The expression ‘lessons learned’ in a review of some poorly managed safeguarding episode, always fills the reader with a sense of déjà vu.  We ask ourselves the disrespectful question, how many more lessons learned reviews do we need before the Church gets the central point of how and why things can go so disastrously wrong in safeguarding events?

In every review of past safeguarding cases there are normally at least three components.   The first is the account of criminal sexual activity against a child or vulnerable adult.  Many of the cases, but not all, have ended up with criminal prosecutions and imprisonment for the perpetrators.  The second part is the reaction to the victim/survivor by relatives and people with professional responsibilities.  The third section is the examination of protocols and paper trails that help to reveal who did or knew what and when.  Of the three, the first is the most painful to read.  It is also the part of the review that provides the least scope for comment.  How many times can a commentator say, this is wicked/criminal behaviour?  The second section is worthy of comment.  If an individual has suffered and, for various reasons, they have not received a compassionate caring response, this is likely to have compounded the evil of the original malevolent act.  The third aspect, the failure of protocols and process, can be blamed on the common, but not necessarily wicked, weakness and sloppiness of those entrusted with the task of maintaining records and following procedures correctly.

When we come to examine the Independent Learning Lessons Case Review – Graham Gregory, we find all three aspects of a typical safeguarding report present.  The abuse and the failures of care are chronicled and then we have the astonishing carelessness in the preservation of records to illuminate these past events.  Girls and young women were abused over a thirty-year period by Graham Gregory.  Opportunities for checking this criminal behaviour were repeatedly missed.  Ray Galloway, the Reviewer, has produced a piece of work of high quality.  This in no way tries to avoid trenchant criticisms of protocol, management, along with a continuing failure to care for survivors in this bitterly shameful episode for the Church of England.   Abuse at the hands of Gregory took place in London and the North of England over his entire active ministry of 30 years.  Even at the time of his early retirement in 1995, the Church of England had still not identified Gregory as an active danger to vulnerable girls and young women, in spite the valiant attempts of his victims to speak to those in authority.

Of the three identified aspects of a Safeguarding Review, I intend to comment further only on the second, the response of authority figures.  Some of the accounts of the young girls trying to attract the attention of their own parents following the abuse are tragic, but it is the failure of church officers/dignitaries that I find even more shocking.  For the remainder of this commentary, I want to tell the story of three encounters between the young victims and professional outsiders.  In one case it was the meeting with a psychiatrist by a victim (by then an adult); in the other two cases it was a face-to-face meeting with a Church of England bishop soon after the abusive events.  Were things really so inept in the past, before the widespread acceptance in the Church of England that the Church had a real problem with sexual abuse among its clergy?   One sentence, repeated several times in the Review, states tellingly: No specific examples of Good Practice were identified on behalf of the Diocese of X.

One encounter that is recorded in the report is between a survivor known as Victim B occurred at a very late stage in the process after Gregory had been sentenced to prison in 2017.   Victim B had experienced abuse in the 1960s and already had been through the ordeal of testifying in court.  She then had to suffer the further humiliation of facing a psychiatrist who, no doubt working for an insurance company, was trying to claim that her abuse had left behind little harm.  The psychiatrist is not named, but such treatment by mental health professionals on behalf of the Church is recorded in other cases known to me.  Victim B told the Reviewer her story in these words.  It is shockingly awful…. it’s a travesty.   Once you have gone through the court and the man has gone to prison, you’ve gone over the awfulness so many times, blow me down, if they’re going to give you anything you have to go and say it all again to a psychiatrist, who’s desperately trying to find you have no symptoms at all, nothing at all, and they can give you as little money as possible.’

Victim F suffered a troubling and inappropriate intervention by the Diocesan bishop after her abuse at the hands of Gregory.  At that time, (in the 80s) she was still an 8-year-old child and, with her mother, in awe of such an important person.  The visit took place within a week of the abusive event.  In Victim F’s words, I remember him (the bishop) coming to see us and he said, ah well, that’s an awful thing to happen and he will have to go.  And will you promise not to tell anybody.  That was the worst thing, when you think about it now, him telling us not to say anything to anybody… I remember him saying that, I promise you, if you don’t say anything to anybody, he’ll be gone within six months.  Even though this conversation took place before church safeguarding protocols were set down, it is an appalling re-abuse of a vulnerable exploited child.  Gregory did move a year later but with a letter of commendation which did not mention anything about this episode of abuse.  The Diocese of Southwell thus had to receive a priest with a chequered past.  They were totally unaware of his history as a dangerous paedophile.

Another survivor, known as Victim G, also had a meeting with a Diocesan bishop in the 90s.  The latter felt it appropriate to invite Gregory to this meeting, as though a serious alleged case of sexual crime could be resolved by a process of reconciliation.  Fortunately, Victim G was supported by someone in the Diocese who was a highly experienced social worker.  Victim G read a prepared statement to Gregory that outlined how the abuse she had suffered had destroyed her childhood.  The bishop, who was present sat back in his chair with an air of detachment with the whole thing having, apparently, nothing to do with him.  Gregory’s response was a muttered I know, I get that now’.  The bishop himself having heard the statement then attempted to close the conversation down by outlining the complexities of a consistory court, and how difficult it would be to prove the offence.  Victim G was never offered the option of going to the police or even allowed to tell her story in full to the bishop.  Because her story had not been believed by the bishop, the whole process seemed to stall.  One feels that an act of gross pastoral failure had been perpetrated on this occasion.

The three vignettes that I have outlined from the 87-page Gregory Review may well have shocked my readers as much as they have shocked me.  One episcopal encounter dates back to the 80s and the other to the 90s.    The recent encounter with the psychiatrist took place within the past 10 years.  The biblical lament of ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ comes to mind.  Can we eventually expect to see the end of crass insensitive treatment of survivors in the next ten years?  I have passed over the mislaying and probable destruction of records that the detailed report reveals.  This too probably reflects, on the part of someone, a callous disregard for the cause of survivors.  No one wants to hear about such episodes of cruel behaviour.  The failure of care for the abused, whether by management sloppiness or pastoral cruelty, is deeply wounding and damaging to the whole Church.  These are failures of integrity.  To misquote Scripture:  Where there is no integrity, the Church perishes!

When I was a very small child I was introduced to the idea of temptation and evil by a vivid, even frightening, picture in a book.  There was a small boy with two beings sitting on him, one on each shoulder.  The first was an angel and the other a small devilish creature, complete with tail and fork.  The reason for sitting on the shoulder was to give each ‘influencer’ ready access to the boy’s ears.  Temptation was being presented as a matter of whether or not we were listening and acting on what the devil was whispering to us.

However crude and simplistic this picture is, it is probably typical of the way that a Christian understanding of temptation was presented to children of my generation. In short, sin and evil were the consequence of individuals not listening to their consciences (the angel) but rather following a compulsion to go their own selfish way (the devil). With the wisdom of adulthood available to us now, we are able to see how such notions may still be distorting our thinking about evil. It is easy to believe that our involvement and responsibility for evil only occurs when we engage in personal lapses of conscience.  Our responsibility for any wider evil goes beyond that. There is such a thing, as we shall see, as corporate evil.  This can drag us into its grip and, in some way, we become part of it in varying degrees.  Our failure here is not necessarily the result of ignoring our individual consciences but may involve failures of caution, wisdom or imagination.  In short, there is nothing simple about our confrontations with evil.  Nor are there simple ways to establish our degree of culpability when we meet it in its capacity to damage, even destroy, our lives and the lives of others.

The idea that evil in the world is always the result of wrong decisions by individuals operating independently, is a notion deeply embedded in our thinking.  There are two important ways in which this crude initial picture is misleading and, at times, completely unhelpful.  When we examine the settings in which the temptation to do evil occurs, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a lot more going than a single conscience leading someone to wrong decisions or evil actions.  The culpability, the blame we attach to individuals fighting temptation will vary according to a whole variety of factors.  For example, we may make allowances for a child who has never received any moral guidance or ‘good-enough’ parenting to help them understand ideas of good and evil.  Evil deeds are sometimes perpetrated in the context of a desperate need simply to survive.  We should always be prepared to examine the influences on an individual who has chosen in some way to go over to the dark side.   The influence of a group, a dysfunctional family or a gang can be very strong, even irresistible.  Such evil pressures do not excuse the individual act, but they certainly help us to understand it. Evil can descend on to an individual because of the geographical area in which an offender has been brought up, or the social circles they move in.  One question in such a situation has to be this.  Where do we locate the evil?  Is it only in the individual concerned or can we find it somewhere else, within a group that has seduced a vulnerable individual into its ranks? We soon discover that there is something we call corporate or social evil.  This form of evil is very hard to pin down or say where precisely it is to be found.  As with any other form of evil, it must be resisted and opposed.   But social evils are far harder to deal with and it may take a generation or two to root out particular evils, like racial prejudice, misogyny or homophobia.

