The rot goes deep
Hwyl fawr to the Archbishop of Wales, but does the Church in Wales need to dig deeper to really fix things?
Hello! Only one place to start today: the resignation sorry, ‘retirement’, of the Archbishop of Wales. The pressure on him over the sprawling crisis at Bangor Cathedral ultimately became too much to bear. We look at why he went, what the damning central church statement (eventually published after he had already gone) reveals about the church’s dysfunction, and why this relatively small denomination seems to lose so many bishops to scandal.
Then we look across the border at the Diocese of Leicester, which has managed to stumble into its own scandal which somehow encompasses almost all the Church of England’s issues. We have race, sexuality, church planting, lay ministry and much more, all triggered by a bizarre stalking episode from a one-time rising star of the diocese.
Then there’s the second half of our podcast discussion on parliament’s vote to decriminalise abortion, and a list of interesting links to church news stories from around the web (including why the bishops were afraid to talk about grooming gangs, whether Makin was “wrong”, and an update on the most salaciously tabloid Vatican scandal ever).
The rot goes deep
It’s always sobering to read back in this newsletter and realise just how wrong I can be. When the redacted summaries of the two investigations into Bangor Cathedral in north Wales were first published, barely two months ago, I covered the news but described it as a fairly minor issue “which will no doubt be forgotten by the wider church within a few months”. WRONG.
As you will all probably already know, the Archbishop of Wales Andy John (who’s also the Bishop of Bangor) resigned on Friday. He was ultimately brought down by this very same slow-burning scandal which eventually erupted into an inferno he could not escape. How did something I thought was relatively small scale ultimately topple the head of the Church in Wales?
I say resigned, but technically he says he has ‘retired’. The announcement by the Church in Wales is entirely framed as John’s retirement, as though the archbishop has decided by total coincidence this week of all weeks to walk away from ministry for his own reasons. John said:
‘I am writing to you to announce my immediate retirement today as Archbishop of Wales. I also intend to retire as Bishop of Bangor on August 31st. It has been an enormous joy to serve in the Church in Wales for over 35 years. I cannot thank you enough for the privilege of working at your side for the sake of our Saviour Jesus Christ.
I would very much like to thank the clergy and congregations of this wonderful diocese before I retire and I will be in touch again about the way in which this might happen.’
Riiiiiiight. Just so we are clear, this is palpable nonsense. John is 61 years old, and so had a chunky nine years to go before the church’s mandatory retirement age of 70. He had given no indication whatsoever he was considering hanging up his crozier at any point prior to this. He has not retired - he has been forced to resign in disgrace.
But it’s not just John putting a determinedly positive spin on things, his fellow bishops are also colluding in the fantasy that this is a ‘retirement’. Gregory Cameron, the Bishop of St Asaph and now most senior cleric in the church, also makes zero reference whatsoever to the real reason John is quitting:
‘As Archbishop Andrew announces his retirement today as Archbishop of Wales and his forthcoming retirement as Bishop of Bangor, the Bench of Bishops of the Church in Wales wish to express our heartfelt thanks for his service to the Church during his ministry.
“Andy has dedicated thirty-six years of his life to ordained ministry in the Church in Wales, and has served with commitment and energy to proclaim the Christian Gospel and draw people to deeper faith in Jesus Christ. He has given so much for the good of the Church in Wales. He now lays down his considerable responsibilities in the same spirit in which he has served for these decades.’
Obviously it is natural that neither John nor his colleagues want to dwell on the unpleasantness that has brought his archiepiscopate to a shuddering halt. And no doubt they genuinely are grateful to him for his service and ministry, and all the good things he has done in the role.
But it is fundamentally dishonest to pretend to the watching world that John is retiring when we all know he is resigning in the wake of a scandal. Indeed, as we will discuss shortly, he is resigning in part because of pressure from some of his fellow bishops and other senior figures in the Church in Wales. For these same people to then turn around and pretend he’s riding off into the sunset with their good wishes after a job well done is disingenuous and distasteful.
