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Church of England ‘Colluded’ With Bishop to Hide Sex Abuse, Report Says
By Dan Bilefsky
New York Times
June 22, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/world/europe/church-of-england-colluded-with-bishop-to-hide-sex-abuse-report-says.html
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The Most. Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, asked Lord Carey to resign from his position with the Diocese of Oxford after a report on sexual abuse within the Church of England.
Photo by Chris Ratcliffe |
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Peter Ball, the former bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, was found guilty in 2015 of misconduct in public office and of committing indecent assaults against 18 victims over a 15-year period. Mr. Ball was released from prison in February.
Photo by John Stillwell |
LONDON — Senior people in the Church of England “colluded” over two decades with a bishop to help cover up his serial abuse of young men and boys, an independent review found on Thursday.
The unsparing report, titled “An Abuse of Faith,” centers on Peter Ball, the former bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, who was convicted in 2015 of misconduct in public office and of indecent assaults against 18 victims over a 15-year period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Now 85, Mr. Ball was released from prison in February after serving half his 32-month sentence.
Overseen by Dame Moira Gibb, a former social worker, the report shines an uncomfortable light at the highest echelons of the church. The report was commissioned by the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, who called it “harrowing reading.”
Among the report’s most damning criticisms is its rebuke of the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, now the honorary assistant bishop in the Diocese of Oxford. It accuses him of setting “the tone for the church’s response to Mr. Ball’s crimes” and enabling Mr. Ball’s declarations of innocence to be accepted, even as victims and members of the public came forward to expose abuse by the former bishop.
Mr. Ball refused to meet officials conducting the review or to submit a written statement.
The report said that despite the efforts of victims and witnesses to report the abuse, the church allowed its desire to preserve its reputation to supersede the imperative to help victims.
After the report’s publication, Archbishop Welby asked Lord Carey to resign from his position with the Diocese of Oxford.
Lord Carey said Thursday that the report made for “uncomfortable reading” and he apologized to Mr. Ball’s victims. “I believed Peter Ball’s protestations and gave too little credence to the vulnerable young men and boys behind those allegations.”
According to the report, Mr. Ball, a graduate of Cambridge University, was a charismatic speaker and a frequent visitor to public schools who mentored young men and boys. During his trial, prosecutors said he cajoled and forced young men in his orbit to pray naked, using the cloak of religion to gain their trust.
Mr. Ball resigned as bishop in 1993 after Neil Todd, a 17-year-old aspiring monk, reported abuse to police and church officials that occurred when Mr. Todd was living with Mr. Ball at Bishopscourt, the official residence of the Bishop of Gloucester.
According to the report, Mr. Ball encouraged Mr. Todd to engage in spiritual exercises involving nudity and cold showers and he suggested Mr. Todd agree to be beaten while naked. That was averted in one instance after an intervention by a member of the domestic staff. Eventually, explicit “sexual activity” between Mr. Ball and Mr. Todd ensued, the report says.
Even after his resignation, Mr. Ball was permitted to officiate at churches and to speak at schools. Mr. Todd took his own life in 2012 at the age of 38.
Another of Mr. Ball’s victims, Cliff James, who was 19 at the time he was abused, told the court in 2015 that Mr. Ball had groomed him over many months, insisting that he shower naked in front of him and beating him with a wooden clothes brush.
Dame Moira said the abuse of many boys and men over two decades was “shocking in itself.” But she added in a statement that it was “compounded by the failure of the church to respond appropriately to his misconduct, again over a period of many years.”
“Ball’s priority was to protect and promote himself and he maligned the abused,” she wrote. “The church colluded with that rather than seeking to help those he had harmed, or assuring itself of the safety of others.”
During Mr. Ball’s trial, it emerged that members of the British establishment, among them cabinet ministers, an unnamed member of the royal family and Lord Carey, had intervened to vouch for Mr. Ball with the authorities. The church has been accused of seeking to cover up what it knew about the abuse.
On Thursday, Archbishop Welby apologized to Mr. Ball’s victims and vowed that the church had learned its lessons. “The church colluded and concealed rather than seeking to help those who were brave enough to come forward,” he said in a statement. “This is inexcusable and shocking behavior.”
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