Within every corporate organisation or institution there are certain predictable forces or dynamics at work.  Many of these will be morally neutral.  The desire by a firm to create a product which is valuable to society, at the same time making a profit to reward investors, is compatible with wholesome ethical behaviour.  The management of such a manufacturing company will also be guided by one overriding dynamic, the need to preserve itself in the present and have the strength to survive into the future.  Other organisations, like the Church, will also have this same fundamental drive for self-preservation and expansion.  In pursuit of this aim, they will use a variety of methods to protect themselves from any threats to their existence.  We see the same fundamental self-preserving dynamic in the world of nature, from the largest animals down to the smallest cellular creature.  Whatever an animal does to protect itself and reproduce itself is not judged by standards of right and wrong.  The task of self-preservation within the Church is also normally a neutral act.  As with every organisation, the Church has the right to defend itself in appropriate ways.  The deployment of lawyers, publicity experts and reputation polishers can all relate to the activity of a Church when it is in a justified self-protective mode. There is, however, a line that is crossed when ethical self-preservation methods become immoral and unethical.  The Church’s desire for survival can sometimes negate its ethical standards and claims of total integrity.  We note here two examples of unethical behaviour can be given from the reported catalogue of safeguarding failures of the last ten years.  Church reputation managers may decide that a person persistently asking awkward question about decisions made in the past needs to be forcibly side-lined and their reputation challenged.  The ‘dirty tricks’ department swings into operation in an effort to isolate and pressurise the individual concerned.  When innuendo, lies and rumour spreading are employed against an individual in an effort to undermine him/her, we are clearly describing an institution moving to immoral evil behaviour.

 Among other examples of immoral behaviour in an institution such as the church, is in the use of silence.  This weapon of silence, used unethically, can operate in a variety of ways.  Among the examples are the letters and emails that are sent to the church authorities from abuse survivors, but which go unanswered.  Any refusal to answer legitimate questions about the past can be seen as involving a serious unethical treatment of a complainant.  Another use of silence is when an order goes out from the centre forbidding contact or any sharing of legitimate information with suffering abuse survivors.  The whole institution gets into a situation of moral paralysis as this clamming up process shuts down the Christian virtues of love, openness and mutuality.  They are replaced by a claustrophobic secrecy which excludes all but the elite powerbrokers at the centre.  The Church is supposed to stand for justice and fair play.  Neither of these are in evidence when church authority uses its power to control people and information by simply shutting everyone else out through the use of silence.

When evil acts are committed by individuals within an organisation, the effect of these actions has a tendency to spread right across the organisation, corrupting the entire body.  This can happen even if the perpetrator is speedily identified and punished.  All the individual members of the institution may be innocent of any of this evil but, somehow, the sense of corporate shame can percolate right across the organisation.  When we try to describe this corporate sense of shame, it is very hard to locate it or suggest ways to remove it.  In such a situation we can see how inappropriate the crude picture of evil that we started with has become.  There has been no listening to a private angel or devil, but evil has still invaded the lives of all the members of the institution simply by virtue of their membership.  Individual innocence does not protect them from the guilt and shame which attaches itself to the whole institution and the members of it.

I had wanted to go further and discuss the way that institutions, even nations, have the power to incubate and propagate destructive evil within their cultures.  These cultures can actively suck otherwise innocent people into their terrifying ideologies and ways of behaviour.  Ordinary people can find themselves spouting the most appalling hatreds which reflect the prevailing political or ideological climate around them.  Trump’s America has corrupted many millions of people with its poisonous rhetoric, aping similar dynamics prevalent in Hitler’s Germany.  The important point that is being made here is to state that evil can pervade institutions and societies in a variety of ways.   Evil works its nefarious purposes, not by tempting individuals one by one, but by contaminating entire institutions and organisations, creating norms of thought and behaviour that are normally considered repellent and evil.   In our day, the smiling face of corruption is not absent even from our churches.  It takes the hard work of people of goodwill and Christian insight and integrity to identify and call out such evil that may be going on even in our own trusted institutions.  That was the task of the prophets of the Old Testament, to challenge institutional evil and assumptions. It behoves all of us who have a sensitivity to the presence of evil to name it and to challenge those who remain insensitive to its power.  That power, especially in its corporate form, can harm and corrupt the thinking of so many.  To challenge corporate evil means that we have to be thinking in quite different ways from the devil on the shoulder imagery.  Personal evil still exists, but far more insidious is the evil that takes root in the institutions of our land.  This, as we are leaning to our cost, includes the churches that were once believed always to be the main bastions against the devil’s power.  That seems to be true no longer.

by Anonymous

(Editor) I want my reader to imagine a far away country with a totally dysfunctional legal system.  The courts follow no consistent protocols for determining guilt or innocence.  The only thing necessary for a guilty verdict is that there has to have been an accusation of some kind.  If a child makes an accusation, then the reasons for the acceptance of guilt against an accused are reinforced.  The motto that seems to be engraved above the judge/jury’s seat is ‘the child must be believed’.  Into this crazy court, which does not bother to employ any actual lawyers, comes a man.  He is accused of the indecent touch of a child.  The police have examined the case and have found nothing worthy of investigation. Initially the accused is hopeful of finding justice but one by one the planks of his defence are denied him.  In the first place the child complainant cannot remember the precise date when the offence took place or even where.  It might have been one of three dates (or all three!).  This makes it hard to present a defence. The fact is that, for at least one of the dates mentioned, the accused was out of the country. This cannot be brought forward as evidence.   Indeed, in this dysfunctional court, there seems absolutely no interest in establishing what might be the truth.  Registers of attendance for the child exist but they are blocked from scrutiny.  A witness is also prepared to come forward to tell what she knows about possible days when the accused and the complainant might have been in the same space.  This testimony is ruled out of order because seemingly, it might interfere with the narrative created by the prosecution.  The accused man continues to protest his innocence.  The court then tries to do a deal.   If you sign this piece of paper admitting the offence, you can go free.  Our accused is a man of principle.  Freedom obtained through colluding with a lie is not a freedom worth having.  This is  topsy-turvy justice, but it also represents the justice protocols followed by a diocese in the Church of England in the prosecution of a man called ‘Kenneth’.  This is the reality at work in one example of the church’s disciplinary processes and perhaps church justice in general. Kenneth’s anonymous friend and supporter takes up the story.

Another Episode in the Kenneth Saga

This is the third episode in the ongoing saga of my friend of fifty-six years, Kenneth. Not his real name of course, but given that might identify other people, for this blog we shall call him Kenneth. You will need to read the previous two episodes in order to fully understand this one. The first one, published December 13th 2021 was written by Stephen Parsons and the second one January 7th 2022 written by myself. At the end of my previous blog I promised you a report on a meeting to be held on January 12th 2022.

There was indeed a meeting on January 12th and although when Kenneth entered the room, alone, there were three agendas on the table which in the event were never used. Instead Kenneth suggested that those present, the Church Safeguarding Officer and the Assistant Safeguarding Adviser(ASA), should face up to the dysfunctional way in which his case had been dealt with. This occupied most of the afternoon. At the end they looked shocked and said that Kenneth had spoken strongly and they had heard him. There had been no discussion on the Safeguarding Agreement, the following week Kenneth received an email from the ASA with an attachment. The only word to describe this document is ‘bullying‘.

The Attachment:

This was a document listing the purpose of the Safeguarding Agreement and the points with which they wanted Kenneth to agree. It was stressed that this document was highly confidential and Kenneth was instructed not to share it with anyone until eventually he had signed it. What is written in it they are so afraid of anyone else reading? Is it the same reason they do not reveal the information in the choristers’ registers of attendance? In any case Kenneth wants to show the document to his solicitor before he signs anything. Why are they trying to prevent him doing this? Remember at the beginning of all this in 2020 they wanted to prevent him having a solicitor present at any meeting. They made enquiries and must have been told it was beyond their remit, because no more was said and the solicitor was in attendance at meetings.

Kenneth replied to that email saying, ‘Technically this is known as a “gagging order”, which I cannot agree to. My intention would be to discuss these proposals fully, first with my solicitor and second with my friend,both of whom you know.’ There was no written reply to this but it was discussed at the next meeting, February 2nd.