An interesting comparison is the resignation of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury, just six months ago. Now, we all have our own views about his resignation, whether it should have happened at all or if it should have happened much earlier. And he did somewhat blot his copybook with his cloth-eared House of Lords speech a few weeks later. But at least the statement announcing his resignation made no effort to obfuscate why he was leaving office:
‘The Makin Review has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth. When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow. It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.’
John’s resignation is in part due to his less than entirely candid approach to what was going on at Bangor Cathedral and his bad habit of trying to hush things up quietly behind the scenes. Given this, it’s a really bad look to once again try to hide what is really going under the guise of a fictitious ‘retirement’.
We ended last week’s Bangor update with the crunch meeting of the Church in Wales’s Representative Body (RB, effectively the board of trustees for the whole denomination) on Tuesday of last week. Sources said that the RB spent hours deliberating on the Bangor crisis (after first making John and other Bangor reps leave the room) before finally agreeing a critical statement, which included a line calling for “changes in leadership”. Note that the RB’s membership includes most of the bishops, who are in effect putting their names to this demand for their own boss to stand down.
This statement should have been published immediately after the RB meeting finished, but instead it was delayed. The Church has not explained why, but multiple reports have suggested there was some to and fro negotiation between the church mandarins on the RB and John himself. Some claim John tried to first get them to water down the motion, but when this failed, spent several days pondering what to do about it.
Eventually, he decided to jump before he was pushed and announced his resignation retirement on Friday. Although most of the journalists covering the story knew by then that the RB’s statement was critical of John, it had still not been published. It finally landed on the church’s website on Tuesday and is worth pondering for a moment.
The RB begins by noting its “deep concern” over the issues in Bangor and explains that as the “charitable trustee body responsible for stewarding assets and distributing funding to both the diocese and the cathedral” it really has to be confident that everything is as it should be. And clearly, everything is very far from as it should be in Bangor, they go on to say, which is draining away the public’s confidence in the Church in Wales more broadly. Then it sets out a list of recommendations and demands, the most interesting of which are:
Both the Diocese of Bangor and Bangor Cathedral have to make public statements committing to implementing all the recommendations from the two outside investigations.
And also commit to co-operate with another financial audit which the RB itself is going to launch. This will focus on financial systems at the diocese and cathedral and “how effectively these separate legal entities function and relate to one another”.
The RB will not give any more money to either the diocese or cathedral until it is satisfied that proper governance is in place, including “robust safeguarding and HR procedures” and protection for whistleblowers.
The senior leaders in the diocese and cathedral have to take part in an externally-led lessons learned review to figure out how they got into this mess in the first place.
The cathedral has to order yet another independent inquiry into its choir in particular, looking at behaviour and culture.
Finally, the RB intends to set up a taskforce and send it in to partly take over the workings of the Diocese of Bangor, who must let these people into all meetings and see all documents they need. And there will also be a church-wide safeguarding audit of all six cathedrals in Wales. And a “cultural audit” of the entire church too.
Phew. But that’s not all. We haven’t even got the damning bit which finally forced John to quit. The final paragraph of the RB statement reads:
‘We remain committed to supporting the mission and ministry of the Church in Wales in Bangor and across Wales, always guided by our duty to protect the vulnerable and steward our resources for the common good of the Church in Wales. Therefore, we also call for change in leadership, procedures and governance in the Diocese of Bangor.’
It is this final sentence about a “change in leadership” which John allegedly wanted softened or toned down. And when the RB refused, it was this final sentence which effectively sounded the death knell for his time as archbishop. What else can a “change of leadership and governance” in the Diocese of Bangor mean except a new Bishop of Bangor? When you own church’s highest governing authority is making tactful but direct calls for you to go, you kind of have to go.
It’s easy to get lost in the blizzard of reports, audits, investigations and taskforces. But let’s draw back to see what the RB is saying. They are revealing they have entirely lost trust in one of their own dioceses, led by their own archbishop. They have so little trust in Bangor, in fact, that they are demanding the diocese make public statements to implement things they’ve already agreed to, and allow in an external group of RB busybodies to micro-manage them implementing what they’ve already said they’ll do.
