UNITED KINGDOM
The Daily Beast
by Tom Sykes Nov 15, 2012
The UK’s spiraling child-abuse scandal has already reached Prince Charles once – he was a good friend of the children’s TV presenter Jimmy Savile who was hailed as an eccentric saint in his lifetime but has been unmasked as a predatory paedophile in death – and now the prince’s judgment is being called into question again, after it emerged that a retired Church of England bishop arrested yesterday by police investigating historic allegations of child sex abuse was given a free house to live in by Charles after the bishop resinged in disgrace having received a police caution for committing acts of gross indecency against a 17-year old trainee monk.
Sussex police arrested the 80 year-old Rt Rev Peter Ball, former bishop Gloucester, on Tuesday morning on suspicion of eight sex offences against eight boys and young men in the late Eighties and Nineties, after carrying out a “comprehensive and painstaking” analysis of internal church files “relating to certain child safeguarding issues within the Chichester diocese from between 20 and 25 years ago”, the Guardian reported.
Ball was created bishop of Gloucester in 1991 at a ceremony attended by Prince Charles. But in 1993, Ball resigned in disgrace after receiving a police caution for committing an act of ‘gross indecency’ against a teenage trainee monk. The young man involved, Neil Todd, spoke out about Ball’s ‘mental, sexual and physical’ abuse on the BBC in May.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.