When the allegation was first made in March 2020, all the clergy connected to his church were told not to have any communication with him. Kenneth, who has no family in this country, regarded the church as his ‘family’, so effectively the core group took away his family and now are attempting to cut him off from his friends by telling him not to discuss with them what is worrying him. Their merciless power seems to be ultimate and unaccountable. What does the Core Group imagine the outcome could be on his mental health doing this? There is no reason or justice in this. Do the Bishops applaud and condone what is being done in their name?

The Meeting

Kenneth had a meeting on Wednesday February 2nd with the Church Safeguarding Officer and the Assistant Safeguarding Adviser.

A further form of bullying is that no notes or minutes are written down by anyone at these meetings. Our notes are dependent upon Kenneth’s memory of what was said as soon as possible after the meeting, which he tells me and I then type out. This does seem an amateurish way of recording minutes.  Not writing formal minutes or even taking notes at meetings makes it easy later, when challenged, for two people in agreement with each other to claim Kenneth has ‘misunderstood ‘ what has been said. At this meeting they denied any attempt at ‘gagging’ him, but Kenneth pointed out that it had been written to him in an email and therefore there could be no misunderstanding. The author of the email said she was sorry Kenneth had interpreted her instruction to maintain confidentiality as ‘gagging’ him, but she had not been a good communicator in this instance and that the document is a starting point for negotiation. ‘Not been a good communicator in this instance’. What other instances has she failed to be a good communicator? When else in the past twenty-three months has she failed to communicate effectively? What an admittance!

There were other denials and contradictions of what had been said and done in past meetings and an attempt to justify their actions. This can be shown as contrary to evidence we have provided throughout the past twenty-three months.

The worst thing said at this meeting was there would be no scrutiny of any evidence and no investigation, meaning that Kenneth cannot contest their decision of being ‘high risk’ and therefore if he wants to go back to church again he must accept whatever safeguarding procedures are appropriate for a high risk person.  We have appealed to different organisations of the Church, but Kenneth is a lay person and they only counsel the ordained. We even wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who not surprisingly passed it to a Provincial Safeguarding Advisor (PSA) who said (place names have been omitted) ‘The matters you refer to are essentially a complaint about how the diocese has managed a safeguarding complaint through the core group process. Neither the Archbishop, nor the National Safeguarding Team, have the jurisdiction to investigate such complaints. Complaints must be directed towards the Diocese’

We did this but the answer was effectively to say ‘this has already been dealt with under our Safeguarding procedure…….the matter is now closed’. Although I had sent a detailed, well evidenced document about our complaints which the PSA said he had ‘skimmed through’, it was not realised by Lambeth Palace that we were complaining about these same safeguarding procedures.

The Core Group constantly say that they are following the House of Bishops Guidance and their mantra is, ‘on the balance of probabilities we have to believe that you might have done it’. In view of the boy and his mother’s contradictory stories surely it could be claimed that on the balance of probabilities the boy, could be telling a whole tissue of lies. Not to consider this is discriminatory against Kenneth.

Whilst claiming it is not their role to investigate, judge, seek the truth, scrutinise any evidence or doubt the boy, although asked many times, the Core Group has failed to give the section or page reference in the House of Bishops Guidance where this is said. I, on the other hand can identify 15 procedures relating to respondents and 5 general instructions which they have not followed.

I make no apology for having mentioned this in my previous blog because it is the crux of the whole way in which this case has been handled; a constant reiteration that the Core Group are following the House of Bishops Guidance, which they plainly are not.

The core group is unaccountable and answerable to no-one.  They apparently can do as they like and, without any evidence otherwise, seem to be making it up as they go along.

The meeting ended with a promise to send Kenneth a new draft of the Safeguarding Agreement sometime the following week and which is  still based on a risk assessment of 2020 and not the one in 2021. No arrangements were made for any future meeting. Between two previous meetings in 2021 ten weeks had elapsed with no communication. Little wonder the case has dragged on for twenty-three months and still counting. Such a dilatory, lackadaisical attitude is totally unacceptable. Even the independent investigator, engaged to investigate the procedures only and not the allegation itself, said in his review of August 2021 that, ‘without strong and decisive leadership it [the case] seems to have drifted and meandered’.

In one month it will be exactly two years since Kenneth was told of the allegation and so it goes on and on and on with no end in sight.

Kenneth has serious health issues and is almost 77 years old. How long do they think he can continue with this level of persecution? He has been part of that church for sixty years with clean DBS checks throughout. Nothing has ever been proved against him. Surely he can be left to live out his old age in peace and without being bullied by authorities in the Church of England.

Postscript: This account links back indirectly to the story of NST failing to act quickly in the Percy case. It is also pertinent to the powerful speech given by Gavin Drake at General Synod on February 9th calling for something beyond ‘moral authority’ in the oversight of the NST. Martyn’s and Kenneth’s stories clearly need an ombudsman to appeal to but such a figure does not at present exist. The incompetence continues.

Anonymous wishes to add as an addendum

‘I should like to add here a comment to note how similar is Kenneth’s case to that of J in the opening chapter of  ‘The Trial’ by Kafka and now, after almost two years, in chapter seven of that book the events in the life of J are almost the same as those of K.

‘Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K.; for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested’. 

He is shortly summoned before the inspector, who does not know what the charges are either but tells K. that he is free to continue living his life as usual. K. goes to the bank where he works and is later told that a series of hearings will be taking place on Sundays………..

One of Kafka’s best-known works. Although written in 1914-15 and published 1925 after his death, it has become synonymous with the anxieties and sense of alienation of the modern age and with an ordinary person’s struggle against an unreasoning and unreasonable authority.’

It is always tempting, when a long-standing dispute is resolved, to want to move on with a large sigh of relief.  The Christ Church Oxford saga may seem to have come to an end, with a mediated settlement agreed with the Dean, the Christ Church Governing Body and the complainant Ms X.   The reality is that in any dispute that has been going for four years, that there are likely to be many stones that have been turned over to reveal a dark grimy underside.  The glimpses of shameful behaviour among some of the participants in the drama, leave the onlooker feeling decidedly uncomfortable.  Questions about motives remain, and are, in many cases, unanswered.  A settlement may have been found, but the history of all that preceded it cannot be so quickly dispensed with or pushed to one side.

Among the many written documents and articles that can illuminate our understanding of the drama, there is one that appeared a week ago in the Tablet by Canon Angela Tilby.  It is one of the most vivid accounts I have seen, particularly because it gives us an inside/outside perspective that few people in fact possess.  Tilby writes as a partial insider from her time as a cathedral canon at Christ Church from 2011-2016.  Then, she was involved with the appointment of Percy in 2014 as Dean, representing the Cathedral Chapter on the interviewing panel.  On that occasion, she listened to Percy expound his ideas on college governance and administration and what he would do to make the College more open-ended, with a greater emphasis on inclusiveness.  After her retirement, Tilby continued to visit the College in various capacities, maintaining contact with several former colleagues in the Cathedral and College.  The first complaints against Percy she heard were shared with her by one of the members of the Governing Body, Canon Sarah Foot, in the summer of 2018.  It was impossible to find out precisely what Percy was supposed to have done but the consensus was that the misdemeanour was ‘very serious’.

The serious crime allegedly committed by Percy seems, from the available evidence, to be one of having disturbed the status-quo of the College.  Power in the Governing Body is held by a small group of ‘censors’ who convene the entire Governing Body of some sixty strong.  The real power behind the scenes is to be found in the group of ex-censors.  Following their term of office, former censors continue to retain much of their old influence within the College.  Tilby describes these ex-censors as ’tribal elders’.  Nothing is done in the College without their approval.  Sir Andrew Smith had also noted how these elders were wielding a great deal of social and political power.   A conflict was perhaps almost an inevitability if a new Dean, interested in governance reform, were to challenge the vested interests of this group of present and former censors. The majority of the other members of the Governing Body were loath to get involved in matters of decision making and governance, so the power to manage the College was wielded by quite a small group.  Previous Deans seem to have done little to challenge this power wielded by the elders. 

