At Amritsar, Justin Welby prostrated himself in apology for the massacre a century ago. Why did he refuse a simple verbal apology to Matthew Ineson when invited to do so by counsel at IICSA? The Church of England had no responsibility for Amritsar, and the Queen made apology there years ago. But Matthew Ineson was raped by an Anglican priest and the Church’s handling of his case has been ‘shabby and shambolic’, as the Archbishop of York admitted at the same hearing. Matthew has not had an apology from anyone in the Church. Why does the Archbishop of Canterbury feel able to apologise for events over which he has no responsibility, but refuse to apologise for events which are part of his remit?

I have long been baffled that our bishops and archbishops continue their mismanagement of the abuse crisis facing the Church.  All bishops are intelligent and highly educated; most of them are good, well-intentioned people.  Why are they still colluding with a system which is known to be failing victims? Long ago it became clear that the tactics employed by the Church and its insurer are costing them dear in terms of reputation and trust, and are contrary to the gospel they claim to serve.

The archbishops refused to allow General Synod to discuss the Blackburn Letter; a refusal they ought to have known would inflame the situation. A number of bishops have mishandled abuse cases and got away with it. The Archbishop of Canterbury has denied that a prominent abuser was Anglican, though he knew the man, a lay reader. The Eliot Review was consistently trashed, and there was no apology to Ian Eliot when the review’s accuracy was proven. Bishops who are dead or retired (or about to retire) are ‘thrown under a bus’, while favoured bishops who have ignored disclosures of abuse are let off. How much is incompetence, and how much is corruption? It’s not easy to tell. But it’s long been obvious that these tactics are only making matters worse, and could even destroy the Church.

One reason for this strange obtuseness may be the uniformity of the House of Bishops. Until recently there were no women, and they are still heavily outnumbered. Ethnic minority bishops are also scarce, as are those from working class backgrounds. There are few, if any, theologians or academics, and pastors are in very short supply. The emphasis is on managers. There is nothing wrong with managers, of course, and we need them among our bishops, but it’s unhealthy for any decision-making group to so lack diversity.

According to Matthew Syed, writing in the The Times on 2 September, ‘Homogenous groups don’t just underperform, they do so in predictable ways. When you are surrounded by similar people you are not just likely to share each other’s blind spots, but to reinforce them.’ In his new book, Rebel Ideas:  The Power of Diverse Thinking, he develops this theme. He cites research showing that diverse groups perform better than groups made up of friends. The groups of cronies were more confident their decisions were right, but in fact were more often wrong. Syed also quotes Anthony Crewe and Ivor King, writing on the poll tax fiasco:

‘More than two decades later the whole episode still evokes wonder and astonishment…Its perpetrators walked into clearly visible traps with their eyes open, but they saw nothing. They blundered on, impervious to warnings. In the end their failure was abject and total.’

Those who devised the poll tax came from privileged backgrounds. When it was pointed out that people would struggle to pay the tax Nicholas Ridley, who was responsible for implementing it, replied:  ‘Well, they could always sell a picture.’

Ridley’s equivalent in the House of Bishops is the prelate who, when faced with complaints from abuse victims, protested that he knew hundreds of ‘happy survivors’.

There are a few outliers among the diocesan bishops, but their effectiveness in mitigating the bishops’ collective blindness is limited by their small numbers. We are social creatures, and the pressure to conform to the norms of those around us is enormous. It’s easy, too for the majority to ignore the lone voice expressing a different point of view – as those of us who were among the first women to be ordained know all too well. The collegiality of the House of Bishops is another factor. The stultifying effect of collegiality was seen when 19 retired bishops criticised their successors’ document Marriage and Same Sex Relationships (https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/17-february/news/uk/retired-bishops-take-their-successors-to-task-over-sexuality-report). Now they were retired, they said, they could express their views in a way they’d been unable to do before.

I see this human tendency to conform, to take the easy way, to want to be in the ‘inner ring’, as part of the world’s ‘slavery to corruption (or decay)’ which St. Paul talks about in Romans 8. We, the children of God, are meant to be free from this slavery to corruption – but our freedom is usually only partial. We must work at it, and that work begins with identifying where we are still enslaved by a worldly point of view.

So how could our bishops and archbishops be more free of the slavery of corruption? By the time they become bishops they will have absorbed a lot of secular management theory, and identified themselves with the existing goals of a very establishment-oriented institution. I suggest, therefore, that they appoint a group of observers to the House of Bishops. These observers could speak but not vote; they could have a similar role to that of Fool in a medieval king’s court. Each would serve a term of no more than three to years, to avoid their ‘going native’. I’d suggest the Bishops’ Fools should include:  a couple of parish treasurers (preferably form poor churches); several people of colour; a handful of survivors of church abuse; a few people on benefits; two or three partnered LGBTI people; a few theologians; and a non-churchgoer or two. Readers will be able to suggest others who should be included. Their function will be to tell the bishops, bluntly, what they think of the prelates’ attitudes, plans, and decisions. The bishops won’t do this of course – but if they did, it might help counter the rot which has set in.

There are many people in Britain who are dismayed at the events taking place in the political arena.  At the heart of everything that is taking place is an overconfident but, apparently for many, inspiring leader in the person of Boris Johnson.  This blog is not going to be a critique of all that has happened since Boris became Prime Minister, as others are doing that pretty adequately in the Press.  I personally came to a realisation that I would never be able to regard him as an effective leader when he started becoming friendly with Donald Trump.  Evidently, he believed that a personal relationship with Trump would be a way to ease the problems of Brexit.  New trade deals with the States would be our economic salvation in the post Brexit world.  There were two problems with this idea, both of which will probably prove fatal to Boris’ calculations.  The first is that Trump himself is in an incredibly vulnerable situation as President.  As the law-suits pile up against him, it is by no means certain that he will be able to run for President in 2020, let alone win the contest.  The historian in Boris must have realised that it is foolhardy to rely on such a volatile and unreliable partner.  We are seeing almost daily how some of Trump’s allies (e.g. John Bolton) become enemies, sometimes in the space of hours.  Politically speaking how can anyone do business with such a fickle flaky partner?  The second more serious issue concerns Trump’s ethical record.  As someone who seems to have little interest in telling the truth, Trump is hardly an obvious person to do business with.  His capacity to lie must surely make it extremely difficult to pin him down in any future negotiation.  While Trump may see Boris as a trusted ally in terms of his political style and outlook, how will this ever assist our Prime Minister if he is attached to a man who is not only a stranger to truth and honesty but actually seems unable to recognise them?  The extent of the corruption that permeates Trump’s political record is so great that anyone who comes anywhere near him seems liable to be contaminated by its contagion.  Boris’ attempts to make such an individual into a political ally may prove fatal to his own long-term future in politics.

Every time a person of dishonesty or corruption takes over in an organisation, it will affect every corner of that institution.  History will probably declare that the heroes of Boris’ time in office are those who refused to go along with his proguing of Parliament, including my local MP, Rory Stewart.  Integrity will always resist being sucked into a situation of compromise and collusion.  That seems to be the fate of most of the Tory MPs who have allowed their better selves to be seduced by the prospects of power and influence in the future under the leader Boris Johnson.

