extraordinary experience listening to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) on its excellent live streaming site.  I heard some detail that is new to me, although the basic stories are sadly familiar.  But it felt so different.

The reason is simple. At long last these witnesses have been listened to and taken seriously. The whole point of the hearings is to bring into the light that which the institution has tried so hard to keep hidden. Anyone who previously spoke out for the truth was cast as a trouble maker and utterly disloyal.  This applied to individual survivors, their legal teams and their supporters.

It will take some time before we know where this will all go. We will get Part 2 in June and doubtless there will be many more revelations and more attempts at robust defense. There will also be more apologies along the lines of: ‘We have done wrong and we are sorry and beg for forgiveness.’

The spotlight over Easter is on forgiveness and the combination of very public apologies and the ongoing marginalisation of survivors has got me thinking.

What do we actually think forgiveness is? Who does the forgiving? And – this is the critical – what has it all got to do with God?

If I hit my neighbour over the head and then go to church, confess this sin to God and feel confident that I am forgiven, what’s going on there? I didn’t hit God on the head, did I? But being forgiven, I can tell myself that I’m basically a nice person who did this ‘sin’ and now it has been dealt with and I’m nice again. Objectifying sin lets you get right on with your life.

You see, my issue with all the mea culpa that we have heard in these three weeks of IICSA is as much with the intent as the act.

That is surely what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 5:27-28: ‘You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.  But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’

The problem with sin is that the act is secondary to its roots. If my husband cheats on me my pain isn’t just that he has slept with someone else, but that he has become the sort of person who would do that.

The horror of what we learnt in the three weeks of the hearing is that the Church is run by the sort of people who are prepared to cover up and lie, and who have it within them to protect the institution rather than the very victims they have created. They proclaim a gospel of love and then treat survivors appallingly.

It’s Easter and we make a huge song and dance about the resurrection. Rightly so, but we frame it as a moment – whereas the gospel seems to imply that it is the completion of a long and demanding process. The whole story of Jesus’ life is about resurrection: the difficult choices he had to make and the dark places he had to travel through until he emerged still fully human and restored and healed and complete.  There is no puff of magic. There wasn’t for Jesus and there isn’t for us either.

If we want our churches to be safe places, we have to work a whole lot harder than just saying sorry and expecting a puff of forgiveness to sort it out.

The easiest image is the resurrection of spring. This year especially it has been tough. Tiny little shoots. The frost gets some of them. They fight their way back into the light over many weeks.

The real work of repentance is hard and often painful. Really tricky questions need to be answered, like: ‘What is there within me that drives me to put up a wall of silence to protect my chums rather than attend to the person lying beaten up on front of my very eyes?’ Why do I find it possible to talk about putting the survivor first and yet find it impossible to pick up the phone and talk, impossible to open my heart and wallet to make generous reparation?’ ‘Why, when we now know that the Church has damaged people do we continue to blame them for being damaged?’

It’s Easter and it is a time of hope. I sincerely hope that what we are hearing from the Church amounts to the first tiny little shoots.

But make no mistake these shoots are very small and very fragile.  We have a long way to go before the deep healing that forgiveness can offer has fully taken place.

by the Revd Canon Anna Norman-Walker, Rector of Streatham and past member of General Synod

Perhaps Holy Week is the perfect time for the Church to be putting its beliefs to the test.

Death happens and with it the all-important grieving process. Those of us who walk with people up to the point of death and subsequently with their loved ones in its aftermath know that there is a truth surrounding this journey; there is such a thing as a good death. Good deaths involve important conversations, honest expressions of hope and fear, a process of letting go and an acceptance of the inevitable. Ultimately there is a moment of submission into death’s strangely kind embrace made so particularly through the gift of faith in the one who is both scarred and risen.

There is also such a thing as a bad death. Bad deaths involve denial, the clinging on to illusion and the refusal to face facts and to talk about it.

The voice of the Bishop of Chichester in the recent IICSA public hearing bore all the hallmarks of a man preparing for a good death when it comes to matters of safeguarding in his diocese. There was an honest acceptance that the former practice of collusion, cover up and the abuse of power had come to an end. There was a clear expression of regret regarding the ‘thoughtlessness, pride and arrogance’ of the institution something which must have taken some courage to give voice to, considering that many of those who have behaved in exactly this way are still living.

