UNITED KINGDOM
Church Times
by Madeleine Davies
Posted: 14 May 2013
ALL complaints under the Clergy Discipline Measure against a former Bishop of Lewes, the Rt Revd Wallace Benn, have been dismissed, it was announced on Tuesday.
In a statement, Bishop Benn denounced the “misconceived and unjustified” efforts by the safeguarding advisory group of the diocese of Chichester to bring complaints against him. He had been the victim of a “one-sided and unjust process of trial by media . . . orchestrated by unknown people with, it seems, no interest in the truth or the ministry of the Church”.
In November 2011, the diocese of Chichester confirmed that the diocesan independent safeguarding advisory group had made a complaint to the Archbishop of Canterbury concerning Bishop Benn ( News, 17 November, 2011). When Bishop Benn retired in 2012, the charges were unresolved ( News, 26 October).
The complaints from the safeguarding advisory group related to the handling of the case of Robert Coles, a former parish priest who in February was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to 11 sex offences, committed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, against three young boys in West Sussex. The complainants argued that Bishop Benn should have passed information that he possessed about Mr Coles’s conduct to the police. Bishop Benn has maintained that this was the responsibility of the diocesan child-protection adviser ( News, 22 February).
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