They’ve so lost so much trust they are threatening to cut the purse strings entirely if the diocese and cathedral cannot rapidly restore proper financial governance and accountability. They have so little faith in their own archbishop and his closest officials that they are insisting they go off and do some mandatory leadership training (after first promising not to retaliate against any future whistleblowers).
This is catastrophic stuff. This is not just about a few rotten apples, a dodgy acting dean or a foolish archbishop any more. This is about an entire diocese, one-sixth of the entire Church in Wales, which has been deemed so toxic and broken it has effectively been placed in special measures and taken over by the national hierarchy.
And the drip-drip of revelations keep on coming, even through John’s departure. It was reported last week by the Welsh news site Nation.cymru that the Charity Commission has now opened its own inquiry into the cathedral and diocese.
A spokesperson said the issues being explored by the Commission “relate to safeguarding concerns, sufficiency of financial controls, and management of conflicts of interest at the charity/ies”. We already knew the Commission was in regular correspondence with the trustees at the cathedral and diocese, and that at least six serious incident reports had been sent to them, but now a formal investigation is underway by the regulator.
(A brief aside on how John will be replaced. Unlike in England, the Archbishop of Wales is not tied to a particular diocese, but instead is elected from among the six bishops in the church. An electoral college will shortly be formed to replace John, consisting of all the other bishops, plus three clergy and three laity elected from each of the six dioceses. If none of the bishops can get two-thirds majority support, the Bench of Bishops is given the task of choosing from among itself its new leader. In the autumn a separate electoral college will be formed to choose John’s replacement as Bishop of Bangor.)
I think it is fair to say the entire Church in Wales is now in disarray. Note that the RB is not just worried about Bangor any more - it’s ordered a safeguarding probe of all cathedrals to check if any others are in the same sorry state as Bangor, and another “cultural audit” of the entire church. As a side note: I heard this week about a friend who happened to attend a Sunday service at Bangor Cathedral as long ago as 2013 with their infant son. While trying to entertain him during the sermon in the somewhat unloved and meagre kids corner, they stumbled across a used condom. And left very soon after. This happened many years before Sion Rhys Evans took over. The rot goes deep indeed.
There was an excellent blog last month, published before John resigned, by Mark Clavier, who is a parish priest in Brecon and the local diocesan theologian. In it Clavier notes the deeper problems afflicting the Church in Wales illustrated by the “succession of leadership crises that have unsettled our Church over nearly two decades”:
‘These aren’t just unfortunate episodes or isolated lapses. Taken together, they reveal a troubling picture—resignations, fractured relationships, governance failures, and a persistent lack of transparency—that can’t be explained away as coincidence. None of this is about blaming individual bishops or senior clergy. Rather, these events expose deeper vulnerabilities in how we form leaders, structure authority, and hold power to account.’
Clavier runs through the sordid list of troubles with senior leaders in the church in recent years. In 2008 the then Bishop of St Davids Carl Cooper was forced to stand down over rumours he had been having an affair with his married chaplain. Both parties vigorously denied the claims, even as they entirely coincidentally divorced their respective spouses. Two years later it was revealed that in fact the now former bishop and ex-chaplain had bought a house together.
Around the same time, allegations of child sexual abuse began to emerge against another bishop, former Bishop of Swansea and Brecon Anthony Pierce. Long after his retirement he was eventually convicted earlier this year.
In 2019 the then Bishop of Monmouth Richard Pain retired after a lengthy period of absence in relation to a poorly-handled internal report of inappropriate behaviour.
In 2021 the then Bishop of Llandaff June Osborne got into a protracted public row with her own cathedral dean, who eventually formally accused her of bullying and harassment. This case was due to come to a disciplinary tribunal, but was withdrawn by the dean at the last minute who soon after retired after two years on sick leave.
