UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph
By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor
22 Oct 2015
A former Church of England bishop revered as a peacemaker – and granted the closest thing Anglicanism has to a saint’s days – was a paedophile, the Church has acknowledged.
George Bell, who was bishop of Chichester for 30 years until his death in 1958, sexually assaulted a young boy, who is still alive, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Church of England has issued a formal apology to the victim, who wishes to remain anonymous, and settled a legal claim for compensation.
The man first came forward in 1995 but his complaint was effectively ignored by the then Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, who died in 2009.
It was not until he contacted the office of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, two years ago that the allegations were finally investigated properly.
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