The first area of conflict between the Dean and those who opposed him, arose after a widely publicised episode involving a medical student, Lavinia Woodward.  She injured her boyfriend by stabbing him in the leg with a bread knife in December 2016.  The case threw up a range of issues about who in the College was responsible for managing the safeguarding and protection of students.  It seems that Percy was unhappy with the existing protocols for safeguarding, and several meetings were held on the topic in the first part of 2017.  This enquiry led into other issues, especially around the area of financial management.  One topic that was raised was whether the formula for calculating academic and other salaries was still fit for purpose, as Christ Church was out of line with other Colleges, and this was a recent development. But the Salaries Board refused to disclose its workings and methods, and requests for clarity were met with absurdist opacity.  Superficially this gave the impression that Percy was interfering with the governance of the College to obtain a pay-rise for himself, but that does not seem to have been a fair reading of the situation. When the conflict escalated to become a formal complaint by his detractors under some archaic statutes of the College, Percy was accused of ‘conduct of an immoral, scandalous or disgraceful nature incompatible with the duties of the office…’ 

An extremely costly Tribunal under Sir Andrew Smith, a former High Court Judge was held in the summer of 2019.  In August the conclusions were published, and Smith dismissed all the charges against Percy.  Although Percy was allowed to return to work, the atmosphere in the College remained hostile and the accusers refused to reimburse the huge sums expended by him in having legal support at the Tribunal.  In addition, more rumours about Percy were being fed to the Press in apparent attempts to smear his name. 

In March 2020, a church-led enquiry was opened to investigate the accusation that Percy had mishandled four alleged “historic safeguarding concerns” within the College.  Although this case was not within the purview of the Church of England, a Core-Group was convened by the Diocese and NST. Percy refused to be suspended – there were no actual individuals complaining, just the College manufacturing “concerns”. Two further “concerns” were then added by the College. The Diocesan and College lawyers emerged as primary originators in each of these six cases. It was only in September 2020 that Percy was found to have acted appropriately by the NST and allowed to return to work. However, the College refused to accept the NST judgment.

A few weeks later, the final episode – a seventh safeguarding allegation – was made. This new but clearly related conflict between Dean and both the College and Church began in October 2020.  It is in connection with that stage of the drama that the recently announced settlement is purportedly concerned.  An alleged incident of unwanted ‘hair-touching’ was reported to have taken place on October 4^th.  The incident sparked yet another suspension by Church and College. 

Again, as with the previous six “safeguarding concerns” the same lawyers acting for the Diocese and the College were involved in curating and escalating the allegation, making sure through Luther Pendragon (PR) that the media were prejudicially briefed. Percy has all the emails from the journalists, NST and others, which are from the lawyers and Luther Pendragon, planting detrimental stories against him. The Diocesan lawyers also made sure the Dean’s evidence in the internal investigation was redacted, or in some cases, simply ignored.  The lawyers denied involvement in the internal investigation, despite setting its terms of reference, and also helping finalise the notorious bogus “Risk Assessments”. 

Although some may feel that I am merely dredging up old history in the dispute, the level of vitriol that was spreading round the college at that time and since, needs some exploration.  Technically with the agreement that has now been signed, all the past events should be able to be consigned to history.  It, nevertheless, remains a stumbling block that the wording of the agreement signed a few days ago seems to be suggesting that the College dispute with the Dean has always been about a single case of hair-touching.  When we look at the whole timeline of the dispute, we have to note that there have been almost four years of persecution where allegations of sexual misconduct were implied or explicitly made.    The first charge the Dean faced in October 2018 was of “immoral, scandalous and disgraceful conduct”. Most people would assume this was sexual in nature, and not a dispute with a committee about its governance.  The College, for almost four months, refused to confirm or deny that the charge might relate to sexual misconduct or paedophilia.  They were more than happy to let the press speculate, and fed the silence with gas-lighting and innuendo.

In May 2021 the most senior legal voice in the Church of England (and fourth most senior Appeal Court Judge) declared that the alleged incident in the sacristy in itself ‘is not serious enough to merit a tribunal under the Clergy Discipline Measure’, and that both the complainant and respondent (i.e., the Dean) were ‘credible’. Yet for this single allegation there have been no fewer than five separate investigations of that incident, so it is unreasonable to suggest that anything new would have been revealed by a further College Tribunal.  At the heart of the Percy dispute is, to repeat, not a College desperate to protect the innocent and vulnerable, but one apparently fighting an all-out struggle to do everything to leave political and ideological power in the hands of the ‘tribal elders’.

To return to Tilby’s revealing article in the Tablet, she mentions that, in the first years of Percy’s tenure of office as Dean, he was very supportive of Sarah Foot, sponsoring her ordination.  Graham Ward was an unsuccessful applicant for the post of Dean in 2015.  Percy was also instrumental in the appointment of Canon Richard Peers to the post of Sub-Dean.  Both these individuals have subsequently played major roles in opposing and undermining Percy.   In the case of Peers, a CDM was eventually taken out against him because of his many alleged malign statements against Percy. In the case of Foot and Ward, their attacks on the Dean began much earlier, and stem from 2018.

The change in these three, from being supporters to attackers, is one part of the story that does not lend itself to ready explanation.  It certainly leaves behind an unsavoury blight on reputations.  The settlement does not, as far as I can tell, affect Percy’s reputation, or in any way damage it.  The same cannot be said for those who have spent so much effort, corporately and individually besmirching the reputation of a thoroughly good man.  To be attacked consistently over such a long period is a grievous experience but fortunately Percy has been able to count on the support of friends and supporters all over the world.

One further untidy loose end in the whole story of Christ Church and its Dean is the place of Bishop of Oxford.  His role throughout the process has been marked by indifference at best and hostility at worst.  Apparently, he was present at Christ Church this morning (6.2), but there was no joyous announcement of the conclusion of the affair with the Dean able immediately to resume his church duties.  The source reported that everything said by the Bishop and the Sub-Dean sounded as if it had been written by a lawyer.  The earlier statement made by the Bishop on Friday about the whole affair also had a strange reticence to engage with or show any understanding of the causes of the wider dispute between Dean and College.  The Bishop seems to have colluded with the idea in his Statement that the main problem in the dispute has always been about an alleged sexual misdemeanour.  The Dean’s CDM judgment states plainly that there was no sexual content to the conversation with the complainant (it was about donating hair to a charity making wigs for children being treated for cancer). 

Having lived only seven miles from the Dean, the Bishop must have known from the time the dispute became public (and before) that any actual sexual misbehaviour on the part of the Dean was never a credible allegation by the Censors and those who organised the original Tribunal in 2018.  Those of us who have followed the dispute over the four years were very surprised to hear about any sexual allegations.  Yet when investigated, they have always amounted to nothing, and no credible person or evidence produced.  The only common denominators that lie behind the allegations are the intentional malicious gas-lighting and innuendo, which is originated by some clergy, and a law firm and PR company acting for the Diocese. Whatever the precise nature of the ‘offence’ committed by Percy, there has never been any indication that he is a ‘sex-pest’ or a danger to every single individual in the College, making it necessary to change the locks throughout the College.

The final part of the agreement which may prove more long-lasting than any other is the promise by the College to review systems of governance.   Angela Tilby’s piece helps to remind us that that back in 2018, when the dispute came into public view, the disputes were about control and power in the College.   Percy fought hard to establish to establish secure governance structures in his first years in the College.  Although he was unsuccessful in putting such changes in place, it would seem that these reforms may, under the watchful eye of the Charity Commission, be achieved following his departure.  Wherever Dean Percy and his family go after April this year, it can be hoped that he will be allowed to work in an environment conducive to his considerable teaching and writing skills.  In this way, we trust, he will continue to make a continuing valuable contribution to the Church that he desires so passionately to serve.

I recently heard someone use this expression, emotional atrophy, when speaking about the political woes of the current British government.  They were, as the reader might be able to guess, describing the catastrophic failure of sensitivity on the part of those in power in the UK.  They were thinking of the tone-deaf and inappropriate behaviour of holding a social event in the middle of a pandemic and on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral.

 The word atrophy describes the fact that a part of an organism has never been allowed to develop or function properly.  A foot, arm, or here, the capacity for feeling respect for a grieving family, has withered through lack of use.  The organ that has atrophied still exists, but it might as well not exist since, in its withered state, it has ceased to work.  As I write these words, the political fall-out for this current example of what we might regard a grossly insensitive behaviour on the part of senior politicians, has not reached a climax.  It is clear that that the reputations of these same politicians is under serious threat for their terrible failures of sensitivity.

Moving from current matters, we have all experienced emotional atrophy in others.  As children we would have chosen other words to describe this phenomenon.  Words like snooty or stuck-up might convey the experience of a child trying to negotiate some of the grown-ups encountered beyond the family.  Some of the people about whom we used such adjectives, may well have been emotionally blunted.  Equally, many would be among those frightened of children and uncertain how to speak to them.  Society, particularly today, has made problematic the whole issue of young people and children interacting with adults outside the family.  We sadly now live in a highly polarised society where any kind of interaction with a child may be frowned upon or regarded as suspicious, even within a church setting.

