On Friday last, there was a notable event with the publication of a new book about safeguarding entitled To Heal and not to Harm.  The authors, Alan Wilson and Rosie Harper are both slightly known to me so I was anxious to get hold of a copy.  As the book was not immediately available as a hard copy, I had to order my copy on Kindle.  What I write today is not a full review of the book but a restatement in my own words of what the authors have to say about the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  What they say seems so clearly to set out the problem of safeguarding and a proper response to survivors and how the church seems so often to get things wrong.

Anyone who has followed this blog over the months and years will know that one of the major issues on the part of abuse survivors is their claim that the Church authorities do not want to engage with them.  Instead of being an object for the Church’s care and concern, survivors have often felt themselves to be nuisances and made to feel somehow responsible for the problem that has come into being through the abuse perpetrated against them.  Defensiveness, avoidance, forgetfulness and even outright lying has come to mark many of the reported relationships between those in charge of the Church and the wounded victims of church abuse.  Some of this distancing obviously has to do with legal issues and the matters of criminality that have to go through the courts.  But whatever the official explanation, the Church has a poor record in doing the simple things like answering letters, picking up the phone and maintaining human contact with those who have suffered at the hands of members of the Church. Survivors constantly claim that to receive anything in the way of apologies or compensation from the Church, they have to have an enormous amount of perseverance.

Wilson and Harper’s retelling of the Good Samaritan story early in their book is utterly brilliant for the way that it sets out clearly the way many survivors encounter blockages in their dealings with the Church.  By likening the situation of survivors to the man robbed on the Jericho road, the reader is able to grasp quickly the main issues in the survivors’ difficult dealings with the Church.  Jesus tells the story with a very clear purpose.  He is not interested in the motivation or identity of the robbers.  He did not reflect on the importance of self-defence classes for travellers.  All that he was concerned about was the wounded man lying on the road and the way that those who passed by responded.

Our authors want us to see the man lying in the road as possibly like a victim of church abuse.  Nothing else is mentioned or thought to be of major importance in the story, except responding immediately to the victim.  Responding urgently to a situation of need takes precedence over everything else.  A failure to offer immediate help by the Church, which is what many survivors report, greatly adds to the pain and damage of the original abuse.  We may speculate on the thoughts that went through the minds of the first two on the scene of the attack, the Priest and the Levite.  What they might have been thinking is not far from the possible thoughts of church authorities when faced with survivors.  ‘This is too complicated’ – ‘facing up to this problem may affect the church’s reputation with the general public’ – ‘dealing with the legal issues will be terrifyingly expensive’.  The Bible of course does not tell us the thoughts of the priest and Levite but countless preachers have attempted to fill in this gap in the narrative.  But, whatever the motivation, we are left with the bare fact that two of the three passed by on the other side.  Two of the three were constrained by their involvement with the official religious life of their day, and we suspect from the narrative that issues such as ritual impurity from coming into contact with blood and a potential corpse played a part in their decisions.

The inability of the Church to take a straightforward approach to the needs of survivors has puzzled many people and indeed is one of the constant refrains of the book by our two authors.  The wounded man on the road needed time, care and ongoing support.  Not only did he need these things, but he needed them at once.  There was no time for a committee to meet to decide whether he qualified for a grant from a discretionary fund.  The wounded man needed the donkey transport to the inn on that very day.  If an institution like the Church recognises that such things as abuse can happen, then it needs to have mechanisms to respond and deal with it at once.  Problems do not go away when they are ignored.  They have a habit of coming back to haunt the institution with a greater vehemence because the victims/survivors have found no immediate reply to their pleas for help.

To Heal and not to Harm contains many tough and challenging insights about the danger of the church failing to respond to the needs of past and future survivors.  The retelling of the story of the Good Samaritan to suggest that Jesus cares above all for needy survivors is a stunningly powerful but simple message.  In a week’s time we are to receive the awaited report on the hearings of IICSA from last year.  The goings on in the Diocese of Chichester and in Lambeth Palace itself revealed in those hearings sounded very much like conversation among a convocation of Priests and Levites in Britain.  How best can we hide and protect the church and its interests from the inconvenient truths of past abuses?  We seldom hear the voice or feelings of the Samaritan in what is debated behind closed doors.  Of the Samaritan it is said that when he saw the wounded man, he was ‘moved with compassion’.  Compassion was then translated into instant appropriate action and Jesus spoke of this response by telling the lawyer, ‘Go and do thou likewise.’ Perhaps the Church needs to hear better this urgent command.