Looking at the Church of England at present it is unclear whether or not a similar struggle for the hearts and minds of the senior levels of leadership is currently taking place.  Over the past twelve months the most appalling revelations about the behaviour of clergy abusers have been revealed.  We have also heard of the participation of lawyers and management reputation companies in protecting the image of the Church.  In some cases, bishops themselves have actively resisted the attempts of survivors to be heard.  None of us knows exactly what conversations take place at the twice-yearly meetings of the House of Bishops.  We can, however, assume that the issue of managing the reputation of the Church has been discussed.  From the outside perspective, it would seem that the ethical and Christian approach requires a complete opening up and confession of the many failings of the past.  I am sure that some bishops would support this kind of honest way of dealing with the past.  It would of course prove incredibly expensive both in financial terms and in the human cost involved in resourcing the acts of reparation.  The other side of the argument would be the one that seems to prevail at present.  This approach to the problem is all about minimising responsibility, pushing away survivors as much as possible and generally living in a state of denial about how appalling the scandal has become. 

In any kind of management structure, including the Church, we have the term, corporate responsibility.  This states that the decision of a committee, from the Tory Cabinet to a village PCC, is binding on all members.  This will require that any members who strongly disagree with the corporate decision keep their mouths firmly closed and not reveal what has happened to the outside world.  This principle works reasonably well in the corporate world but it breaks down when there are strong ethical issues under discussion.  Boris chose to sack Tory party members who resisted on ethical grounds to his actions.  The corporate responsibility model blew up in his face because the pressure on his opponents’ consciences became too great.  Something similar may well happen in the Church of England.  It is hard to imagine that there are no rebels among the 42 Diocesan bishops. Some may well want to protest at the corporate responsibility model that forces them to keep quiet when, arguably, ethically dubious decisions are being taken on their behalf.  To take one small example of an unethical and un-Christian event taking place in the past few months.  At the IICSA hearing, Justin Welby was invited by a lawyer to apologise to Matthew Ineson, sitting behind him, for his treatment by the Church.  The Archbishop failed to respond.  Clearly there were other unseen forces in the room which were controlling his conduct.  Whether they were management advisers, publicity folk or lawyers, the Archbishop was being controlled and prevented from performing a simple ethical response to Matt. 

For the Church of England to have a chance of regaining its reputation for honest integrity it has to emerge out of the grip of the unseen forces that seem to bind it at present.  The honest and ethical ones among our leaders must be allowed to speak openly about the appalling events of the past.  The Reviews of particular episodes of abuse must be allowed to proceed without any hindrances and follow the principles set out so memorably by Kate Blackwell QC on the Sunday programme.   But I want to end up on a positive note.  There is a new broom that has recently arrived in the Safeguarding world in the person of Melissa Carslake.  Her position and seniority as new Director of Safeguarding gives her the chance to change things radically at the centre.  It will still be a tough task for her.  If I am right to see the Archbishop’s performance at IICSA being manipulated by hidden forces, Melissa will, no doubt, have to battle these very same forces in order to prevail and bring back honesty and integrity to the Church of England.  It ought to be abundantly clear which path will promote the Church’s long-term health, but hitherto many of our Church leaders have failed to recognise this.  Once again, we pray for truth and light.

Send out thy light and thy truth that they may lead me: and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling.  Ps. 43: 3

At the time of writing we are in the middle of a profound political crisis.  While I am not going to get involved in the well-rehearsed arguments about Brexit, there are certain aspects of the debate that indirectly touch on the Anglican Church and its present travails.  Michael Sadgrove, a fellow blogger and former Dean of Durham, asked a question on Twitter when it was reported that Boris Johnson was going to remove the whip from the 21 dissenting Conservative MPs.  Michael asked if a leader of an organisation, such as, in his case the Archbishop of Canterbury, could remove a faithful member of the Church for not agreeing with the ideas coming from the leadership.  This rhetorical question was posed to show the absurdity of the situation where disagreements in the Conservative Party are leading to bully-boy tactics in our political life.  I happen to live in the constituency of one of those so affected, Rory Stewart. His status has rapidly changed from being a Conservative leadership contender to someone cast out to become a non-person in a political sense.

In this situation I find myself thinking about this status of being someone’s enemy.  There are clearly many ways of talking about other people as enemies but they have a theme in common.  A person or people who can be described as belonging to the category of enemy are understood in some way to be a threat.  In the situation of war, these threats are real and tangible.  German soldiers might well have invaded our country in the last war and threatened the lives and property of every inhabitant.  We are right to feel that, when individuals or nations threaten to fire nuclear weapons at us, we need to protect ourselves against such dangers.  Enemies come also in many other guises.   Anyone who wants to rob us or hurt us in some way can be said to have made themselves our enemy as long as they continue with their intentions.  Even if we wish to show compassion or Christian love towards them, we still have to protect ourselves with common-sense measures.  Trying to love the stranger does not stop us locking our front doors at night or making sure our children are kept safe.  There is a need to balance the possibility of loving the stranger and being prudent in how we conduct our business with the world at large.

The recent events in Parliament suggest that there are a variety of situations when other people are declared to be enemies which have little to do with threats to anyone’s physical safety.  Ken Clarke and Rory Stewart are not a threat to the Tories.  The attempt to make them enemies of the party has to be something that emerges out of the thinking and imaginations of the mind of the Prime Minister and his closest allies.  It is quite easy with Boris Johnson to believe that certain individuals are hostile when this perception is merely what is going on inside our heads.   It is not difficult to provoke in individuals like ourselves feelings of jealousy and envy so that we think of them as a threat to us.  Another way that we may feel under attack by an enemy is if our self-esteem is in some way challenged.  The narcissist, about whom I have written many times on this blog, is likely very thin-skinned and vulnerable to seeing enmity in those who disagree with him.  Anybody, even bishops or senior politicians, whose sense of self-importance is challenged, is vulnerable to the perception that they are surrounded by threatening enemies.  The only threats that are being made are ones that are perhaps needed – challenges to pomposity and the sense of entitlement.    The enemy here may be simply the person who is telling us the truth.  As T.S. Elliot said, humankind cannot bear much reality.

A serious case of ‘enemy-making’ appears to be taking place in the Church.  Survivors of abuse within the Church frequently complain that there is one thing that causes them more pain than anything else.  That is the experience of being made an enemy by officials and leaders in the Church.  Survivors are those who already suffer the vulnerability created by the original abuse.  It is then a massive blow to find that they then carry the projection of being ‘enemy’ on the part of powerful people in the Church.  The labelling of survivors as enemies and threats to the Church is something not anchored in reality.   It seems only to exist in the minds and imaginations of those who believe they are somehow defending the reputation of the Church from harm.   The irony of these defensive measures against survivors is that they are making the reputation of the Church sink further in the eyes of outsiders. That is what seems to happen time after time.  Instead of encountering welcoming support and professional help from the Church where they were first harmed, survivors are often pushed aside to face broken lives alone.  Many of them feel it is just not worth fighting battles for justice when there are so many powerful people and institutions set against them.  If we were to use military language, we might describe poorly armed clusters of soldiers/survivors coming up against a blitzkrieg of overwhelming power.

