The Cof E can’t afford to lose another Archbishop

Many readers, I suspect, feel so dismayed by the current hierarchy of the Church of England that they will support yesterday’s ambush by the BBC, which is trying to prevent Stephen Cottrell, the current Archbishop of York, from taking up his role as interim Archbishop of Canterbury. I think that would be a mistake.

The case against Archbishop Cottrell concerns his time as Bishop of Chelmsford. He allegedly failed adequately to act against David Tudor, a priest in his diocese with a past conviction for child abuse. It echoes accusations which were brought against Justin Welby, who recently resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury because of his alleged failures in the handling of the case of John Smyth, the sadistic evangelical missioner who beat boys in the name of God.

For other reasons, neither archbishop has endeared himself to the person in the pew. Both wanted to shut churches during Covid. Both seemed more concerned to take down so-called “monuments to slavery” and root out “unconscious bias” than to help parish life flourish, so they demoralised congregations.

But it does not follow that Christianity will benefit if archbishops can be kicked out like football managers.

First, there is the question of fairness. Neither archbishop is accused of iniquity, but of mishandling. The Church has indeed made dreadful mistakes about child abuse, but it must be acknowledged that the problems involved are extremely complicated, concerning the legal rights of both victim and accused. Accusations cannot simply be accepted: they must, in justice, be proved. (It was a failure to check the facts which caused Archbishop Welby falsely to accuse the late Bishop George Bell of Chichester of abuse.) Responsibility does not necessarily lie at the door of the most famous person involved.

Having read the Makin report on the Smyth case, for example, I am convinced that its case for the personal responsibility of Justin Welby is weak. The evil deeds John Smyth committed in England date from when Mr Welby was in his teens and twenties. Besides, Smyth was not a clergyman nor employed by the Church of England. The Smyth case was peculiarly horrible: it does not follow that a scapegoat for that evil must be found.

Second, there is the underlying mission of the Church to consider. Certainly that mission can never be convincing if it is unable to root out abuse, but it is also certain that if factions in the Church can work off grudges by evicting bishops, there will be no end to the destructive power of odium theologicum. The strength of the Church of England is its tolerance – not of wrong, of course, but of difference. These internal wars will destroy that.

Poor Archbishop Welby, never the most diplomatic of men, managed to annoy two factions at once – the pro-gay lobby which is obsessed with overturning the Church’s teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman, and the anti-same-sex marriage lobby of his evangelical former friends who feel he deserted them on the subject.

Jesus famously invited those who are “without sin to cast the first stone”. There cannot be a bishop of the Church of England who has not made delicate judgments about safeguarding issues. Will all those judgments have been correct?

The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, has been throwing plenty of stones at the archbishops. Even before her attacks on Welby and Cottrell, she had also denied Permission to Officiate in her diocese, where he resides, to Lord Sentamu, the former Archbishop of York – again because of an alleged failure of safeguarding when he was in office.

Yesterday, I telephoned the Diocese of Newcastle because it has at present no safeguarding officer, and its previous officer left accompanied by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). The diocese says it has an interim safeguarding officer. I got no substantive reply about the NDA. According to the Church of England press office, the national institutions of the Church do not use NDAs, so it would be interesting to know if Bishop Hartley is out of line on this.

It has just been announced that Lord Evans of Weardale, the former head of MI5, is to be chairman of the Crown Nominations Commissions which will recommend the next Archbishop of Canterbury to the Prime Minister. I fear that, in this untrusting climate, his surveillance skills could well prove relevant.

Paddington Bear’s background

Canal+, the French pay-TV company which is to list on the London stock market has, according to its CEO, Maxime Saada, eight “core beliefs”. The eighth is, “We believe in Paddington” – not the railway station, of course, but the bear. His channel owns the Paddington franchise.

Mr Saada wishes to emphasise that Paddington is British, not American. His company wishes to respect the bear’s cultural identity, he says.

Many will be pleased to hear this. But wait! I suspect Mr Saada of neo-colonialism. Although a welcome immigrant to these shores, Paddington is, in origin, Peruvian. He was orphaned in an earthquake and brought up in Peru by his Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo. He is certainly no Yankee, but he is a Latin American. One is bound to conclude that the first language in his childhood home would have been Spanish, or possibly an indigenous tongue. That is his lived experience.

It is typical of our Western male species-ist white fragility and latent racism that Paddington’s background is invisible to us, curtly dismissed in the cruel phrase “darkest Peru”. Canal+ should be listing on the Bolsa de Valores de Lima.