In 2022 the then Bishop of St Davids Joanna Penberthy retired after two years of on/off sick leave, prompted by a political row after she had tweeted unsavoury opinions about Tories.
In 2024 another Dean of Llandaff, Richard Peers, went into a very premature retirement after being cleared by a Church of England disciplinary tribunal relating to his supposed involvement in another scandal about the Dean of Oxford Martyn Percy (although in this instance Peers was entirely innocent and his integrity unimpugned, see this previous newsletter for details).
And now the Archbishop himself has been forced into ‘retirement’ after the Bangor Cathedral fiasco (which also consumed the acting dean of Bangor, who also spent… that’s right, a year on vague undefined ‘leave’ before moving on).
Clavier estimates that even before John’s retirement a full quarter of all bishops in the Church in Wales since 2008 had ended their ministries surrounded by scandal, disgrace or controversy. And that’s not all:
‘Two of our six cathedrals have lately endured prolonged dysfunction. Several recent episcopal elections have proven difficult or impossible to conclude, reflecting the complexity of discernment in a small and diverse Church. This isn’t about blaming individuals, but about recognising systemic vulnerabilities in how leadership and accountability are structured and carried out.’
Now of course Wales is not unique in facing leadership challenges. Across the border the Church of England is regularly rocked by its own scandals and bishops have also been falling like dominoes in recent years. Scotland too has had its fair share of senior dysfunction.
But Clavier goes on to note that the whole Church in Wales is smaller than the C of E’s Diocese of Oxford. This has lots of upsides - it creates a friendly, collegial church where everyone knows each other. But it also unquestionably creates a stifling groupthink and a tendency for cosy backroom deals to be carved out by a group of mates. As Clavier writes:
‘When a problem arises, it often implicates the very people responsible for resolving them. The intimacy of our relationships—something I genuinely value—can make it hard to act objectively, particularly when it involves friends or long-standing colleagues. This same closeness can also make it harder for others to trust that decisions have been made fairly.
This isn’t an abstract concern for me. I’ve been personally connected to most of the leadership challenges mentioned earlier. I know people on both sides. I’ve seen the pain up close. And I’m not alone. Many clergy find themselves caught in these webs, unsure how—or whether—to speak.’
There’s no easy solution to any of this. But it is now inescapable that in what is a relatively small denomination, there is a disproportionate amount of bad behaviour, scandal, toxic relationships and dysfunction in the Church in Wales. And simply getting rid of the archbishop isn’t going to solve any of these deeper worries.
The Leicester Stalker
Many moons ago, we covered briefly a remarkable story from the C of E’s Diocese of Leicester. A rising star there was Venessa Pinto. In only her 20s, she had been licensed by the diocese to lead a trendy and growing ‘inter-cultural’ fresh expression of church (born out of a WhatsApp group during the covid lockdowns, apparently). She’d also been elected onto the General Synod (the C of E’s national governing assembly) and even chosen as one of the synod’s handful of representatives on the Crown Nominations Commission (the committee which chooses new bishops).
Pinto represented what a lot of people hoped would be the future of the fusty established national church. She was young, black and LGBT. She was a standard bearer for Inclusive Church. She was a lay woman leading an innovative church plant of people in their 20s and 30s. However, she was also a stalker. Last summer she pleaded guilty to stalking a man called Jay Hulme. Hulme was himself a moderately well-known name in online church circles, as a poet, theologian, devotee of church architecture and trans activist.
Now, BBC News have published a big investigation into the stalking, which has left some big questions to answer for the Diocese of Leicester and its bishop Martyn Snow (better known for leading the Prayers of Love and Faith project until recently). As it happens, I looked into this very same story last year and spoke to many of those involved in the hope of getting something published. Nothing ever came of it unfortunately, so I’m glad it’s finally been broken by the BBC as it feels to me quite significant for a number of reasons.
But before we get to that, what actually happened in Leicester? Pinto first began stalking Hulme after the pair bumped into each other at Hulme’s church where he was welcoming folk on the door. When they later crossed paths again at a service at Leicester Cathedral, Pinto asked Hulme out. He politely declined, explaining he was gay but Pinto accused him of rejecting her because she was black.
