Abuse cover-ups must be dealt with, but above all CofE needs to safeguard religious observance
As Oscar Wilde might have said, had he been observing the travails of the Church of England, to lose one archbishop through a sexual abuse scandal may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose a second would look like carelessness.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has been accused of failing to remove a priest who was a serial child sexual abuser. The BBC has revealed that, one week after he became Bishop of Chelmsford in 2010, Cottrell was told about a priest in his diocese called David Tudor who had served time in prison for indecently assaulting three young girls.
Even though these convictions were later quashed on technical grounds, the church found Tudor guilty of misconduct and banned him from the priesthood — but only for five years. Although he was deemed unfit to be left alone with children, he subsequently returned as a vicar and in 2015 — even more incredibly — was made an honorary canon at Chelmsford cathedral.
These revelations follow the enforced resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury of Justin Welby, who fell on his crozier when he took responsibility for the church’s long failure to stop the prolific child abuser and Christian charity worker, John Smyth. Cottrell, who is number two in the Church of England hierarchy, is about to step up as its caretaker head following Welby’s departure. So these disclosures are, to put it mildly, unfortunate.
Cottrell says he couldn’t take disciplinary action against Tudor because no new cases had emerged and he did what he could to minimise the risk Tudor had posed. After Tudor paid £10,000 to a girl who said he had abused her, two further reports of his abuse and a six-figure sum the church paid to yet another victim, Cottrell suspended Tudor in 2019. Two months ago, Tudor admitted sexual misconduct and the church finally sacked him.
How could the church have so egregiously covered up for Tudor and even given him public validation by making him an honorary canon? One possible reason is that the church leadership behaves like a boys’ club. Another is fear of the scandal if it was brought out into the open. But something more systemic is surely at work here — a sustained failure to take such abuses seriously enough. A moral failure.
This was evident in Welby’s valedictory speech in the House of Lords when he appeared to make light of the issue, lamenting the inconvenience he had caused his diary secretary and quipping how, like a decapitated 14th-century archbishop, his head had to roll. The resulting outrage caused him to apologise.
The real outrage, however, should surely be over the fact that throughout his period of office he had behaved as a culture warrior for progressive causes while his church continued to haemorrhage adherents. Rather than promoting religious belief and biblical precepts, all his energies seemed to be devoted to unfairly flaying his church for the sin of colonialism. His church is today stacked with leaders who have a similarly secular approach.
The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, led the campaign to force Welby to resign because the Smyth scandal had undermined the church’s credibility. Yet surely the church’s credibility was shot because Welby had presided over its calamitous decline?
Now the bishop says Cottrell should resign as Archbishop of York and that “safeguarding is the major issue for the next resident of Lambeth Palace”, who must deal with the “cultures around power, privilege and entitlement” within the church leadership.
The sexual abuse cover-ups need to be dealt with. But surely what the church needs to safeguard above all is biblical observance? Isn’t the really “major issue” the collapse of church attendance and religious belief due to the church’s failure to fill the spiritual void that has developed in a post-truth, post-moral society?
The reason for this failure is the church’s replacement of a spiritual message with social and managerial issues such as “governance” that Hartley thinks constitute the leadership’s mission. As I argue in my new book about religion and the West, which will be published early in the new year, by focusing on society rather than religious matters the church has actually undermined society and abandoned the many who are spiritually lost.
While sexual abuse certainly isn’t a modern invention, the cultural promotion of licentiousness, with graphic sex education, tarty clothes for little girls, debauched pop lyrics and ubiquitous pornography has produced an obsessively sexualised society that has stamped upon regular rules of behaviour and tacitly normalised paedophilia.
Throughout this decades-long demoralisation (in every sense) and degradation of society, the church has either remained mostly silent or even gone with the flow. It doesn’t believe that it has a sacred duty to hold the normative line. Instead, the issues it now defines as sacred are certain foreign wars, gender dysphoria and climate change, about all of which it can do diddly squat and knows even less. And then British society is shocked when these Vicars of Bray turn the other cheek to monstrous individuals.
Sexual abuse scandals and safeguarding disasters are hardly confined to the church. But the fact that its leaders think it’s this issue that poses an existential threat to itself rather than the loss of religious faith and biblical morality tells you everything about why the Church of England is in free fall.
