The Church of England has been my life’s work. What has it done to my soul?

This Christmas is not going to be an easy one for the Church – but fundamentally, its mission and message have not changed.

By Stephen Cherry

The Church of England was cracked open by the publication in November of the Makin Report into the sadistic abuse of boys and young men by the conservative evangelical John Smyth. Its release was followed five days later by the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In as much as truth was revealed and accountability recognised, this was a good episode. And yet, for me as a priest of the Church of England, it has also been a time of extraordinary anguish. This is because I see the appalling physical abuse meted out by Smyth, and the inclination of leaders to turn a blind eye, as indicative of deep and troubling faults in the culture of the Church that has claimed my allegiance, shaped the use of my energies and talents, and structured my spiritual and emotional life over my almost 40 years as a priest. I wonder what this allegiance and ministry have done to my soul.

Maybe I should have started worrying sooner. Christian history is riddled with ethical shortcomings. Among them, the failure to appreciate the evil of slavery and the failure to recognise that for a century or more in Ireland unmarried mothers and their offspring were treated as less than human press upon me closely. These huge moral failures can’t be pinned on individuals but reveal something wrong with structures of thought – with ideas being deeply wrong.

John Boyne’s novel A History of Loneliness tells the story of an Irish Catholic priest who lived through the exposure of extensive abuse perpetrated and covered up by the Church, and who comes to agonise about his complicity. In parallel with this, the Irish people’s faith in the Church is shattered. It is a powerful, brave book that reveals the subtlety of human anguish when a decent person finds themselves within a corrupt and therefore corrupting institution.

As I have reflected on the Makin Report and the Smyth case, I have, of course, been appalled by the violence to which young men and boys were subjected, and the theological framework within which it happened. But if anything, my concern is more deeply with the spirituality of grooming. Grooming takes time and might appear benign – even positive. Groomers are invariably people of charm and charisma who use these gifts to not only gain the trust and respect of the groomed but their compliance, deference and obedience. The groomer acquires personal power while the groomed lose their instincts of self-protection. Grooming co-opts the agency of the abused. It is the occupation of the soul. Grooming hasn’t had the same attention as physical or sexual abuse, but it is part of what is being exposed as spiritual abuse.

“Spiritual abuse shares some of the hallmarks of bullying and harassment, including intimidation, manipulation and inducing fear. However, what makes this distinct are the elements associated with religious belief including coercion through religious position, membership of the religious community, scripture, biblical discourse and spiritual threats” – these sentences from the Church of England’s “Safeguarding Manual” make it clear that the Church understands that religion can make a context conducive to bullying, harassment and manipulation. Full marks for institutional self-awareness.

The question is whether this self-awareness is enough to transform the Church itself; to shift it from being an environment that makes abuse possible to one that embodies compassion, respect, care of others, openness to difference of perspective and the intention not only to protect the vulnerable and downtrodden but to raise them up.

To be an institution dedicated to this sort of mission is not a new challenge for the Church. It has often worked in this way: schools, hospitals and hospices are among the triumphs. But it is the hospice that I believe offers the clearest example of the way in which Christian values should play out today. Death has always been the only certainty in life, but it took the pioneering determination of Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern hospice movement, to face down complacency and recognise that much could be done for the dying. Hospices contribute beyond measure to the lives of many dying people and their loved ones. It is a triumph of practical care and compassion, and the unflinching recognition of the need and vulnerability of each individual.

This Christmas is not going to be an easy one for the Church of England. The suspicion that power is mishandled, truth is not named, the vulnerable are exploited rather than cared for, and that there might be yet more horrors to be revealed, will make it difficult to proclaim its faith. But fundamentally the mission and the message have not changed. It is that life is hard, people are sinful, and God is love.

An image that draws much of this together for me is Giovanni Bellini’s The Madonna of the Meadow, in which the naked baby on the mother’s lap is asleep, sleep being a metaphor of death, and in a posture anticipating the doleful image of the pietà, where the dead Christ, taken down from the cross, is cradled by the same maternal arms. These are images that put tenderest love and bleakest brutality in absolute proximity. That’s Christianity for you.

Or, as Mary Elizabeth Coleridge perceived when she envisioned the child in the manger: “The safety of the world was lying there/And the world’s danger.”