Leaving to one side our memories as children and the way we then related to adults, we are acutely aware of the issues around meeting someone for the first time.  One fear we may have is of being blanked or ignored.  Fortunately, most first encounters take place in defined settings and the conventions that exist help us in knowing what to say to a complete stranger.  Formality is likely to dominate any initial interaction in a workplace environment.  This will be quite different in a party.  At a party we may allow ourselves the freedom to ask questions about a person’s background.  The same questions would normally be totally inappropriate in a work setting.  Sometimes we can work with someone for years and never discover a thing about their personal lives or their inner feelings.  The relationship is a purely contractual one.  They give the orders, and we obey (or vice-versa).  Most of us can find such a situation extremely trying, when we are engaged with another person in a working relationship and the person gives away nothing personal.  In the case of curate working with a non-communicating training incumbent, the reaction will often be simply to keep your nose clean until escape beckons.  We have on the blog discussed relationships among clergy in team situations.  Some reactions suggested that teams are always mutually affirming of all the members.  Sadly, my experience has been that if there is any trace of hierarchy in the team structure, it will be rigorously enforced.  Far more people seem to prefer the ‘safe’ environment of a defined structure than the uncertainties of open-ended relationships.  These risk exposing personal vulnerabilities.

When we look at a body of clergy in the Church of England, we might suggest that each of them, like everyone else, is to found somewhere along a spectrum between formal gravity and exuberant openness.  Each, in other words, can be described in terms of their tendency to keep all relationships carefully business-like or move in the direction of being spontaneously open, even chaotic.  It is no secret that the powers that be in the Church seem to prefer those who practise a high degree of emotional control and correctness.  They are the ones who achieve promotion.  The safe predictable types fit far better into an institutional system like the Church.  Predictability is always highly esteemed in any organisation.  Spontaneous creative personalities are less easy to control.  People who wear their heart on their sleeve must be kept safely under supervision.  The institution, here the Church of England, must always be kept safe from eccentrics and mavericks of every kind.  Alongside the word ‘sound’ so beloved by many evangelicals, we find a further word being required of candidates for high office.  That word is ‘safe’.  The connotations of these two words, whether used singly or together, imply an individual who is good at management, the avoidance of controversy, smooth administration and loyalty to the structure. 

One of the current problems in the Church of England is that many of the values esteemed by the hierarchical leadership cohort, are not well-equipped to deal with the safeguarding crisis.  Those good at management and administration, those who are ‘safe’, are probably not the best people to place in a situation where there is a lot of trauma and hurt.  The Church has taken a look at the terrible events of the past and has decided to set a variety of formal initiatives including new appointments.  To put it another way, the Church is using the value system articulated by the highly institutionalised ‘safe’ personality type to tackle a problem that would be better handed over to the emotionally literate, pastorally minded, even though, sometimes, less organised personalities.  One thing I have said many times on this blog is the fact that there appear to be no individuals with proper psychotherapeutic qualifications anywhere near the centre of the Church’s safeguarding structures.

When an individual, wounded by a traumatic episode caused by a member of the Church takes their plea for help to a senior person, they may expect certain things.  They expect to be heard; they expect the person they speak to to have emotional intelligence to understand something of what they are describing.  By telling deeply personal material to another person, they will be retraumatised if the human compassion element is absent in the other person.  If all that can be offered is the atrophied emotional response of someone honed within a managerial culture, then the possibility of further damage will be massive.  On present showing, the statistical chances of meeting a non-empathetic manager-type in the person of a bishop, archdeacon or safeguarding officer are high.  From the accounts that reach me, it appears that professional safeguarding officers, who do have psychological and empathetic skills, burn out very fast.   They find the context in which much of the top level of Church decision-making and administration is done, very hard to adjust to.  The reason for this emotionally atrophied culture existing at all is, sadly, to be laid at the door of those who have deliberately promoted the efficient managerial culture rather than one which is prophetic, pastoral, and passionate.  People who foster this latter form of culture do not fit the current models of what a leader should look like in the Church of England. 

In writing this blog post, I have found myself realising that the people in charge of safeguarding and Church leadership in this area will often fail to have the human qualities that are most needed for this type of work.  Safeguarding and Christian shepherding and leadership should require, from those who undertake such work, a high degree of skill, together with those qualities that we (and the public) recognise as Christian.  Words like kindness, empathy, compassion, and human understanding all crowd in and should all form part of the skill set for people who do this work.  By contrast the survivors seem to meet individuals who singularly lack such skills/qualities.  The skills they do have seem to centre around efficiency, administrative competence, and the ability to organise well.  These latter qualities are commendable but, if they are combined with emotional atrophy, they can be highly destructive and dangerous to the whole organisation.  One (among many) of the scandals revealed recently in the Church of England is the one where a range of leaders have allowed the pain of Smyth victims to be buried in the cause of trying to save the wider organisation embarrassment.  Reputation against pastoral need?  The repeated choice by many Church leaders to place institutional reputation above the needs of suffering individuals can only be described as an outworking of emotional atrophy.  Sadly, it still goes on, which suggests that this is an affliction which may take the Church some time to recover from, if it ever does.    

The departure, through ‘retirement’, of the Bishop of Winchester, is proving to be a dramatic, even traumatic, event in the life of the Diocese.  The Anglican Church has always proved well able to mark in a liturgical way a range of events, from the launching of a nuclear submarine to the start of a local hunting season. The recent final service of Bishop Tim Dakin in Winchester Cathedral proved to be a liturgical challenge for those working out how to commemorate a significant moment in the life of a Cathedral and Diocese.  Somehow, they were required to do at least two things.  There was first the need to note the end of a ten-year episcopal ministry, marked, by all accounts, by extreme stress and unhappiness for many.  At the same time the solemnity and dignity of the cathedral setting required that the commemoration was done in a way that did not offend or directly confront anyone with accusations of blame.

What exactly was being marked at evensong on Saturday January 29^th when +Dakin laid his bishop’s crosier on the altar and, with high emotion, spoke the Covenant Prayer of John Wesley?  I am no longer mine but yours …..let me be employed for you or cast aside… The prayer is one about vocation and surrender for the service of others, including the possibility that the one using the prayer could be let go/dismissed when the need for their services comes to an end. This latter realisation must have been particularly hard for +Dakin to bear. His style of theology and administration had always breathed the supremely confident stance of the evangelical believer who claims to know the will of God at all times. This was proving now not to be true and, because of this loss of control, there was a strong sense of dissonance in his voice. The voice cracked and broke as +Dakin read the words and we wondered whether he could reach the end. The whole episode was a kind of drama and will be pondered by many for what it revealed about the Bishop’s inner state of mind. The form of this part of the service was probably brought together by +Dakin, assisted by the Cathedral Canon with responsibility for liturgy.  Alongside this final part of the service, we had listened to the sermon by the preacher, Professor Elisabeth Stuart. She skilfully managed to reveal what the service at its heart was about. It was the end of a season of darkness, now being banished by the light. +Tim was leaving us ….   

Winchester is some 300+ miles from where I live, and so I have not had any access to direct sources of information about what people have been saying about the ministry of +Dakin over the past ten years.  I have to evaluate what has been going on from publicly available material.  This is, in one way, an advantage for me in my role as a commentator.  If I had been closer to the action, it would have been hard not to be drawn in to support the detractors or supporters of the Bishop.  As with the Wymondham situation, I try very hard to see the problems in an institution from both sides.  Here it has, however, proved extremely difficult to find a coherent narrative on which build a convincing defence of the Bishop.  The videos of him provided by Youtube give us a strong sense of his rhetorical/theological style.  As someone who is sensitised to the use of power in church settings, I found the public speaking demonstrations by the Bishop uncomfortable to watch.  There was never, to judge from his style of speaking, any obvious space for any kind of dialogue with another theological position.  Rather, the theological vision of +Dakin, particularly as revealed by his on-line performances, felt like a tank driving relentlessly forward, flattening anything or anyone who did not agree.  When I learned that Dakin’s vision was that mission should dominate everything undertaken by the diocese, including ministerial training, it set off a shudder inside me.  I felt a pang of sympathy for all those individuals in the Diocese brought up to worship in the pastorally aware version of Anglicanism that I and many others still value.  A similar feeling happened inside me when I first learned about a small cluster of parishes in the Anglican Sydney diocese in Australia.  I believe they are called surplice parishes because they retain some traditional marks of Anglicanism in a sea of parishes overseen by Moore College conservatively trained clergy.  All these conservative parishes practise their fundamentalist/complementarian outlook with scant interest for the wider traditions of Anglicanism.  One hopes the small cohort of traditionally run Anglican parishes will survive, in spite of successive Archbishops of Sydney insisting that only Moore College alumni can be appointed to serve the parishes of the diocese.  Was +Dakin on the way to doing something similar in the Winchester diocese?

