UK: Anglican Church hit by new abuse claims
Senior bishop faced calls to quit over his own handling of sexual abuse case
LONDON: A senior Anglican bishop, who will soon take temporary charge of the scandal-hit Church, faced calls to quit on Monday over his own handling of a sexual abuse case.
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, the Anglican Church’s second most senior cleric, will take charge for a few months in the New Year following the resignation of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby last month.
Welby stepped down after an independent probe found he “could and should” have formally reported decades of abuse by a Church-linked lawyer to authorities in 2013.
The report found the Church of England - the mother church of Anglicanism - covered up the “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks”, which occurred in Britain, Zimbabwe and South Africa over several decades.
Now the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, has called for Cottrell to stand down over claims he too mishandled a sexual abuse case during his time as the Bishop of Chelmsford.
Cottrell let priest David Tudor stay in his post despite knowing that the Church had banned him from being alone with children and paid compensation to a sexual abuse claimant, the BBC reported.
Cottrell’s spokesperson told the BBC that he had been in an “invidious situation” as he did not have the legal power to sack the priest as all the complaints had already been dealt with.
According to the spokesperson, there were no grounds to act until a fresh complaint was made in 2019.
But Hartley said he could have done more.
Moral and ethical authority
“It completely undermines his credibility that this case was not acted on,” she told the BBC.
“How can you have the moral and ethical authority to lead an institution with that?”
On becoming Bishop of Chelmsford in 2010, Cottrell was told that Tudor had been a defendant in two criminal trials in 1988, according to the BBC investigation.
He was acquitted in the first trial of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old girl but admitted having sex with her when she was 16.
Tudor was found guilty of indecently assaulting three girls and jailed for six months in the second case, but had the conviction quashed on technical grounds.
The Church banned Tudor but allowed him to return to ministry after five years.
Despite working under an agreement that prevented him from being alone with children or entering schools in Essex in Chelmsford, he went on to become an area dean in charge of 12 parishes.
“Any action that could have been taken... should have been vastly stronger than simply to try and manage a risk, particularly if the priest in question is already banned from working with children or entering schools,” Hartley said.
Tudor was only banned for life from ministry two months ago after a Church diciplinary tribunal found his previous sexual relations with two girls were an “abuse of trust” amounting to “grooming”.
According to the BBC, at least seven women say they were abused by Tudor.