She then proceeded to subject him to months of harassment and abuse, mostly through anonymous online messages on social media. Pinto sent him threats and urged him to kill himself, and also spread false rumours about him among their many mutual friends and acquaintances in church circles in Leicester. At one point Hulme even found out she intended to follow him to an obscure weekend retreat in Wales, forcing him to cancel his plans last minute as he began to seriously fear for his safety.
“I felt like she was in my pocket, and in my house, and in my brain all of the time, saying these horrendous things and I couldn’t get away.”
All this while Pinto was employed by the diocese as an intercultural pioneer minister, leading this fresh expression church called Roots. It was at one time even profiled glowingly on the diocesan website, but they’ve since taken that page down. After Hulme failed to get the police to take his case seriously, he turned to the diocese and made a complaint against Pinto.
The diocese commissioned an external HR consultant to look into the case, and they concluded on the balance of probabilities Pinto probably was stalking and harrassing Hulme. But when Hulme was soon afterwards invited to a meeting with Snow, he said the bishop began interrogating him about allegations Pinto had made, including claims he was engaging in witchcraft.
Hulme says this was nonsense and misunderstandings, based on some garbled report of him being seen lighting a candle in a church one evening and his personal friendship with an actual witch and tarot card reader. But rather than trying to rein in Pinto, he says Snow focused on him and accused him of making up stuff. He also allegedly said he was pausing Hulme’s discernment process (exploring whether he should train to be a vicar).
Others got dragged into the saga. One senior figure in the diocese, Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, also received complaints about Pinto. He was the “mission and ministry enabler” for ethnic minorities in the diocese, but like Snow was unsympathetic to Hulme when he heard about Pinto’s behaviour. Instead, Hulme says, he echoed Pinto’s suggestions that she was being targeted because of her race. Son afterwards, Nsenga-Ngoy was promoted to become a bishop in London.
Eventually, even those at the diocese who didn’t want to believe their star young leader was an abusive stalker could not ignore it any longer. Because Hulme was far from Pinto’s only victim.
Kat Gibson joined the diocese at the same time as Pinto to co-lead the church plant together. In fact, she says even before Pinto arrived there were concerns. She had previously worked as a pioneer evangelist for the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. Hulme and Gibson have said she left somewhat under a cloud (which the Diocese of Leicester found out only too late), but a statement from Leicester insists they got a full reference from Pinto’s previous employers and that she had all the usual safer recruitment checks. To further complicate the picture, the bishop in Aberdeen who was in charge of Pinto there was none other than Anne Dyer, who would shortly herself be dragged into a (still unresolved) scandal about alleged bullying, and spend years suspended.
Gibson said that Pinto very quickly became unpleasant to work with, although at first she put this down to the strains of lockdown. But over time the shouting, malicious messages and aggression only got worse. Dozens of other people also began to approach Gibson complaining of their own issues with Pinto’s manipulative and coercive behaviour. But, like Hulme, when she tried to raise concerns with the diocese’s hierarchy she was warned off and told she was being racist or misunderstanding different cultural communication styles. When she spoke with Nsenga-Ngoy he would apparently flip between acknowledging Pinto’s actions as abusive and inappropriate, before then defending her or accusing Gibson of being insufficiently resilient for the trials of ministry.
Her impression is that the worst of it was being kept from Snow, which may explain why he found it so hard to believe Hulme when his separate complaint against Pinto reached the bishop’s desk. Gibson herself was unaware of the stalking against Hulme, let alone the fact he had on multiple occasions reported her to the police.
In a statement to the BBC, Nsenga-Ngoy and the Diocese of Leicester said pastoral support and counselling were offered to Gibson and others affected, and her complaints were taken seriously. But Gibson says she was told to continue ministering alongside Pinto for months, even as the complaints against her stacked up, and (she would later learn) the police were also investigating.