However, the good death will not come until the Church of England as a whole lets go of its independence regarding matters of safeguarding. This is the only way in which we will navigate another, not so comfortable death, that is taking place in society. The death of trust in the Church.

We have been exposed and nothing short of a new and transparent system for dealing with matters of safeguarding (both historic and current) will do. The former Archbishop of Canterbury knows it and has said so. He knows it from the inside. He knows just how much of this stuff bishops are dealing with in their Dioceses and he knows how underqualified and compromised they feel under the weight of it all. Our present Archbishop has said he has learned to be ashamed again of the Church and was visibly moved  on camera, but this is not enough. For the victims of abuse, assurance of a different future is what is needed.

To continue to cling onto our defunct systems, which have led to a spectacular break down in trust, would be just another step towards a very bad death indeed.

Of course, what this requires is the relinquishing of power (as with any death), and for an institution that has enjoyed its privilege for hundreds of years this is a tough call.  Perhaps if we were to rediscover the subversive power of weakness as modelled by Christ himself on road to Golgotha we might find a place from which to find the confidence to let go. Humbling ourselves always hurts.

Trust can be restored but it will take a good deal more than words; things need to change not just in matters of safeguarding, but in much of our self-understanding and practice within the Church. In a society now largely ignorant of our history and the privilege it has afforded us, the time has never been more right to take stock and rebrand. Shameless marketing speak I know; but the old model is no longer fit for purpose. The product is a timeless treasure, we are custodians of it and urgently need to change the way we go about our business.

People often quote Charles Darwin as the one who coined the phrase ‘The survival of the fittest’, but this is a mistake. Darwin was far more intelligent than that. His theory was that it wasn’t the fittest (the most powerful) who survived, but the most adaptive.

The environment has changed, and we need to adapt; and in doing so, some things need to be given a good death.

In the final scene of the film ‘The Theory of Everything’ the character of professor Stephen Hawking brilliantly played by Eddie Redmayne, is asked the question – ‘You have said you do not believe in God, do you have a philosophy of life that helps you?’

He responds ‘Where there is life there is hope’

It received a standing ovation, but for those of us with faith in Christ, this is a rather bleak summary of the meaning of everything and not the best final word…… because we believe in Christ, we believe that ‘Where there is death, there is hope’.

Perhaps it is time to put our faith to the test and start dying well?

by the Rt Revd Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

The popular image of St Francis of Assisi is that of a gentle lover of nature; a man who preached to the birds, tamed an aggressive wolf, and even picked up worms from the path so that they wouldn’t be trod upon. The love of Francis for every part of the creator’s handiwork lies at the heart of his spirituality. It’s one of the reasons why he continues to inspire me and many others, who make vows and promises within the Franciscan Orders, 800 years after he walked this Earth. Yet an equally important, if less immediately attractive, aspect of Francis’s Way is his deep devotion to the suffering Christ on the cross. As we enter the season of Passiontide, heading solemnly towards Holy Week, I believe this medieval saint has something profound to teach us.

Late in his life, Francis prays one of the most challenging prayers I have ever come across. He asks that he might feel in his own body, as much as he can bear, the suffering of Jesus on the cross. If it had ended there, the prayer might be construed as belonging within the family of monastic masochism practised in the flagellant movements of his era. But Francis goes on. His desire to share in the suffering of his Lord is entirely in order that, thereby, he may experience in his body as much as he can bear of the love for which Christ willingly went to the cross. It’s that entering into the divine love of God for the world which is the heart of his prayer.

Love is what matters, suffering is the price that it willingly pays.

I don’t pretend to have anything approaching the spiritual depth of the saint whose example I attempt to follow. But, when I gaze at the figure of the crucified, I seek to look through and beyond the agony, and to encounter the love that saves the world.

Debased theologies of suffering abound as much today as they did in Francis’s world. Often, they are associated with the maintenance of regressive imbalances of power. The poor and marginalised are told to see their plight as holy suffering. They are to accept their lot rather than to protest or rise up against it. Moreover, alongside this justification of the acceptance of generic oppression, the same corruptions of theology take place at a very individual level. I have read with horror of how some of the victims of Peter Ball testify that he groomed them for abuse by inviting them to embrace punishment and suffering as part of their spiritual growth, even alluding to St Francis as his example.