My readers will have read the contributions of Gilo over the past two weeks.  I obviously know Gilo a bit though we have only ever spoken on the phone.  For every Gilo I know there are others with similar stories but who simply lack the stamina to stand and fight for justice.  The effort is simply too draining on their energy and their family lives.  This is why Gilo’s testimony is so important. He has survived, along with Matt Ineson and Phil Johnson, the most appalling pressures.  He has refused to be silenced and collude with the Church trying to present itself favourably to the world in this area of safeguarding.  The Church wants to show that it is always motivated by not only the highest standards of ethical behaviour but also the spirit of Christ in its dealings with those it has wronged.  The truth seems to be different.  I have, for example, pointed out the fact that out of the national church budget of several million for safeguarding, nothing goes into a pot marked Care of Survivors.  No specialist in mediation or reconciliation has been appointed to any of these national bodies.  All the energy and the effort seem to be expended on protecting the structures.  The idealism with which some of the new staff on these bodies begin their work seems quickly to be drained out of them.  Every time a new appointment is made, among survivors there is a hope that things may get better.  So far, at any rate, the hopes have been dashed as each fresh face among national safeguarding staff appears inexorably sucked into the quick-sand of institutional indifference and inertia which Gilo has described.   If the Church is ever to recover from the deep wounds of the abuse crisis, it needs to devote considerable resources to escaping the destructive mind-set of treating Gilo and many other victims as enemies of the Church.  They are not.   These survivors do need to be extended the courtesy of being listened to and their offers of help better received.  The Church has a wound which will never heal until it is properly treated.  The treatment for this particular kind of wound requires surgery.  Such surgery will include welcoming the testimony and ideas of the survivor community instead of so often treating them as the enemy.  If this treatment is not applied it will remain a festering sore in the whole Church body for decades to come.

A year ago at General Synod the Church trumpeted an Ombuds scheme in response to survivors’ request for an effective complaints procedure. I sat with others in the public gallery when this announcement was greeted with applause from Synod members. But following that Synod, the NST (National Safeguarding Team) have used the term “persistent and vexatious” to describe any survivors they wish to exclude from this scheme. Ironically, they also expected any survivors would need to be ‘persistent’ as the ombuds they envisaged was to be port of last call and only accessible once every other hoop of possible complaint had been jumped through. Talk about creating vexation!

Think about this for a minute. Without the vexed and persistent pursuit of truth by Phil Johnson across decades – Chichester would not have come to light. Without his persistence it’s possible there would have been no IICSA. Without the vexed and frustrated persistence of many survivors so many of the Church’s failures and cover-ups might never have emerged. Without the persistence of a handful of Smyth survivors, the enormity of that story would never have come to daylight and the dozens (hundreds?) who hid it away would be hiding it still. And without the ongoing persistence of survivors there would be little discernible change in the Church’s response to victims. Persistence has been necessary and is required today and into tomorrow. Without it, the senior layer of the Church of England will easily revert to type – as expressed by the closing statements of survivors’ representatives at the Inquiry. Persistence is needed in the face of continuing inertia and dishonesty.

That this legalistic phrase is used still by the NST and those who manage them suggests the extent to which the structure is led by the interests of the legal team in Church House. It also displays an undercurrent of malevolence towards survivors and shows how unsuited the NST is to any pastoral understanding of this crisis as a whole. It is simply not fit for purpose as currently constituted. It seems clear to many of us that for the NST to stand any chance of salvage, the thing needs to be prised away from control by a shadowy éminence grise, the Secretary General of Synod, and away from the mindset of Church House. Re-abusive harm to survivors coupled with reputational damage to the Church will continue while the NST is allowed to run as an unchecked and unaccountable demesne. Too many survivors have experienced dishonesty from this all-powerful empire. One referred to its culture in terms of ‘enduring cruelty’. I suspect that anyone coming into that culture, however independent, is likely to be assimilated into its self-protecting hive. It needs root and branch surgery.

The lead Bishop and others have lacked the courage to tell Synod the reason why the ombuds has been quietly shelved. A church unable to take ownership of things that need to be acknowledged transparently, especially when a mirage has been presented to Synod, is one that needs to conquer its own moral cowardice. The desire to hide ugly things in a drawer lest they emerge is a sign of a fearful culture still in those running this Church or with responsibility for its various component parts. A Church is not a secular organisation and should be holding itself to a higher standard.

Likewise, the mendacity of EIO (Ecclesiastical Insurance Office) which was finally laid bare in a robust and forensic hearing in the final Anglican hearing at IICSA – was mendacity maintained with the tacit support of William Nye and senior NST management. Both Ian Elliott and myself tried many times to get the NST to address the repeated public falsehoods made by the insurer. They refused. Ian Elliott tried for over a year before he finally gave up. He wrote to the Lead Bishop after his requests were ignored by Church House but received no acknowledgement. I met with the Lead Bishop and Bishop Mullally 18 months ago in a failed attempt to get them to address this too. Despite thorough vindication at the Inquiry there has been no whisper of apology or explanation from anyone, including the Bishop mandated to champion the Elliott Review who seemed content to watch it being devalued by the lies of an insurer. When Counsel to the Inquiry asked three times in a row, “Was your answer sufficiently full and frank?” with increasing emphasis on each word – it was clear to anyone watching the hearing that the weaselry of Ecclesiastical had been fully laid bare in front of a government inquiry. Further evidence has since gone to the Inquiry from another survivor demonstrating further the extent of their slipperyness under oath to the Inquiry. Any differentiation they attempted to make at IICSA between ‘contact’ and ‘pastoral support’ has been found to be meaningless in their own documentation! ^{1 2} Ecclesiastical has a considerable task to recover its ethical heart. They know it. And so do their charitable owner AllChurches Trust, who astonishingly in late July tweeted the word ‘Shameful’ when it was posted by Janet Fife in reference to Ecclesiastical’s unethical litigation strategies!

It’s also clear that the NSSG (National Safeguarding Steering Group) needs to find the moral integrity to address its own dysfunctional structure. It is not appropriate that two bishops who have walked away from disclosures in denial or “no recollection” and who have failed to address this in any meaningful way other than continued denial – sit on any national panel which makes decisions about the response to survivors. It is unethical. And wouldn’t happen in a county council. Several of us have tried repeatedly to address this. It has been blanked.

As I said in the previous essay, a church which cleaves to the disposition of ‘say nothing unless asked’ or ‘blank any question we don’t want to address’ remains an unhealthy culture. This pattern has led to the ongoing existential crisis of the bishops and senior management of the Church. The time for keeping secrets, whether in a Lambeth Palace eliterie or the corridors of a corrupted Church House, should be over. The Church should no longer create any further cognitive dissonance for its employees by expecting them to play along with senior level dishonesty. Bishops should look at the collective mendacity and cowardice in their senior layer, own it, and deal with it properly. And repent.