One single inconvertible fact about +Dakin’s time as Bishop is that there are currently quite a number of wounded survivors of an abrasive episcopal pastoral ministry.  I have no access to actual names or situations, but there seems to be a consensus on this point among all those who comment on the Winchester situation.  Cases of bullying, wherever they occur, have a contagious effect.  One person’s bullying can cause a collapse of morale in a family, a parish or an entire deanery.  The would-be complainants at the Winchester Diocesan Synod last June, knew from their personal acquaintance, some of these traumatised individuals in the diocese.  The individual cases of the traumatised were not only those directly affected by the bully’s actions, but others who knew about them.  If we leave to one side all the other financial and administrative issues which seem to have played a part in the complaints against the Bishop, we still have this issue of damage and hurt.  How does one deal with such things?  In the Winchester situation, the moment for reconciliation between perpetrator and victims seems to have long passed.  The climax of the service, combining the powerful words of Wesley and the obvious distress of the reader were indeed moving to the hearer.   What was really going on for +Dakin?  Were we listening to words that convey his deep regret for actions that have caused so much hurt?  Quite possibly this liturgical moment in front of the high altar of Winchester was indeed an attempt at such contrition.  It may of course have been equally an attempt to use high emotion to win over, even now, members of the Diocese that had been increasingly alienated from his ministry over the years.  Another possibility is that the tears were of incomprehension and personal pain. Were the tears, in short, uttered for him or for the many he has wounded by his harmful ministry? The drama of the farewell may have been a combination and confusion of all three.  Each reader is invited, after watching the event, to make their own assessment of what was really going on at this point in the service.  There are unlikely to be any correct answers.

Looking at the whole episode that unfolded in Winchester last Saturday I am left to wonder whether anything can be lifted from the events of last Saturday and applied to the whole Church. In thinking about the tears shed by the Bishop, I am reminded of the sometimes intense emotional ambiance of reconciliation work undertaken by the Bridge Builders organisation. The Winchester event may have lacked many of the necessary ingredients that would achieve a successful reconciliation for those who have been abused sexually or spiritually. There were, however, some elements which might well play a part in such a liturgical/reconciliation process. Whatever the origin of the cracking voice and the tears that could not be held back, they do form part of a potential, as yet unwritten, future liturgy of remorse and contrition which might bring together those guilty of neglect and abuse and the abused.  The early Christian fathers knew about the part of tears in the expression of remorse for sin.  Somehow +Dakin’s action in front of the altar may, in fact, be his unwitting offering to the Church.  He may be remembered, not for his numerous mission initiatives, but for this simple act of breaking down before the altar of his cathedral.  In this act he may have been pointing us paradoxically to something that the whole Church desperately needs to discover and make its own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IyQj0_PF3g

by Janet Fife

‘One day the whole creation will know the glorious liberty of the children of God.’      

The liberty is like a person who gets up in the morning, with the sleep still in their eyes and in their mind, and drinks their first cup of coffee; it wakes up their whole body and makes it ready for the day.

The liberty is like a girl who passes her driving test, and finds a whole new world lies before her.

The liberty is like a boy who comes of age and votes for the first time, and shares responsibility for his government.

The liberty is like when a child grows up, leaves home, and finds their own home and career.

The liberty is like when a woman’s children leave home, and she has time to nurture herself and look for her own growth.

The liberty is like the factory worker who is made redundant, and invests all his redundancy money in a new business of his own.

The liberty is like the woman who has always listened to the opinions of others and tried to please them.  She finds some friends who like her for herself, and gradually she begins to find her own voice.

The liberty is like the gay man who finds that God loves him just as he is.

The liberty is like the church that keeps an open table for refugees and same sex couples.

The liberty is like a man who puts on a suit and tie and makes a long journey in to work in a large company where he does as he is told. But in the evening he comes home, puts on comfortable clothes and is his own man.

The liberty is like the newspapers, which reveal corruption and dishonesty.

The liberty is like the person who could make a lot of money by selling their story to the press, but chooses not to because it would hurt the innocent.

The liberty is like the person who thinks they have no talents, and then finds something they are good at.

The liberty is like the GP who could set up her practice in a posh suburb, but decides instead to work in the inner city.

The liberty is like the survivor who feels able to tell her story and find support and acceptance.

The liberty is like the archbishop who puts justice before the church’s reputation.

The liberty is like the bishop who has the courage of her convictions and breaks ranks.

The liberty is like the vicar who tells the truth, knowing it will cost him promotion.

The liberty is like the MP who resists party pressure and votes according to her conscience.

The liberty is like the person who retires and could spend all his time pleasing himself, but decides to do voluntary work for a charity.

The liberty is…what do you think the liberty is?

Back in November, Surviving Church carried a piece I wrote about the travails of Wymondham Abbey in the Norwich Diocese.  Although I tried as hard as I could to see the dispute from the perspective of the Vicar of Wymondham, my sympathies in the end went to the Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher.  He had inherited an impossible situation and he simply wanted the parish to function normally without further conflict. 

To remind my readers of the story in outline.  A new Vicar, Catherine Relf-Pennington, was appointed to the living of Wymondham in 2017.  The candidate was, unusually, the existing curate who had worked in the parish since 2014.  Soon after her appointment, problems and complaints started to emerge.  Some were to do with pastoral issues and others to do with the alleged mismanagement of property and finance.  Clearly, whether or not the complaints were justified, there were issues to be resolved with the support of outside guidance.  The Bishop appointed two Visitors to carry out a formal visitation to the parish. On the basis of their report, he issued a Direction.  Some of the sections in this Direction spoke to property issues and finance.  However, the most interesting part of the Direction was the Bishop’s requirement that the Vicar offer a public apology to those individuals that she had upset.  If this was done, then the Bishop assured the parish that all existing complaints and disciplinary processes would be immediately dropped and the parish would be helped to get back on to an even keel.

The intention that a public apology would resolve all the issues and tensions in the parish always seemed a long shot as a way of successfully resolving the problems in the parish.  So it has proved to be.  The Vicar and churchwardens have now issued a formal Response to the Bishop’s Directions, on January 17^th, and this indicates how great the chasm still is between Bishop and the parish at Wymondham.  It is twelve pages long and it is hard to anticipate how the dispute will go on from here.  Speaking as a total outsider and forming judgements on the basis of what is in the press and in these formal documents, I have to say that my original preference for the Bishop’s position has now become a total backing.  This fact that I believe him to be in the right in what he has said and done does not mean that I am clear what should happen next.  There does not appear to be a plan B.

Why do I, as an outsider, now regard the position of the Vicar and churchwardens as not being one worth supporting.  In the first place, there are on the church website a number of copies of letters of support for Mother Catherine, as she is called, to the Bishop.  I find it uncomfortable that two of these letters are from children of primary age.  The fact that a child relates well to an adult is a good thing, but not of great moment when you are trying to establish the nature of the overall pastoral care in a church community.  Clearly an adult had to persuade the child to put pen to paper, so the existence of such letters feels contrived and inauthentic. 

A second point that comes out of the Response, is that the tone of the whole document is off-putting.  It also lacks anything by way of contrition.  From beginning to end there is a kind of peevish sense of entitlement and not one concession to the fact that the Bishop, to whom you have sworn canonical obedience, might in any way be justified in his approach.  This blog not infrequently suggests that bishops get things wrong, but there is normally an identifiable reason for such failures.  Here it is hard to see anything to be gained for Bishop Usher other than the welfare of the people of Wymondham.  The issue of the appropriation of the former Vicarage for the use of the suffragan bishop of Thetford has been made to be a cause celebre by those who wish to perpetuate a sense of division between parish and diocese.  The affair sounds like a hijack, but I understand that the former Vicar had not lived in the building for some years, and it was in a state of disrepair.  It needed considerable financial input from the Diocese to bring it back up to standard. Whatever the precise details of the ‘takeover’, they appear to be far more nuanced and complicated than the simple claim that the Diocese ‘stole’ our property.

