The Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North, calls for more “awareness” around sex abuse as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigns over the Church of England’s failure to alert authorities to the abuse of boys by John Smyth. Report by Ajagbef. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I think he's made a great contribution to the church. He brought a very clear focus at the
00:05beginning on evangelism, on prayer and on reconciliation. He's brought faith into the
00:11public square and has enabled the church to engage with some of the major global issues that we face,
00:18particularly around the environment and global conflict, and has been a great reconciler.
00:23And also he's helped us to address some of the tougher issues, particularly around diversity
00:27in the church and also, ironically, safeguarding. He has seen progress in the area of safeguarding
00:32and it's an irony that it's that that eventually has led to his downfall.
00:36I think one thing that makes me quite so depressed tonight is that again and again
00:42the church has been told to improve in certain areas and yet another report comes out measuring
00:47limited progress. Now it must be said that on the ground our local churches are working tremendously
00:52hard and there really is cultural change in the local church but they're being let down, I think,
00:57by failures at the centre. And the learning from Macon is really clear. There's something about
01:03being a survivor-centred, trauma-informed church and really listening to the voices of survivors
01:08in the way we haven't always. There's something very important about disclosures and making timely
01:13disclosures and disclosing even when you think someone else has disclosed. And there's also, I
01:17think, warnings about the way in which the structure of the church makes it easy
01:23for powerful, well-connected individuals to groom others into abuse. We've got to be much, much more
01:28aware of those kind of feelings. So I think I, along with many leaders, will be paying a great
01:33deal of attention tonight to the way the culture that we set and the way we use power ourselves.