1https://www.postonline.co.uk/claims/4276536/revealed-leaked-emails-show-ecclesiastical-staff-using-callous-language-over-child-abuse-claims

2https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2019/26-july/news/uk/ecclesiastical-planned-to-persuade-bishop-to-take-a-less-active-role-in-claimant-s-pastoral-care

About fifty years ago I wandered into a second-hand bookshop in Morecambe.  In those pre-internet days, before books could be valued at the press of a button, there was always the chance of finding something interesting or rare in such places.  On that particular day I came out clasping a copy of a slim book by the Russian philosopher author, Vladimir Soloviev, entitled The Meaning of Love.  Soloviev was active in the years leading up to the Revolution in a period sometimes referred to as the Russian Renaissance.  This description refers to the little-known fact that Russia at that time was a place of enormous creativity in philosophy and theology.  Some of this energy was transmitted to the West after the Revolution and the traces of its theological flowering can still be found in theological circles today.  Sadly, the contemporary theological scene in Russia itself does not appear indebted to the magnificence of this cluster of theologians that were a bright light in the Christian world of the time.  The name of Soloviev has to be added to other luminaries such as Bulgakov, Berdayev and Florovsky.

The Soloviev book no longer graces my bookshelves, having been lent or given away at some point in my life.  But there was one memorable definition relating to the title of the book which I can still recall.  Love, Soloviev claimed, is the ascribing to another person the same significance and importance that you give to yourself.  This definition, remarkable for 1900 when it was first penned, captured a pragmatic approach to the topic which stands up to scrutiny when examined from either a theological or psychological perspective.  Over the years I have pondered this definition (which I hope I have reproduced accurately) because it manages to be helpful in so many settings.   Love is something that we can give when we have learned to know that we are ourselves loveable by our parents.  The Christian message also tells us that, by learning to be loved and forgiven by God himself, we then have something of enormous power to share with the world.

The Soloviev theme came to my mind as I was reading some material about narcissism by the American psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw.  The title of his book, Traumatic Narcissism. sums up a state of going in a completely opposite direction to the one I believe Soloviev wanted to share.  Shaw’s thesis begins with describing the healthy non-traumatic relationship between mother and child.  A mother concerned for her child’s full flourishing, loves him/her in such a way that the child’s self, the separate capacity for feeling and awareness, can safely emerge.  Another way of putting this is to say that the subjectivity of the child is preserved and encouraged.  The whole force of love on the part of the healthy parent is there to promote the new emerging self of the infant.  For that to happen there must be nothing resembling any kind of psychological suffocation that would prevent this important process unfolding.

Parents who use the role of nurturing a child merely to gratify psychological needs of their own are effectively assaulting the child’s well-being.  We talk about coercion and control in the context of adult relationships but this kind of bullying can also often occur in the context of a parent-child relationship.  Why a parent should wish to squash the subjectivity of an infant or small child is discussed in Shaw’s account.  Some parents carry traumas from their own upbringing and this, tragically, is then worked out on their own children.  Space and complexity forbid me the chance to explore these dynamics but they exist and the tragedies happen.  In the task of good parenting one looks to see the flourishing of the growing infant in their becoming a person who has a pride in their simple subjectivity and aliveness.  From Shaw’s discussion I take the revealing idea that traumatising narcissism is the opposite.  It is essentially about one party in a relationship attacking the subjectivity of the other.  The neglected child, the battered wife, the cult victim or the bully’s target have all become objects in the minds of the abuser and they can then be treated as a thing.  The narcissistic individual has to use coercive power on another to assuage psychological wounds from his or her past.  Their own subjectivity, the capacity to feel and to love freely, has probably been itself damaged by earlier experiences, perhaps in childhood.  What has been partially destroyed in them, their full aliveness, leads to them abusing and trying to destroy it in others.   

In our discussions of the incidence of sexual abuse I think it is legitimate to see here that such abuse will always involve an attack on the subjectivity or the self of the victim.  When I attack the inner life, the self of another person by some kind of abuse or violence, I am able to do this because I have ceased to think of them as being like me.  They are an ‘it’.  My needs and my desire for gratification has taken centre stage in the process.  The traumatizing narcissist successfully exploits, mistreats or uses his victim(s) when he has convinced himself that they somehow deserve this treatment.  What is also happening is that the victim of attack has probably been caught up in a complex psychological nexus of such things as projection, dependency and shame.  The victim may have become the means of relieving a past trauma in the abuser, one which may have created a massive need or wound in his psyche.  This damaging the subjectivity of a victim, whether by sexual assault, humiliation or relentless bullying seems to offer relief.  All it is in fact doing is offering momentary gratification.  The psychological hunger that exists inside the abuser, can probably never be satisfied.

I am trying to explore, through my reading, this notion that the sexual abuser in church or elsewhere is likely a narcissist, or, more precisely, a traumatising narcissist.  The tell-tale sign of this is that he is able to deny the subjectivity of a victim and prepared to hurt them through some act of subjugation.  There are in fact numerous ways of attacking the subjectivity of another and many exist in what we describe as ‘spiritual abuse’.  The bully, the shunner, the one ignoring a complainant are all guilty of the objectivization which takes place in the church as elsewhere.  The survivors who complain that they receive shoddy treatment from church officials and others are telling us that they are still suffering being made into objects and treated like an enemy.  Sexual abuse has had severe implications for the individual but so does, in a different way, the betrayal of trust from a bishop or senior person charged to deal with their case.  The situation of being treated like a thing, as with a neglected infant, is always going to be acutely and painfully difficult to bear.

We began with a picture of love which puts the other person at the centre, the place we normally we reserve for ourselves.  We have identified the opposite, the traumatising narcissist who makes the other person into a thing, an object to be used, maltreated and pushed away.  From the witness of survivors, abuse is being experienced at both stages – the original abuse and the later frequent callous treatment by others who are supposed to care for their plight.  In many ways it is easier to outlaw actual sexual abuse of children and the vulnerable by rigorous training and good systems.  For the Church the more difficult part of the process is removing the unfeeling continuing abuse that is communicated to survivors in the way they are often treated by the institution that allowed them to be hurt in the first place.  It is clearly a narcissistic attitude towards survivors that pushes them to one side, ignores them, slanders them as nuisances and generally treats them as less than fully human.  The Church is even now failing these survivors in many cases.  They need professional help but at the very least they require the kind of love that Soloviev was trying to describe – a love that puts them at the centre of concern.  

The last few years have seen a variety of reports on the issue of sexual abuse of children by clergy.  They have normally taken a church-centered approach.  They answer questions that many people are asking.  How can we make the future better or what procedures would make child-abuse less likely to happen?  To use a metaphor to describe these reports, they are often written from the tower of a castle, looking down on a countryside which has been overrun by an enemy invasion.   The damage has been done but the rhetoric is often all about rebuilding houses, but seldom about the healing of shattered lives of those who used to live in them.