Just a few weeks after Snow had decided not to act against Pinto despite his own diocese’s investigation siding with Hulme, he changed his mind. Unspecified new information had reached him which led to Snow first asking Pinto to step back from ministry in June 2022, and a month later going further and stripping her of her licence to preach and lead. Four months of leave later Pinto’s employment came to an end, although publicly at this point the diocese made no mention of why she was leaving.
And through it all, Hulme said Pinto continued to barrage him with vile, violent abuse online. She posted his address and sent him extreme pornographic material. Hulme began to have nightmares of being murdered in his bed and was freaked out enough to even write his will. Finally, in March 2023 the police believed him (21 months after the stalking began) and launched an investigation into Pinto.
Pinto stepped down from synod and the CNC. The police charged her and she pleaded guilty in May 2024 to stalking involving serious distress or harm. She was given an 18-month community order. After it was long since clear what bad news she was, Snow commissioned an independent review into how complaints against Pinto were handled. This included meeting with Hulme (at which Snow apologised for not acting sooner against Pinto) and others affected by her. The diocese said that they would act on the recommendations made in the report, which apparently revolved around the complexities of Pinto’s status. She was both an employee of the diocese and held the bishop’s licence, which meant there were two, sometimes conflicting pathways - one based in HR policy and the other in church law - about how to deal with complaints.
The diocese also said the “Independent Reviewer did not offer any specific criticisms of the bishop or any other member of staff”. They also strongly denied that Snow had ever accused Hulme of practising witchcraft, insisting that all he did in the now infamous meeting was quiz the poet about complaints made against him, including reference to a joke he’d made about holding a seance in a church and whether he’d ever consulted a tarot reading.
As for Pinto, the BBC reports she is once again preaching (and also doing missionary work in Brazil) but now takes responsibility for her campaign of harassment against Hulme. She said that reading his victim impact statement in court “brought into sharp focus the pain I caused and strengthened my resolve to take responsibility and make amends”:
“I acknowledge the seriousness of my past conduct and do not seek to diminish its impact. I have moved forward in my life and hope those affected in Leicester and elsewhere can find it in their hearts to allow space for healing and growth.”
This can only be welcomed, as when I first wrote about her last year in The Critical Friend she angrily emailed me demanding I retract my “defamatory statements” about her being a “literal stalker”, even though she had, quite literally, pleaded guilty to criminal charges of stalking. The BBC also says that while Pinto is apologetic to Hulme, she denies the allegations from Gibson and many others.
Hulme concluded to the BBC:
“I feel that everybody failed to protect me. I almost feel like I was naive that when the police failed to protect me, I thought the church, which talks about safeguarding, [would]. It fails because people are scared to do the right thing. In James, my favourite book of the Bible, there's a bit that says that anybody who knows the right thing and fails to do it, commits sin. And that's the problem at the heart of this church.”
The fascinating thing about this story is how it intersects with so many of the C of E’s current agonies. There’s the repeated issues around race. Several of Pinto’s victims report that when they tried to make complaints about her, even informally, they were rebuffed with suggestions they were misunderstanding a black person’s different communication style or culture.
Across the C of E there is a growing recognition of the difficulties many ethnic minority clergy and leaders face in ministering in what can be a very white organisation. This is especially acute in the Diocese of Leicester, which covers an incredibly diverse patch of England. Under Snow’s leadership, the diocese has been making concerted efforts to become more intercultural, to be better at bringing Christians from all ethnic backgrounds together and able to worship in a way that is authentic to them.
Snow also pioneered the creation of a new junior bishop role in the diocese with a specific brief to minister to and for ethnic minorities (which is how the frontrunner to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Guli Francis-Dehqani, first became a bishop). And so you can understand in that context, Pinto’s status as one of relatively few non-white church leaders meant it was difficult for the hierarchy to hear anything bad against her. Especially given the troubled history the C of E has. It feels likely there was some unconscious over-correction going on. We know we’ve been racist and exclusionary to ethnic minorities in the past, so now we will go too far in the opposite direction and accuse anyone complaining about our black employee of racism.