I am more and more convinced that any understanding, religious or otherwise, of suffering which does not have the overwhelming love of God, shown in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, at its heart, runs the risk of offering camouflage for the exploitation of the weak by the ruthless. Yet Francis offers a better way. He has met in the face of his Lord on the cross, an invincible and overpowering love that no amount of suffering can sunder. Far from seducing him into stoicism, it fills him with compassion for the pains of others. He clothes the naked, embraces the leper, and undertakes a personal peace mission to end the crusades.

May our devotions this Passiontide be grounded in love, pursued in love and graced by love, that like Francis, we may be formed more deeply in the image of Christ.

by the Revd Dr Hayley Matthews, Director of Lay Training, Leeds Diocese

As a young child this limerick amused me no end, but as an ordained minister in the Church of England I’ve been bemused at the ready use of stonewalling in circumstances when one might expect ‘the very stones in the walls cry out against you [perpetrators]’ (Habbukuk 2:11) as we exercise our vocation to speak up and speak out for those who most need it.

Running through the scriptures like a silken thread that cannot be a broken we are reminded time and again to ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed.’ (Proverbs 31:8-9); directed as an imperative ‘Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act (Proverbs 3:27-28) and taught that an intrinsic part of our faithful discipleship of Christ is to ‘Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless [read powerful advocate, not ‘orphaned’] (Isaiah 1:17).

It is notable to me that the prophetic, legalistic and pastoral texts all speak of our need to break impenetrable walls of silence that protect only those hidden behind them.  This reinforces the call as global, not just for some brave individuals who have particular prophetic calling, or social-justice activism.  This is an undergirding call to each and every Christian, irrespective of age, position, gender, status.  We are called to speak out for those suffering any form of injustice both within and beyond the walls of the Church.

Having once found myself hemmed in by an actual dry-stonewall, I can attest to the utter frustration they add to a difficult journey. I had simply walked too far, for too long, and in my exhaustion thought I’d espied the next stile in the corner of an enormous field. The mud was deep and rain filled the footprints of those who had struggled through before me. With legs now shaking with exhaustion, I could have wept to discover that my eyes had failed me.  This wall was long, and high. ‘Fine,’ I thought, ‘I shall climb over it’ and in my defense, I can climb over most things given my army training. What I hadn’t accounted for was the skill of the dry-stone waller. Every stone was tightly packed to it’s neighbouring stones, and the smooth faces gave me no rough corner for a toe-hold. I pressed here and there to see if anything would give, if I could just get enough of a foothold to gain purchase, but nothing. Not even finger holds, so tightly packed were these stones. And so very cold, and silent. At that moment in time nothing felt more impervious to my (relative) suffering; the wall had nothing to give me and was incapable of resonating with or yielding to my plight. As I turned to survey the field, barely able to walk for cloying mud, all I could see were the two trajectories of wall as far as the eye could see, and no way out.

I cannot begin to imagine how that transposes to the experience of a victim of sexual abuse with a person to whom one has turned in good faith.

These walls of silence need to be dismantled and however painful the process for the institution, we need to be reminded that we are specifically called to ‘Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not S/He who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not S/He who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will S/He not repay man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:11-12).  What could be more deadly than having one’s body and soul pillaged by one in whom we trusted?

Lent is a time of fasting but giving up chocolate or alcohol or social media simply will not do.  ‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (Isaiah 58:6).  Whether or not the timing of the IICSA is coincidental, there is no better time in the Church year to bring to light the sins of commission and omission through the use of stonewalling, addressing them – once and for all?  No, that is surely not what we would want.

For the book of Amos yearns that ‘justice [will] roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24) – yes, historical justice must be done and closure brought to many who have remained trapped in a place where their journey towards healing, life and ongoing faith in the Church, others and even God could not continue. But we must work towards much, much more than that. This process needs the healing streams of ongoing justice to keep flowing that – God forbid – any further abuse takes place by or within the church, the victims of such abuses will know that they can and will receive justice.

Perhaps then it will be time to build a new stonewall. One that refuses to allow injustices to persist, or to find a way through robust safeguarding procedures. A theological undergirding for all Christians that is not based on a naivety that lauds position, politics and presence – or even visibly good works – but one that looks to the heart of a matter, grasping the possibility that profoundly gifted individuals can also be deeply flawed and behave completely inappropriately.  Perhaps also a wider understanding that Christians – or people of any faith group – are not meant to perfect, but those who know better than most their need of God.