To read in the Response that the parish believes that ‘Bishop Alan Winton’s and Bishop Graham’s behaviour in relation to Wymondham is unethical, immoral and self-serving’ comes as a jarring note.  It would seem that the Bishop and Diocese had every reason, in the first place, to be alarmed about the finances in the church.  It appears that, even according to the Vicar’s admission, there had been an ineffective treasurer presiding over a plethora of accounts and cheerfully running down reserves to pay diocesan quota.  This financial disaster zone has to be recognised as the responsibility of every PCC member who, over a number of years, had failed to ask questions or seek clarity over the financial accounts.  What was in the Annual Parish Report?  It is the job of the Treasurer to make accounts understandable and the PCC members need to expect to be able to understand them.  The same applies to every trustee in any charity.  I would expect to see somewhere a contrite recognition of a massive failing of all PCC members over the past decade.  Instead, we have the rather limp claim that the parish cannot now pay quota because the ex-treasurer, in plain sight, had used up all the reserves.

I have read the rest of the Response and much of it is to do with local issues which the Visitation Report had picked up and which formed part of the Bishop’s Direction.  The main thing that the Response does not address in any way is the fact that there are and were unhappy people in the church and town who found the personality of the Vicar difficult and abrasive.  Nowhere in the Response is there a hint of contrition or any plan to reach out to those who had complained to the Diocese.  Obviously we are not privy to the detail of these complaints, but it is quite clear they have caused massive upset and division within the congregation.  The other explanation for the failure to pay quota to the Diocese may simply be that the planned giving totals have dropped, with people voting with their feet.

There are various things that are not possible to discern from reading reports from two sides in an acrimonious dispute, so I returned to the parish website to try and get a feel for the priorities of the parish and its Vicar.  While this is only impressionistic, I sense that the Vicar is far more comfortable with contemplative styles of prayer and worship than with other forms.  I have no criticism of this kind of Christian practice, but it may clash with the expressed need of many Christians to experience the support of community with all its untidiness.  There is evidently, even from the superficial evidence of the website and the documents, a lot to suggest that the Bishop’s evident desire for radical change in the parish is not unjustified.  The Response, at the end of the document, finishes with these words ‘Something needs to be done’.  Perhaps the Vicar and churchwardens can help work out a constructive way to do things at their end to make the ‘something’ happen.

The ugly and criminal behaviour of John Smyth QC towards young men and boys at his home in Winchester and elsewhere, has become a well-attested episode amid similar abuse stories in the Church.  Surviving Church has looked at the succession of accounts and reports about how things went terribly wrong in the failures to expose Smyth, both at the time of his nefarious activity and subsequently.  We have looked at various reports published about the affair, including the Titus Trust report of 2021 and the recent Scripture Union report.   The most recent exploration is, of course, Andrew Graystone’s book, Bleeding for Jesus, which appeared in the autumn.  This latest report from Winchester College released on Tuesday 18^th January is one that concerns itself with the activity of Smyth in and around the College.  How was an individual with no official role within the College, able to get access to so many boys to groom and abuse a significant number of them?

The 197-page Review by Jan Pickles and Genevieve Woods, by careful interviewing of many of the witnesses of the event of the 70s and 80s, adds considerably to our understanding of what went on at the time.  It is interesting to read some very vivid testimony. This gives us insight, not only in the personality of Smyth, but also into the religious atmosphere of the College at the time.  To summarise the situation in a few words, Winchester College, in the 1970s, was host to a narrow strand of evangelicalism among many of the boys.  This was linked directly to the Iwerne type of conservative Anglicanism which we have many times discussed.  In a school of 600, some 100 identified as having had an evangelical conversion experience as the result of a decision made at the school.  In one of the ten Houses into which the College is divided, there was one which claimed 75% as members of the Christian Forum. This was the organisation within the school which acted in a similar way to a university Christian Union.   Only 15 boys in that House were not identified with this group.

Depending on one’s perspective, Winchester College was going through a religious revival or a troubling example of an infectious mass psychosis.  Christian Forum had been founded by a maths teacher, John Woolmer.  It began its life as a bible study group consisting of a handful of boys.  Things changed after 1974 when Keith de Berry, a visiting preacher, held two meetings in the College.  Some 30 boys then experienced a conversion to Christ.  The Christian Forum then became the dominant expression of Christianity in the College.  It was this rapid expansion of the Christian Forum and its need for ‘sound’ teaching and pastoral input that gave Smyth his opportunity.  What could be more appropriate than to invite a local prominent Iwerne leader to speak at Christian Forum meetings?  The invitation to speak gradually, as the Review makes clear, turned into a regular attendance and Smyth used his presence at the meetings to befriend particular boys and invite them to come to his house.  There were plenty of takers, it appears, for the chance to be part of an ordinary family for Sunday lunch. 

Winchester College is a foundation with considerable resources for articulating a thoughtful expression of Christianity.  The school was able to fund no fewer than four chaplains in the period studied by the Review.   Such chaplains would be among the most qualified and well-educated clergy in the Church of England.  They were thus potentially able to present issues of faith in a thoughtful and challenging way.  Nothing of this legacy of an intellectually stimulating presentation of the Christian faith seems to be remembered or found its way into the Review.  The expression of Christianity that was prominent at the College seems to have been almost entirely of the Iwerne Camps/Bash variety.

An insight into the divided nature of Christian observance in the late 70s in the College can be discovered from some extracts of a school magazine written by the boys in June 1979. The contrast made seems to be between Christian Forum observance and no faith at all. In speaking about the Christian Forum, the anonymous editorial author in the Dossier’s Organ stated that the ‘School is very much divided into Christian and non-Christian houses.  Or should I say Christian Forum and non-Christian Forum houses?’  The writer goes on: ‘The reasons for this are difficult to pin down, but the main one is that the leaders of the Forum are totally disconnected from the official school chaplains’ The Editorial recommended that the chaplains be put in charge of the Christian Forum so ‘that it would cease to be a breakaway group with a tarnished reputation’.  The clear sensible understanding of the situation of division and polarisation was heard by the school and a mainstream evangelical, Mark Ashton, was soon appointed to be one of the chaplains in an attempt to weld this cultic section of the College back into the religious mainstream.

In the autumn of 1980, a new senior chaplain appeared in the College, David Conner, later to become Dean of Windsor after serving as Bishop of Lynn.  I take an interest in his Review evidence because we knew each other slightly in Oxford in the mid-70s when we both helped out at the same church in Summertown.  He was then a school chaplain in Oxford, and I was a research student.  Although I am two years his senior, we were both familiar with the polarised situation in many Oxford college chapels when we were undergraduates in the previous decade.  Members of the Christian Union routinely refused to have anything to do with either the chapels or the chaplains that cared for them.  This situation was very similar to the one that David seems to have found in Winchester in 1980.  From an Anglican point of view, the situation would have presented a clear challenge to his professional skills.  The Forum was the dominant expression of Christianity, and he would have the clear task to present the breadth of the Christian tradition and suggest that living with questions was still part of Christian faith.  Was he, in summary, going to help Winchester College become a place where Christianity was presented and lived out in a nuanced and rounded way? 

The evidence of Conner’s testimony to the Reviewers states that he can remember little or nothing of his relationship with the Christian Forum and Smyth.  The same failure of memory was apparent when approached by Channel 4 in 2016. Although Conner’s name appeared as a speaker at the Forum from time to time, his memory of any significant engagement with the organisation and their leaders is almost nil. This is indeed extraordinary.  When Smyth became non-grata in the course of 1982, would he not as Senior Chaplain have been brought into the picture very early on?  The obvious thing for him to have done is to think back over the previous two years and try to remember as much as he could about the Forum meetings he had attended.  Is it not strange that the Forum, the most prominent expression of Christianity in the College at the time, should have not engaged his attention even if another chaplain, Mark Ashton, had been given the task of monitoring the Forum?  Conner claims that he never met Smyth, even though Smyth was a regular attender at Forum meetings in the College. The presence of such an evangelical celebrity, as Smyth, would surely have piqued Conner’s interest. Quite apart from the reports of abuse, which only came out in 1982, Smyth, according to the boys’ testimony had a considerable effect on the boys he took under his wing.  It is frankly strange if none of this got back to Conner.