There’s also the issue of lay leaders. Unusually Pinto held the bishop’s licence as a lay minister while simultaneously being employed by the Diocese of Leicester. This meant, as their review later found, she kind of fell between two stools. The bishop can strip someone of their licence fairly easily, but that doesn’t cancel their employment. And you can’t just fire someone without good reason and a lengthy paper trail justifying your actions and previous efforts to resolve the problems (and you risk an employment tribunal with all its associated costs and bad press if the employee challenges their sacking).
The mechanisms for prohibiting someone from ministry are completely different and grounded in church law compared to the pathway for disciplining and ultimately sacking an employee. For vicars this is resolved by the tribunals of the Clergy Discipline Measure (soon to become the Clergy Conduct Measure as discussed in recent newsletters). But no equivalent procedure exists for lay ministers, which is what Pinto was.
This seems like a bit of a loophole which needs to be filled fairly urgently, especially as the C of E’s strategy for the future involves a huge surge in lay ministers leading churches. What the C of E wants is basically a lot more Pintos - young lay people pioneering innovative fresh expressions of church outside of the traditional parish context. Yet more reasons why this poster girl for the future C of E was able to evade accountability for her behaviour.
Gibson also said it was part of that age-old problem: Pinto was clearly gifted in ministry and that made it hard for her superiors to believe she was also a toxic person who should not be in any form of leadership. Pinto was a talented street preacher and evangelist who was bringing a steady stream of unchurched folk into their growing community, and yet she was also making Gibson’s life hell. This, as anyone who’s spent any time reading about church scandals knows, is a perennial issue. So, so often an abuser is left in post for far too long and their many sins overlooked because they seem to be doing good things for the kingdom. They can’t be that bad, look how their church is growing! Yes, that behaviour is problematic, but we can’t get rid of them - it would hamper God’s work here.
And finally, the story also intersects with the church’s agonies over sexuality. Hulme is a gay trans man, an unabashed progressive who was seeking ordination from Snow - a evangelical who is personally conservative on the issue of same-sex relationships. Although not at the time, Snow would famously go on to lead the Prayers of Love and Faith project, trying (and ultimately failing) to find a middle ground between the two entrenched conservative and liberal factions in the C of E. As it happens, Pinto also describes herself as LGBT and was a member of the group Inclusive Church. And so you can imagine this heaps on another layer of complexity and anxiety for Snow and the diocesan leadership. How can we resolve this dispute - whose side do we take - without antagonising the liberal wing already suspicious of bishops like Snow? Can we trust what this young liberal trans would-be vicar is saying, when we already think he might be a bit suspect theologically?
Clearly the Diocese of Leicester did not cover itself in glory here. Snow himself has apologised to Hulme and others for the delay in realising what a threat their golden girl Pinto was. They had plenty of opportunity to clock what she was doing earlier and take stronger steps to protect people from her.
But these deeper issues should also be reflected on, and not just by this one diocese. How do we properly take account of the C of E’s sad history of racial injustice, without overcorrecting in the other direction and giving ethnic minority wrong ‘uns a free pass? Do we yet have the right frameworks for lay ministers to operate and be held accountable in, given the central role they are due to play in the 21st century church? And are we so burned out by decline and failure, and so desperate to see growth, innovation and mission, that we are ready to brush under the carpet red flags from those who seem to be succeeding in ministry?
Abortion decriminalised, part 2
Last week we set the historical context of abortion law in the UK and how a sudden imposition of decriminalised abortion in 2019 in Northern Ireland set a precedent for what happened here in England a few weeks ago. But it’s hard to imagine the situation we have today also without the covid pandemic, which pro-abortion activists used skilfully to accelerate their plans to liberalise Britain’s abortion regime. How did the pills by post telemedicine abortions introduced during the lockdown lead to our present situation, where a small number of women are being unprecedentedly prosecuted and even imprisoned for aborting late-term fetuses? And presuming decriminalisation does pass the House of Lords and become law, what on earth should Christians and the church do in response? Is the answer more strident advocacy, prayer, or social action to reduce demand for abortion in the first place?