Deuteronomy undergirds the religious underpinnings of five major faiths and in these words reside: ‘Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’’ (Deuteronomy 27:19).  Far be it from me to curse anyone or anything, but may those appalling, unjust, silent stonewalls crumble to nothing.

by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

We are just a couple of weeks into what will be many months of painful interrogation of the Church of England’s safeguarding record by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and already some outlines of what we must come to expect are becoming clear.  The press commentary is likely to focus – rightly – on issues of personal responsibility: who knew what, what action did they take, what were their priorities, where did they place child safety in relation to institutional reputation, and so on.  But a vital subsidiary theme will be information – what kind of records were kept, how was information handled, what should be done with confidential information, and so on.

Anyone who has troubled to look at the IICSA website will be astonished not only at the rapidity with which testimony is being transcribed and indexed (presumably audio transcription software is being used, but it must be of a very high quality), but at its sheer volume.  When the hearings on the Church of England are finished, what will be in the public domain will provide a remarkable, completely unprecedented insight into the intimate workings of parts of the Church.  Usually the records of near-contemporary developments and situations are on restricted access, under a thirty-year rule – a bane for historians like me, but obviously necessary to protect individuals in contexts in which the implications of complex decision-making processes may still be unfolding.  Here it is all going to be on view, with facts, allegations, personal views or prejudices, insights into how decisions were actually taken, supposition, all mixed up together.  It is already, I would argue, a formidable archive of events and opinions in the public domain, so far bearing specifically on the recent history of the diocese of Chichester.

It is much too early to draw any firm conclusions from what has been revealed, but when you read about the uncertainty with which church people faced allegations of abuse against colleagues, and made catastrophic decisions based on their assumption of essential goodness, it is hard – at least to me – to avoid thinking that too much discretion has been given to church leaders in the past, and that mandatory reporting of allegations of abuse is the way forward.  I can see that there are all sorts of drawbacks to going down that road, not least that some people might be put off registering suspicions by the thought that the implications of doing so will be so serious for the people concerned.  But there is a remorseless logic about the evidence being presented to IICSA: if there is a possibility that abuse is taking place, or a risk that it may do so in the future, then we cannot afford to balance probabilities when a child’s welfare might be at stake.

But there are two particularly tricky questions to which we’re going to have to give some thought.  One concerns data retention.  Here two contradictory pressures are bearing in on the Church.  One is the development of personal data regulation, soon to hit us in accelerated form through the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation coming into force shortly.  According to that, essentially organizations are going to have work on the assumption that individuals have a ‘right to be forgotten’ – they can demand the erasure of personal data.  Organizations will have to justify data retention, at risk of heavy fines.  The other is the need to keep full, accurate records of allegations made against individuals, with their correlative circumstances.  Anyone who has been involved in pursuing disciplinary matters within an organization will probably know the immense frustration of being told ‘such and such a meeting took place’, only to find no permanent record of it.  The right to be forgotten, but the need to record accurately and permanently.  How will these things be reconciled, especially by small, poorly-funded organizations, by local churches and charities, for example?

And the second question concerns the long-term effect of having a vast archive of material in the public domain that essentially presents the bleakest possible account of the internal workings of the Church over the last three or four decades.  It will not be possible to ignore all this material.  Nor should it be.  But there will be little else available of such granularity and scale to balance out the account.  So how will we assess the modern Church of England in the future?  From the point of view of safeguarding and child protection, of course, it is absolutely vital that the woeful failures of process and intention should be exposed, and practical solutions adopted to prevent such things happening again.  But are the failures all there is to say about the Church?  Is the modern history of the Church simply a catalogue of catastrophe?

I don’t believe so.  But it is going to be an uphill struggle to make that case.  It was a brave and, I think, laudable decision to volunteer the Church of England as a first substantial test-case for IICSA – better to make a clean breast of things, and face the storm early.  But that doesn’t in any way ease the challenge of acknowledging the extraordinary efforts church people do make to live out their faith and to help others.  Churches somehow have to hold in view a double truth, with equal vehemence on both sides – they fail frequently and have to face bravely and openly the possibility that even the most seemingly ‘nice’ people are capable of great harm, and that nonetheless most people in the Church live out their lives with conviction and integrity as they try to follow the gospel.  That’s a very difficult balancing act.  And for a long time the news will all seem to run one way.

We are on the ropes!