The new report by Yvonne and David Shemmings entitled Sexual Abuse by Clergymen in the Diocese of Chichester is refreshingly different from all that has gone before.  It is an attempt to understand the phenomena of abuse from new perspectives.   There is no sense that it has been written to protect the Diocese or to downplay the seriousness of what has happened in this particular area of the country.  It is informed by psychological, sociological and theological insight.  Above all it makes a real attempt to listen to survivors and to record their experiences of abuse and what followed.

The report is over 100 pages long and has been summarised in this week’s Church Times by Hattie Williams.  One special value is in the way that it conveys the feelings and perspectives of the abused, sensitively revealing what it is like to be a target of the grooming techniques of the abusers.  In this short post I have had to make a choice about the material I can discuss.  So, what I write is not in any way an attempt to make a summary of the whole report.  Rather, I have focused on two themes within it that have attracted my attention.  The first is the issue of the bystander in the accounts of abuse. One of the issues that apparently came up as the police force began to firm up their enquiries was the question of the possible existence of an organised paedophile network within the Diocese.  This idea was never proved but there seems to have been evidence that offending clergy knew each other and some instances shared their victims.  Other non-offending clergy appear to have known what was going on and in effect they seem to have provided a kind of buffer of protection for the perpetrators.  Sometimes the compliance of a non-offending member of the clergy was obtained by the threat of what we would consider to be blackmail.  The perpetrator was saying to the bystander, I won’t share your secrets if you hide mine.  Even though the abuse of children was and is a criminal offence, a clergyman (bystander) might, for example, be accused of having (legal) homosexual activity brought to light.  He was of course vulnerable, as a member of the clergy, to such threats of exposure.  One story that is told in the report is of two clergymen in a room with a male child victim.  The perpetrator was testing the reaction of the bystander to his activity of gradually upping the level of abuse.  If he was able to cross the boundary from physical touching to actual (criminal) abuse without the witness protesting, then he had been successful in making his colleague a colluding accessory to a crime.  The dynamics of sexual abuse in the diocese involved these and other thoroughly unhealthy dynamics.  There seems to have been, alongside abusive acts, a great deal of secrecy, collusion, blackmail and deceit.  These caught up in their tentacles many who had nothing to do with the criminal activities of the actual abusers.

To say that the Diocese of Chichester appears to have been, in certain areas. a place where one used to find corrupting and corrupted morality seems not to be an overstatement.  One of the observations I made during the Chichester IICSA hearings last year, was the surprising fact that some of the convicted offenders had been ordained for 40 years, only to be exposed after retirement.  Without knowing any of the details one must surmise that each perpetrator had found effective ways of hiding his criminal activities.  Whether it was through acts of deliberate deceit or through coercive persuasion of some kind, the perpetrators made sure that bystanders, otherwise innocent, were to some extent complicit in these acts of extreme evil.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of this bystander role, the diocese must still be feeling the effect of this extensive corrupting contagion, affecting an unknown but significant number of its clerical members.

A corrupt theological notion, one which facilitated some of the perpetrators in continuing their activities without faltering, was a distorted understanding of forgiveness.  The Calvinist version of the teaching about forgiveness was summarised in the IICSA evidence by Bishop Wallace Benn.  This emphasis, no doubt, was shared by many from the same churchmanship background in the diocese.  In summary, classical Protestant teaching declares that the suffering of Christ on the cross removes all our guilt.  There is no sin that cannot be forgiven.  A version of this teaching which destroys its moral validity goes on to state that this doctrine also teaches that all the consequences of sin are also somehow automatically wiped out.  Thus, there is the idea that one can commit acts of enormous harm against others, without accepting any responsibility for seeking healing for these who are victims of one’s wrongdoing.  This kind of cheap forgiveness makes a nonsense of justice, love and the need to uphold the weaker brother or sister.  There also appears to be an Anglo-Catholic version of this same teaching of forgiveness without cost.  There are many sins which need more than the repetition of a ‘penance’.  Child abuse has effects which continue for decades and which may damage generations yet unborn.

The personality of Bishop Peter Ball looms in the background of the Shemmings report.  It is not only because of the way that he himself was responsible for numerous acts of abuse against young men, but his behaviour directly and indirectly seems to have loosened the atmosphere of moral integrity within the diocese.  Whether clergy knew anything about his nefarious activities or not, it seems likely that Ball communicated a tolerance of ‘naughty’ behaviour to at least some of his clergy.  In the case of Vickery House, Ball admitted in a letter in 1984 that something inappropriate had taken place between House and a young man but nothing further seems to have happened in this case. It is suggested that House and Ball preyed on the same victims in at least three instances. Certainly the police were not informed.  Ball was good at using exculpatory methods to justify his behaviour and no doubt erring clergy under his oversight learnt to deal with their actions in similar ways.

There is a great deal of wise and instructive detail in this Shemmings report.  By taking the evidence of survivors and putting that at the centre of the analysis, we are allowed to glimpse some of the dynamics of abuse both from the perspective of the perpetrator and the survivors.  I hope that Surviving Church readers take the trouble to read the whole text for themselves.  It is a study that allows us to think about the phenomenon of abuse from a new perspective. It has nothing of a bias that wants to privilege the perspective of the organised church leadership. Nor is it in any way trying to attack or undermine the institution. It possesses that rare quality – a study that lifts the discussions about abuse to a level of scholarly interpretation.  The Church should be encouraging further attempts to understand what is going on as it seeks to deal with the terrible legacy of decades of abuse by its own clergy. https://cofechichestersafeguarding.contentfiles.net/media/documents/document/2019/08/Shemmings_Report_ib4lHC8.pdf

I was recently given a copy of Nobody’s Friends 1800-2000, a biography and historical diary of the Lambeth Palace dining club which featured in the Peter Ball hearings at IICSA. It emerged at the Inquiry that Lord Lloyd of Berwick had cited their mutual membership of the secretive club to Archbishop Carey in one of many ‘letters of influence’ in support of Ball. Nobody’s Friends is a gathering which quietly fosters establishment links between church and Westminster (mostly the Tory bits of it) and meets in the Guards Room at Lambeth Palace. Newly elected members ‘justify’ themselves during congratulatory speeches which honour any advancement in the various pecking orders (episcopal, judicial, political) of its members. It undoubtedly offers a fulcrum of patronage to any senior cleric lucky enough to be elected member, who might aspire to a mitre.

Membership has included many bishops and archbishops, headmasters from a sprinkling of top schools, various Archbishop’s Appointments Secretaries, Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretaries, Leaders of the House of Commons and House of Lords, Tory peers, Admiralty figures, judicial figures and church lawyers. Such heavyweights as Sir Michael Havers (later Lord Chancellor), Lord Pym, Douglas Hurd, Lord Justice Bingham (former Master of the Rolls) have graced its tables. Several of the senior clerics on the board of Ecclesiastical have also enjoyed membership, and one of the headmaster directors of the church’s insurer. The current club President is believed to be Sir Philip Mawer, who was on the directors board of Ecclesiastical when he was also at same time Secretary General of Synod.