We are in this situation, once again, where Smyth succeeded in flying under the radar and avoiding the attention of those who might have protected his future victims.  In a previous blog article, we noticed how a considerable number of prominent Iwerne network leaders, some of whom were Smyth victims, failed to do anything about Smyth or communicate any of their concern to others.   Smyth was thus able to continue his abusive rampage for another 30 years in Africa.  Conner was never part of the Iwerne network but has subsequently become an establishment figure in the Church. Does his failure of memory about the events of 80-82 have some connection with that privileged position he now occupies?  A variety of other senior churchmen, including ++Welby, have found it expedient to play down their association with Smyth.  Does the fear of association, and thus imputed shame, play a part in Conner’s protestations about the Christian Forum? ‘Clearly I have not remembered things accurately’ was his response when presented with evidence by the Reviewers that he had attended Forum meetings.   It should be mentioned that if Conner had played a somewhat more vigorous part in the Smyth episode, the subsequent narrative of Smyth’s story might well have been considerably different.  A little bit more curiosity on the part of Conner about this important personality who was invading the spiritual space of Winchester College, might have helped to bring Smyth to book much earlier.  The absence of any definite answers in the Review, and failures to interview another surviving chaplain from the period leaves this reader with a strong sense of an incomplete story.  A key figure who refused to be interviewed was Peter Krackenberger, an alumnus of Iwerne and member of the Winchester staff.  He was a leading figure in the work of the Christian Forum throughout the relevant period.  The lack of his testimony and the ‘loss of memory’ by Conner weaken the overall value of the Review.

The report contains a great deal of detailed material about Winchester College and to a considerable extent answers the question of how John Smyth, with his cultic ideas and psychologically disturbed personality, gained access to the College and the hearts and minds of some of those who attended the school. It is likely that Smyth bludgeoned his way into the sacred space of boys’ vulnerability by the sheer force of a charismatic personality.  But, as we have indicated, the failures of memory and the passage of time have left important parts of the story untold.  The Review is not, nor can it be, a full account of what happened in Winchester 40 years ago.  We can still wish that there was evidence of a greater robustness and strength to defend the vulnerability, even fragility of the pupils of Winchester College by those professionally employed to protect them from a notorious predator, John Smyth.      

By Paul Devonshire

Archbishop Rowan Williams has called for the Church to be an “argumentative democracy”.  He sees the need for “an investment in articulate, competent religious communities” (my italics).  My experience suggests that the Church of England shows little taste for such thinking, from parish to diocese. My wife, an ex-churchwarden, had been invited by the previous incumbent to be the editor of our church magazine, a role she had fulfilled for over five years.  With no prior warning or opportunity to challenge the decision, she was sacked under a confidential item at a PCC meeting.  One reason given was that the magazine was being used as a platform for articles by me.  These had started with the previous incumbent with no adverse comment that came to the attention of either my wife or myself.  When I asked which articles these were, I received no reply.  So much for disagreeing well and free speech.  I referred the matter to the archdeacon, who declined to be involved, saying the magazine was no concern of his.  The incumbent then styled himself “editor-in-chief”. The process of (constructive) dismissal showed scant regard for common decency, and little acknowledgement of my wife’s contribution over many years to the life of the church community.

In the absence of a physical gulag, we were, in essence, sent to Coventry, leaving pastoral care with its ideas of engagement, concern and interest in others somewhat absent.  Following centuries of tradition, some incumbents, mirroring their diocesan bishops, still treat their parishes and benefices as a personal bailiwick and members of the congregation passively collude in being infantilised.  Half the choir in our local church are refugees from another parish, victims, one might say, of clerical autocracy.  It is of note that the Independent Inquiry in Child Sexual Abuse, which focused on our diocese, identified as a contributory factor in the poor handling of allegations of sexual abuse a “culture of clericalism”. When I asked our diocesan bishop whether there would be an opportunity to explore this, I received no reply.  When, more recently, I approached our rural dean to have some local discussion on this, I was told, with no reference to the lay chair or any apparent sense of irony, that she could not authorise this without the permission of the bishop.  Culture works in both obvious and insidious ways.   During my tenure of a voluntary deanery role of ‘ecumenical champion’, I was very aware of the lack of discussion or debate on any subject at our deanery meetings.  The format appeared to be one of receiving reports with no opportunity for formulating policy, proposing action or reflecting on how anything implemented had fared. 

Failing to stimulate discussion from within on this “culture of clericalism”, I attempted to do so from without.  In September 2018, the Chichester Observer published the following letter from myself, which I present in full:

May I through your columns encourage open discussion in the Chichester diocese not least on the subject of justice?  After all, as we heard at the royal wedding – “let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”.  Discussion on this and other topics is lacking.  What a breath of fresh air has been the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, with churchmen publicly held to account. Let there be more of it!  Accountability and openness are accepted means in challenging corruption and incompetence, so why not in the Church? Disquiet has already been expressed in the national press concerning the handling of Bishop Bell’s case, begging the question whether priests have the appropriate skills, knowledge and attitudes to administer justice. My experience of the diocese’s administration of its Complaints Policy and Procedure begs the same question.  Although this states many worthy intentions, viz. “to ensure that all complaints are investigated fairly…to resolve complaints and repair relationships wherever possible…to gather information to help us improve what we do and how we do it”, there was little evidence of them in practice when addressing my complaints.  These involved the failure to engage in correspondence.  Silence is a tool of the totalitarian state.  In its avoidance of the truth, it is dishonest.  It corrodes trust.  It is rude.  I discern a sense of entitlement informing such behaviour, echoing the title of Bishop Jones’ Hillsborough report , “The patronising predisposition of unaccountable power“.  Unless challenged, such behaviour is perpetuated. Perhaps the recently reported decline in church congregations can be attributed to this mindset rather than any anti-religion attitudes.  I trust you will allow Bishop Martin and his colleagues space to reply, setting in train genuine open discussion and a proper sense of engagement with our national church.

When I took advantage a Subject Access Request, I discovered how this had been received within the diocese.  In a communication between a media advisor, (described on his website as having “used his skills in many critical and damage limitations areas”), and the diocesan secretary, the former opined “I’m not sure he could be more opinionated and misguided but a shirt (sic) reply correcting him factually from [ ] might be better which, in itself, proves these decisions are not taken by clergy!”.  The reply that was prepared read as follows:  “Dear Sir, I refer to Paul Devonshire’s letter complaining of a lack of discussion and failure to reply to correspondence on the part of the diocese of Chichester.  The diocese would be very happy to permit any of your readers who wish to review the lever arch file full of correspondence and meeting notes with Mr. Devonshire, if he also gives his consent”.

It is difficult to discern in this interchange any attempt to engage with what I had written, perpetuating the very pattern of behaviour to which I was drawing attention.  Instead, I am described as “opinionated and misguided”, employing vilification, demonisation or derogation of the individual – discredit the person and so discredit their ideas. Also employed is impression management by referring to “a lever arch file full of correspondence and meeting notes”, meant no doubt to portray me as a time-wasting troublemaker.  I was seeking public debate as part of an “argumentative democracy”, not private conversations.

The role of media advisors and their ilk Is to gain the best outcome for their clients, in their case, the most favourable interpretation of the information in the public domain, whether to enhance reputation or to limit any potential damage.  A 17^th century diplomat described an ambassador as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”, an example of the means justifying the ends.  Public relations is a kind of competitive sport – the name of the game is to win, with the all-too-human temptation to cheat.  The relationship between the two parties is predicated on the dominance of one party over the other.  The goal is not to gain any additional insights by a dialogue between the parties that might reach mutual consensus.  There is no sense of exploration into the whys and wherefores, hence the use of avoidance and denial. It is the “culture of clericalism” in which the clergy tell the laity what they should think.  There is no two-way street.  It is anti-intellectual.

Any moral slippery slope can begin insidiously, starting with pejorative adjectives and adverbs leading to that well-known phrase ‘being economical with the truth’ and on to misinformation and finally outright lying.  Advice, from any source including PR specialists, needs moral scrutiny. There is the danger that reputation is placed higher than truth, with the additional risk of the loss of trust.  Once compromised, trust is difficult to recover.

If anyone had read that arch file, they would have read that my many proposals were all ignored.  These would have included job descriptions for priests, accountability, transparency in decision making, due process and, obviously, debate.  When my complaint concerning non-replies to correspondence failed, I was afforded two ‘conversation partners’, the proviso being no discussion of my complaint. Mediation was rejected.  The actions of the diocese makes me suspicious that something is being hidden.  Surely engaging with people honestly and openly from the start saves time and maintains reputation.  The Church of England at all levels could see itself as a space for developing the civic skill of public debating, encouraging those “articulate, competent religious communities” suggested by Rowan Williams? Parishioners could then feel safe to participate more actively rather than voting with their feet.

Paul Devonshire is a layman in the Diocese of Chichester.