Patheos blog
Nov. 8, 2019
By Barry Duke
The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols – leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales – has spoken of the ’embodiment of evil’ among church members.
Giving evidence for the second time to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Nichols, above, said:
The experience in the Catholic community in this country over the last 20 years has been one of struggling to cope with the presence of evil embodied in its members, which has shocked it to the core.
Richard Scorer, specialist abuse lawyer at Slater and Gordon, who acts for 27 abuse victims in the inquiry, responded to Nichols’ latest claim that he was still struggling to get his head around the extent of clerical abuse by saying:
Cardinal Nichols’s evidence will cut little ice with victims. The Catholic Church has spent the last two decades promising to get safeguarding right, but the evidence in this inquiry has exposed these promises as so much hot air.
Scorer said improvements had been “lamentably slow”, treatment of survivors was “consistently poor” and the Catholic Church’s structure and culture meant it was:
Incapable of delivering the changes survivors need.
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