Jonathan Fletcher, Archbishop Welby’s friend and a regular participant at the Iwerne camps from the early 1950s has been a member since 1983. His father, Lord Fletcher, was also a member. The club seems to have had a culture of nepotism in which the scion of ennobled members themselves become elected members.

But another name kept ringing bells. Sir William Van Straubenzee, Tory minister in Northern Ireland under Heath and later a prominent Synod member and Church Estates Commissioner, became a member in 1973. In 1988 he was elected Vice President of the club, and in 1991 elected President of Nobody’s – a position he held until his death in 1999. Clearly very well connected, his London home was a grace-and-favour apartment in Lambeth Palace in the Lollard’s Tower. This pied-à-terre gave name to a group of Tory wets, the Lollards, who met there during Thatcher’s premiership.

Straubenzee was cited in government files in relation to abuse at the Kincora boys home in Belfast. Sir Anthony Duff sent an MI5 dossier on Straubenzee to Sir Robert Armstrong (now Lord Armstrong) in 1986. Kincora may have have been run under the watchful eye of the secret services who used it as a ‘dirty tricks’ blackmail operation, although the findings of the Hart report (Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry HIA Inquiry 2014-2016) disputed this. The involvement of MI5 in Kincora has never meaningfully been investigated. And although three men who shared in the running of the home were prosecuted and jailed in the 1980s – figures from the political and establishment worlds named in connection with the abuse and trafficking of boys from this and other homes in Belfast did not face questioning.

Armstrong himself was also a member of Nobody’s from 1984, and may be still as far as anyone knows. It’s unlikely that other members had awareness at the time when the senior mandarin from Number 10 received this intelligence from MI5. Armstrong appears to have remained tight-lipped, although it is recorded that these files were passed to the Prime Minister. So two men, one of whom had grounds from the security services to suspect possible abuse activities by the other – both toasted the club’s customs and membership alongside assorted archbishops during coffee and mint thins. It’s a disconcerting image.

Equally as disconcerting, there seems to be no indication that the Church of England shared this information with IICSA. Nor following the Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam QC Review when the material from the Cabinet Office first came to public light in 2015 after their report.

Despite judicial interest in these matters, the suffering of victims and survivors, and the need for transparency – the Church of England did not seem to offer this information to these inquiries? Presumably many current Nobody’s Friends, including many bishops, have copies of this rare publication. It did not occur to any of them, nor to the club Treasurer, that this might be helpful information – not least because it might shed light on the culture of protectionism afforded by these private clubs.

Another Lambeth Palace dining club offers a deeper picture of privilege and protection. In 1993 a former chairman of the Nikaean Club and head of Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge went to court for abusing a boy between the ages of 14 and 16. Canon (later Bishop) Christopher Hill, also a member of the Nikæan Club, accompanied Patrick Gilbert to court. Gilbert was also able to brandish a character witness letter from another Nikaean member – former Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan. Gilbert, who was also secretary of the wine committee at The Athenaeum, admitted a previous conviction for indecent assault on two 13-year-old school boys in 1962. Despite this and despite the seriousness of the charge, and almost certainly owing to the protecting influence of a Lambeth Palace dining club, he received a suspended sentence and sympathy from the judge for the considerable stress he had endured. As the judge explained, he decided not to jail the bachelor because of his health and ‘very severe punishment’ he had already undergone through loss of reputation. Both Hill and Coggan were also members of The Athenaeum. It’s not who you know… but who you dine with.

Returning to Nobody’s it is oddly disturbing that its members are likely to have their own copies of this book, and many older members will remember Straubenzee as President of the club. They will have presumably been aware of media reports in recent years of the mention of Straubenzee in secret service reports to the Cabinet Office.

A culture of ‘say nothing unless asked’ is a culture still reluctant to move on from subtle complicity and subterfuge. This mindset has already led to the current existential crisis of the bishops and senior ‘management’ of the Church. The time for keeping of secrets Luca Brasi-style to protect the reputation of a Lambeth Palace eliterie should long be over. The Church should no longer entertain disposition to this kind of omerta. A church with secrecy riven in its bones is not a church with a healthy and redemptive future. It is hardly worth the candle.

Incidentally I was interested to find that two senior figures I had told of my abuse – were both members. Stephen Platten, former Bishop of Wakefield, and John Eastaugh, former Bishop of Hereford.

With no little irony, I give the last word of this essay to Lord Lloyd. When questioned at the Inquiry, his description of Nobody’s Friends was that it was a “perfectly ordinary dining club”.

Gilo

CoEditor, Letters to a Broken Church (Ekklesia 2019)

The Terms of Reference released this week, for the proposed John Smyth Review, gives us information about the review process taking place over the next nine months by the Reviewer Keith Makin.  With my readers I have tried to follow Smyth’s story as best I can ever since the Channel 4 presentation in February 2017.  The Channel 4 programme detailed the now familiar story of beatings in a shed in Smyth’s back garden in Winchester between 1979 and 1982.  At the time when this story broke, I was roused into writing a letter to the Church Times.  This was in response to a claim that these beatings of devout school boys had no theological dimension.   It was then quite clear to me that Smyth believed in the redemptive power of pain, which related to his evangelical ideas about the Atonement.  No one then or now would concur with this warped attempt at religious justification.  His behaviour was criminal.  At the time of his death in August 2018, Smyth was facing extradition from South Africa to England to face charges.

The Terms document for this proposed Review contains a so-called ‘factual summary’ of the Smyth story.  Although it cannot be expected to go into detail, the author of the document does not seem to understand the meaning of the word ‘fact’.  I pass over the inaccuracy of the described relationship between the Iwerne Trust and the current Titus Trust.  That is unimportant.  What is important is the attempt to gloss over the relationship between Justin Welby and Smyth.  The document declares as fact that Welby knew Smyth but ‘not substantially’.  This claim may be in fact true but the Reviewer should take nothing for granted.  He needs to ask questions without any answers being decided beforehand.  Only diligent enquiry can establish whether or not a relationship with Smyth was substantial.  Questions, as in a court of law, have to be asked about every aspect of Smyth’s network.  From my perspective, Smyth’s social circle has to be fully understood to make sense both of his crimes and the cover-up that follows them.  The Terms of Reference speak about the response of the Church of England and its officers to the allegations.  The Church of England as a body probably knew nothing but considerable numbers of individuals associated with the Iwerne camps, many of them senior CofE clergy at the time or subsequently, appeared to know a great deal but chose to keep quiet.