Quickfire
Pope Leo has praised journalists for their role in exposing abuse scandals in the church, in his first public comments on the matter. The pontiff hailed journalists in Peru, where he has spent much of his ministry, for revealing the truth about an influential Catholic movement there which was recently exposed as as harbouring beatings and sexual assaults despite “unjust attacks”.
The Vatican has also released a 45-minute documentary about Leo’s time serving in Peru, exploring the influence that country has had on the American prelate. The film features interviews with many people who worked alongside the then Robert Prevost as he served as a missionary and bishop.
Last year I interviewed the Christian scientist and doctor Francis Collins, who served as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US for many years and was deeply involved in the country’s fight against covid (and has faced dog’s abuse from many Christian anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdowners as a result). Donald Trump’s new pick to head the NIH is another Christian doctor, Jay Bhattacharya, but he has a different take. He became famous for being sceptical of lockdowns to control the pandemic, and in this interview with evangelical magazine Christianity Today declares that “image-bearers are not biohazards”.
In one of his rare public appearances since leaving Lambeth Palace, Justin Welby has popped up at the Cambridge Union student society to make the case that Keith Makin was “wrong” in some aspects of his report into the John Smyth abuse scandal. He said the report incorrectly suggested he could have done more to ensure Smyth was arrested in 2013 when reports of the abuse reached Lambeth Palace. But, the former archbishop insisted, a paper trail of emails from his office shows he fully informed the police and other bishops in Ely and South Africa, and that the police explicitly told the church to stand down and not interfere in their own investigations.
A Christian reporter in the US has spent years interviewing death row inmates and personally witnessing their executions, which has produced this harrowing and thoughtful reflection on the death penalty and why she has now changed her mind to oppose it.
The Guardian has a regular feature where they force two people with wildly different politics to sit down and share a meal together, called Dining Across the Divide. A recent edition saw a young, female, liberal Green-voting curate from London have dinner with Tory-voting property manager from Milton Keynes.
The BBC have sent a reporter to Damascus to find out how the Christian community there is feeling after a devastating suicide bombing killed 25 worshippers last month. Syrian Christians were already nervous after Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in a lightning revolution by an Islamist militia last year, and many of them now say their only hope is to leave Syria. The Syrian government insists it will protect minorities. Open Doors also has a report from their partners in Syria, who warn of almost daily threats from extremists at Christians, and a suffocating Islamist pressure.
One of the most egregious televangelists of the 1980s, humbled but somehow not destroyed by being caught on camera with a prostitute, has died aged 90. Jimmy Swaggart was one of the most high-profile and wealthy Pentecostal TV preachers of his age, but in 1988 he was brought low by a sex scandal (the first but not the last time his penchant for sex workers would be his undoing). He was kicked out by his Assemblies of God denomination and his audiences never recovered, but he soldiered on until his death.
Disgraced Catholic cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was convicted of embezzlement by a Vatican court, has appealed against his sentence, claiming he was set up by an influential church financial consultant nicknamed the Popess. Becciu is arguing that Francesca Chaouqui sought to destroy him through a secretly taped dinner because she blamed the cardinal for her own conviction for leaking secrets to journalists in 2016, and suspected his hand in leaking raunchy photos of her to the Italian press. This really is the story that never stops giving.
In very unfortunate timing, a Catholic bioethics research centre has shut down. The Anscombe Centre in Oxford, led by academic David Jones, is being closed due to a lack of funds, just when British society is riven by debate over both the decriminalisation of abortion and the legalisation of assisted suicide. Anscombe produced pro-life reports and research, and lobbied policymakers and parliaments.
The Bishop of Burnley Philip North has written a searingly honest article admitting he was too slow to wake up to the grooming gangs scandal. North said despite being told by many white working class families about their fears their daughters were vulnerable to organised gangs, he and the rest of the C of E were too nervous about the awkward racial politics to speak up.
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