by Stephen Parsons

One of the battles that parents fight is in persuading their child to apologise to another child.   Billy hits his playmate Joe in a fit of irritation or pique, and clearly, Joe needs to hear Billy apologise if relations are to be restored.  There may be more at stake than just harmony between these two boys.  The two sets of parents have an agreement about babysitting each other’s children, and they cannot abandon this arrangement without affecting adult work schedules and the after-school pick-up rota.  Saying sorry with sincerity and feeling has become a matter of urgency and importance, if a carefully constructed edifice of childcare is not to be impacted, and even collapse, because two small boys have fallen out and refuse to play together in peace.

At this stage in his life, Billy has learnt how to say sorry in a way that does not signify any real content.  There is a particular sing-song intonation which says, ‘I am saying the words, but I don’t really mean them’.   The parent recognises this fake intonation and gets the child to repeat the words of apology until they sound more or less authentic.  It is a contest of wills but the parent battles on because he/she knows the issues that are at stake apart from babysitting rotas.  Authentic apologies do count for something.  Without them relationships are damaged and may be broken irrevocably.

The sing-song way of saying sorry, which is the offending child’s first attempt to respond to the adult’s demand for an apology, has its correspondence in adult life.  Adults do not use sing-song ways of communicating non-authenticity.  They have other verbal techniques.  Certain formulae, used in apologies, sound correct and sincere, but are, in fact, meaningless and shallow.  Expressions like ‘I regret any pain you may have felt, but it was caused inadvertently’ are the stock in trade for insincere apologies and professional speech writers alike.  Such expressions sound good but fail because, although they may appear heart-felt, they lack the quality of real remorse and sincerity which needs to be present in any proper apology.  In writing this piece, I am reflecting on the ideas and thoughts of ‘Graham’ who has written a piece for Via Media https://viamedia.news/2025/01/01/justice-and-moving-on/ on the giving and receiving of apology.    Graham is a Smyth survivor and disclosed to a number of bishops including ++Justin in 2013 about the abuse.  What he describes is his need for real understanding and human compassion from those who received the information about what he had had to endure.  What he in fact received were the sounds of drawbridges being pulled up and the castle (the Church of England) going into full defence mode.  The casualties of this process are sincerity, honesty, transparency and truth.  Many people (including myself) have pointed out the catastrophe that has transformed the national Church into a body that seems only to understand how to make insincere and shallow apologies.  The wider public has learnt, from experiences like that of being a parent, how to recognise when apologies are fake and insincere.  Listening to the crafted statements from one of the ‘reputation management’ firms, it is not difficult to spot if we have the genuine article among the fake, formulaic and ultimately meaningless statements of apology.  Just as parents recognise the insincere apologies sometimes uttered by their own children, ordinary people are very good at recognising the difference between genuine apologies and the fake formulaic versions.

It would be an interesting exercise to compile a list of words and phrases used by professional writers of official statements of apology.   Many such statements will include words like regret, unintentional and words implying that a decision was taken with good intentions but later proved to be wrong.  Two things will normally be absent from such statements.  One is any sense of real human feeling at the way things have been disastrous and catastrophic for the victims and survivors.  The imagined manual for official writers of apologies does not provide for such levels of empathy.  The expressions of regret provided for in our mythical manual can never plumb the depths of human feeling that survivors look for from those who are supposed to be offering words of comfort and support that a victim might find helpful. 

The second thing that never appears in our statement of healing words from leaders and people of power is an understanding of the ‘institutional alienation’ experienced by the survivors.  The survivor has detected, in their experience of abuse, not only a clear breach of ethical behaviour on the part of an individual, but also a sluggish even obstructionist response by an entire institution.  The Church so often seems to retreat into a lock-down mode when one of their servants is accused.  It is extraordinary that, even after ten years of active and supposedly professional guidance of safeguarding by bodies like the NST, people still find the ‘system’ impossible to negotiate without an incredible amount of perseverance.  As we enter the New Year of 2025, it should be possible for our church leaders to provide a far more survivor-friendly environment for those seeking justice and who have already suffered.  Those servants of the church who are being accused of such things as bullying and other forms of abuse, particularly when they belong to the upper ranks of the clergy, are seemingly able to call on the services of highly skilled (and expensive) lawyers.  The lay person who has experienced serious bullying at the hands of a vindictive church leader normally has no support in trying to be heard.  The more a church leader rises through the ranks, the greater the level of institutional protection is available.  The recent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury appears to contradict my words about institutional protection, but no doubt there are other unseen factors in the story which made this particular event inevitable.

‘Graham’, in his moving piece in Via Media, to which we have already referred,has drawn our attention to the failures of the system to provide the words or the actions that might have helped him to find a greater measure of healing over the past ten+ years.  He speaks for all survivors in his plea for words to be shared that truly convey empathy and feeling.  Individuals in positions of authority are representative of a broader constituency; their words count and, if they communicate genuine remorse and sorrow, these may be instruments of healing.  Healing is also enabled when the ‘mighty … are put down from their seat’.  In other words, when important leaders express their sorrow in humble, everyday terms that ordinary people understand, something shifts in the dynamics of the whole process.  The section in Graham’s piece that describes looking into the eyes of those who seek reconciliation is powerful.  It chimes well with what I have said in my last blog post about the quality of reconciliation that can be achieved through a common experience of tears.  Sharing together the same human emotions of joy as well as sorrow is among the ways that we learn to be reconciled with other human beings.  These emotions are expressed in words but also in our body language.  Graham’s reflection about the connection that can be established by human beings simply looking at one another in a kind of visual embrace is powerful.  Reading his words takes us into a world where words are transcended, and primacy is given to what is real in terms of human relationships and spiritual truth.

2025 will be a challenging one for our Church of England.  The might of the institution is being challenged and the status quo of power and privilege it retains can no longer be taken as the final word.  Perhaps with the current awareness of the need to take the abused and damaged section of our Church far more seriously, we are glimpsing a Magnificat Church, one where the ‘humble and meek’ are ‘exalted’, taken seriously and even to be put in charge.  What we are also learning in the current leadership crisis is that institutions need to be held properly accountable and be flexible so that they earn the respect of those they claim to represent and serve.  The right of the Church to hold a place of honour in a society, where it no longer commands universal respect, needs to be challenged and questioned.  Above all, we want those outside the Church to look in and see only honesty and truth.  Our next Archbishop has the urgent task to call us all back to these basics.  Let us hope he/she has the insight, the vision and the wisdom to be able to do it.