This brings us on to a second important misleading claim in the factual summary.  It states that John Smyth subsequently moved to Zimbabwe.  The implication is that he had been ‘encouraged to seek work overseas’ by the committee who had investigated his behaviour on behalf of the Iwerne Trust.  This seems to be a misstatement of what actually happened.  In brief, substantial funds were pledged in England by Smyth’s Iwerne circle to allow him to run a mission in Zimbabwe.  This focused on running Christian camps for young men.  This financial support owed much to the Coleman family and their names appear as trustees for well over a decade.  The question has to be asked as to whether the trust that supported Smyth was genuinely interested in mission work or whether it had another motive – to keep a lid on a major scandal.  Smyth had become an embarrassment to his wealthy evangelical friends in England and so packing him off to Africa was an expedient solution to a problem.  Various problems and complaints arose from these camps and they are well documented.  I have a 1993 document downloaded from the net running to twenty pages which detail complaints by other Christian groups working in Bulawayo.  The question that needs to be asked by the Reviewer is whether the UK Zambezi Ministries trustees took any action in response to these credible accusations.  The death of the young man, Guide Nyachuru, was not the only accusation of harm.  You could characterise the camps as centres set up to gratify the needs of a leader rather than help Zimbabwean young people to grow as Christians.

The problems with the way the facts of the past are recorded is not the only limitation the Terms of Reference reveal.  The Reviewer, Keith Makin, may be a thoroughly honourable person but questions remain how effective his Review can be.  There is, as we have claimed, a slanted ‘factual summary’ of the past.   But, to help him potentially, there are the principles for conducting a good Review which Kate Blackwell QC so ably outlined on the Sunday programme.  She emphasised how important it was to have all the information that was needed.  It was also important for the commissioning body not to set out any parameters, whether of time or perceived relevance.  Although a Church of England review is not one conducted according to strict legal principles, John Smyth’s alleged offences were criminal.  This ought to give a seriousness to everything that is said and reported to the Reviewer.  We can only hope that he can break through various artificial constraints that are already in evidence.  The Church should be asked to find a way round the refusal of two key witnesses, Scripture Union and Titus Trustees to cooperate with the Review.  Can it really be true that legal cases outstanding prevent the Titus trustees from sharing information?  As important stakeholders, the absence of their witness will make the Review less valuable.

Two final comments on the nine-page Terms of Reference need to be raised.  The main concern of survivors and their supporters is an answer to one simple question.  How is it that the nefarious deeds of an important figure in the Iwerne/Titus network was so successfully covered up for over thirty years?  Is no one going to explain to the rest of the church how and why this happened?  A cover-up on this scale must have dragged numerous individuals into its embrace and the corruption necessarily involved is not good to contemplate.  It is in other words not just the reaction of the Church of England that is of potential interest to an unbiased reviewer but all the other people among Smyth’s network who knew and did nothing.  The same question can of course be asked of Jonathan Fletcher and the attempts at cover-up of his misdeeds that are continuing.

A thought for one group that gets a mention but little in the way of understanding or compassion, the surviving relatives of Smyth.  They are victims in a different way from the survivors but they are likely completely innocent of his crimes.  It would be good if they could be treated with respect instead of just having the review shared with them as an afterthought.  Kate Blackwell in fact mentioned the involvement of every concerned party at the very start of the review process. This would include the relatives of a deceased alleged perpetrator as well as the victims/survivors.

The Terms of Reference for the examination of the case of John Smyth are like the curate’s egg – good in parts.  It remains to be seen whether the Reviewer Kevin Makin can overcome the flaws of the Terms and produce a good and valuable Review.  There will be many people watching, aware of the history of the Church in recent years to do everything to cover-up and bury truth if it appears to damage its image.  As Kate Blackwell said in her broadcast, the most important people in a review are those who have been injured.  Their verdict will be the one that matters.  We await it with interest to see what they have to say.

A murder story, widely reported last week in the Press, would not normally have attracted any comment from this blog.  But the recent conviction of Benjamin Field for the murder of Peter Farquhar does have considerable relevance to our concerns.  The victim was said to have been befriended and drawn into a homosexual liaison within the setting of a small church congregation at Stowe.  The dynamic, which the murderer used to draw Farquhar into a sexual relationship with him, was described as a kind of grooming.  Field allegedly used similar grooming techniques not only with the other individuals he wanted to exploit (of whom there were several), but with the entire congregation.  This village congregation was said to be completely in thrall to Field’s influence.  The trust and the power that he exerted allowed him to take a leading role in the congregation as a parish secretary and there were even moves afoot to put him forward for ordination.

The careful reporting of the story by the Times newspaper mentions that, following the murder conviction, the Diocese of Oxford is to hold an inquiry into the way that the grooming of the congregation by Field took place.  The notion of grooming is widely used as a shorthand for indicating the way that certain individuals prepare their victims for acts of abuse.  The word contains notions of influence and control not dissimilar to the old idea of brain-washing.  Here grooming refers to the influence exerted by Field that caught up not just victims but many others. This idea that a single individual can manipulate groups is far from being a novel idea to students of the so-called cults.  It has been recognised for over a century that when people gather together in groups or in a crowd, they become aware of themselves in a different way from when they are alone.  We speak about the different atmospheres created by the presence or absence of other people.  At the end of the 19^th century a number of writers interested in the behaviour of crowds came up with the notion of ‘contagion’.  This is the notion that an idea held initially by a few members of a group can spread very quickly to become the dominant way of thinking by the whole.  It only needs the conviction of a leader with a powerful gift of rhetoric to infect an entire crowd into thinking in a particular way.  Theories of crowd behaviour may not seem particularly relevant to the situation in Stowe.  What is relevant is the idea that any group can quickly normalise a single thought among its members. We have all felt the pressure of a group to think a particular way.  It might be in a football crowd or in a charismatic gathering.  In this situation it is very hard not to sing along or cheer in the same way as everyone else.  Field somehow understood these dynamics and manipulated them to his benefit.  That is perhaps also the secret of Trump rallies as well as dictatorships everywhere.

The capacity of groups to become one in their thinking and feeling is one part of the way that congregational dynamics worked initially in Field’s favour.   The group consensus was that he was to be trusted and also was thoroughly reliable.  The other part of the dynamic of the congregation were the actual methods available to Field to sustain this common belief.  There were various motivations that were in operation in Field’s plan but they are perhaps the least interesting part of the story.  What is important is the way that the congregation were so mesmerised by him that no one was able to see that something was not quite right in his close association with Farquhar.  Field was not, of course, an official leader of the group but in many respects he seems to have been able to act in this capacity.  From his upbringing as the offspring of a Baptist minister he had considerable knowledge of the Bible and this was superior to anyone else in the congregation.   A facility to quote scripture easily gave him power and influence in a congregation where reverence for scripture was highly esteemed.  The theological conservatism of this particular congregation meant that there was little appetite to question any decisive use of bible quotes to further an authoritarian agenda.  My article in Letters to a Broken Church, explores the variety of bible passages that can be and are used to boost the leadership credentials of an official (or in this case unofficial) leader.   In short, the fundamentalism of Field’s church facilitated the kind of exploiting of human weakness that ended, in this case, in an episode of desperate tragedy.  Youth, charm and the skilful use of bible texts seemed to been able to perform the task of group manipulation over a considerable period of time.

The grooming of the congregation to which Peter Farquhar belonged was, as far as we can see, deliberate and planned by Benjamin Field.  That he was able to go as far as he did in abusing the trust of good and intelligent people ought to alarm the leaders of all our churches.  The story at one level is extraordinary and exceptional.  At another level it reflects a reality on the ground in many churches where people are inveigled into trusting leaders who may not be worthy of such trust.  The dynamics of power in this particular congregation were probably not so different from the way that many congregations operate up and down the country.  Narcissistic leaders, whose motives for being in charge involve their own emotional, financial and sexual gratification, are still found in our congregations.  Whether the system is able to spot such people before they are let loose on vulnerable trusting congregations remains to be seen.  The Church historically has been extremely reluctant to let go priests (and bishops) whose behaviour has shown that they are a danger to potential parishioners.  Is it the acute shortage of clergy within the church part of the reason that dangerous individuals are still found within the system because those in charge are unwilling to spot the dangers? 

The story of Benjamin Field has many aspects.  There was among those involved with him a mentoring priest who had spotted the fact that he was showing severe psychopathic tendencies, including a total lack of empathy or feeling for others.  This encounter was voluntary on Field’s part and we are left to wonder whether, apart from this, the selection process would have penetrated through the personal charm that he had used to endear himself to his home congregation and his abuse victims.  Are all ordinands required to examine the part of themselves that relates to personal power and its management?  Recently we have seen, at the highest levels of the church hierarchy, some extraordinary examples of empathy failure.  If the church is indeed becoming more focused on efficiency and structure, will it also be more likely to miss out on such pastoral issues and the preservation of integrity among the clergy?  Field, having learnt the ropes of how to do ‘church-speak’ got dangerously close to beginning the path to ordination.  One is forced to ask the uncomfortable question.  How many other malignant narcissists have got through the system and are even now preparing, if not to murder people, at least to harm them in the cause of satisfying narcissistic hunger and their drug-like craving for importance and esteem?

Every once in a while, I ask myself the question as to why I write a blog.  Among the answers that come back to me, some indicate that there may be some selfish reasons; others indicate a more altruistic motive.  The writing that I enjoy doing helps me to clarify ideas that I have in my head and allow them to be out there for scrutiny by others.  As a clergyman all my working life, I always had the privilege of teaching the faith while at the same exploring out loud ideas about God and the state of the Church.  Preaching regularly is not something I do now, so the sharing and exploring of ideas has to be done in this format.  Writing a blog may well be somewhat self-indulgent, but it does exercise the same parts of the brain that used to be used to write sermons.

A second reason for blogging is that it has created for me quite a substantial online social life as well as a pastoral role.  After years of being in charge of parishes, the role of the retired clergyman is quite different.  This online world of blogging allows me to make contact with complete strangers.  Although I never get to meet them in the flesh, these contacts are fascinating and rewarding.  Some people complain that being open to online communication from all and sundry opens you up to ‘trolling’ and other unpleasant interactions.  So far, I have managed to avoid anything that would make me want to run away from giving my email to anyone who wants to get in touch.  The contacts I make, because they are made on the basis of a common interest in the themes of the blog, are always interesting.  People write to me with their stories.  Sometimes I respond by email, sometimes by phone.  Stories of bullying, abuse or control are of course widespread and there is very little I can do to help beyond listening.  The task of being a listener is of course what I as a clergyman have been used to doing over the years.  The situation of retirement means that I perhaps do now have a different perspective on power issues, backed up by my reading and current exposure to the safeguarding scene right across the country.  What people seem to value is my complete independence from the structures.  I have learnt very strongly that being part of a structure, whether diocese, national church or safeguarding committee, can have a detrimental or negative effect on the individual.  It can make the task of preserving complete integrity when dealing with survivors of abuse or bullying quite difficult.  Working for an organisation, which demands your complete loyalty as well as making you obey a line manager or boss. can create severe problems for the integrity of many people today.  The particular group who seem to suffer the most in this area are those at the top of our Church, the house of bishops.  Speaking generally, I am sensing that the church has become sometimes a toxic environment for many of those who ‘manage’, whether a diocesan or at national level.  They have to follow the instructions of others, the impression managers, the communication officers and others who control things behind the scenes.

Recently the focus of this blog has been dictated by the topics in the news.  Sexual abuse of minors and cover-ups by senior churchmen are obviously important topics and they need a commentary such as those provided by this blog.  The central concern of this blog has never in fact been about sexual misbehaviour.  It is about power in the church.  In a wakeful moment last night, I came up with an eight-word description of what this blog is really about.  It is about ‘power, its use and abuse in the Church’.  One of the biggest problems that I have discovered in studying power issues is that there is little proper awareness of how the phenomenon of power functions in an institution like the Church.  A failure to understand the nature of this power is a failure that allows it to be far more dangerous and harmful.   Of course, power has to exist but it does not have to be so hidden and unacknowledged where it can wreak so much more havoc.  At every level of the church, power processes are at work.  Whether it is a PCC of six people in a small village or the Anglican House of Bishops there are always ‘games’ taking place.  The problem about these power games is that those involved are often completely unaware that they are taking place.  The moment that the dynamics of this power are exposed, their power to harm individuals can decrease dramatically.  Suppose a Vicar is challenged by an older parishioner for bullying the organist, his interjection may at first be met with fury.  But if the parishioner gives a calm analysis of the situation, citing knowledge of issues on both sides of the dispute, the temperature of the dispute may be quickly reduced.  As long as power disputes are only ‘fought’ by rival factions, heat but very little light is visible.  The Church needs to train itself far better to forensically dissect power problems that take place all the time.  Individuals need to be confronted with the human tendency to dominate and control whether as bishop, Vicar or church warden.  Bullying, grooming or dominating in a variety of ways are all examples of power play that goes on everywhere.  When it becomes normalised and cannot be called out, then it is set to make a church or whatever organisation toxic for years, even decades.

Where this blog makes a claim to rise above the selfish need of its editor to articulate opinions and prejudices, it is in this act of calling out power games.   Naming abuse when it occurs is an important social function.  People who write to me sometimes express pleasure that they have now found through the blog a language to describe their situation as they struggle to make themselves heard in a situation of power abuse within their churches.  Long term readers of this blog will remember how I helped a woman called ‘Maria’ in the States stand up to her minister who was feeding her typical patriarchal nonsense about submission in the face of real practical issues to do with her marriage.  Giving real personal power back to Maria was an important high-light in the history of this blog. Sharing her story on this blog was part of her journey to recovery.

In summary what I feel called to do is provide a platform to articulate for myself and others to understand the nature of power as it functions in the church.  There are many people who simply do not see how failures to understand how power operates in the church can make the entire institution toxic and not fit for purpose.  There have been some lamentable failures by the Church of England recently in the area of public relations.  The instinct to protect the centre, at the expense of the many who are and have been damaged by power and bullying, is short-sighted and ultimately threatening to the long-term survival of the institution.  It is only when these toxic games of dominance and control are ended, that the Church can begin to recover and possibly offer a lead to our broken society.