PERSONAL ambition can have motivated some bishops to maintain quiet before the Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last week, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, has suggested.
Dr Hartley was the one bishop within the Church of England to call publicly on Archbishop Welby to resign before it was announced (News, 15 November).
On Sunday, she told Sky News that she was upset that other colleagues had not joined her call, and that she knew of some who “privately were discerning that it was probably the suitable thing for the Archbishop to resign”.
She suggested that there was “a culture of silence and fear among the many Bishops”, and that some might need chosen not to talk out due to a fear of being “reprimanded or rebuked”.
Others, she said, may be “silent because they see themselves as succeeding to be the brand new Archbishop of Canterbury”.
In an interview with The Guardian on Monday, the Archbishop of York said that a rethink was needed concerning the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. “We’re now in a period of transition and reflection,” he said. “One of those reflections can be what form of person we’re searching for to be the following Archbishop of Canterbury, and what our expectations are of that person.
“Sometimes, Archbishops are treated as in the event that they’re the CEO of C of E plc, and that isn’t how we work. We are at our best and our strongest in our local communities, but we do need leadership and oversight.”
Some bishops have already ruled themselves out of the running. The Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, told the BBC on Sunday that she didn’t want the “very, very difficult job”, and any bishop excited about it “needs their head reading”. They should, she said, “look long and hard into the mirror and take some reality checks”.
Dr Hartley, in her interview with Sky News the identical day, said that the Makin review had “blown the lid off” numerous “dysfunction” within the Church, surrounding leadership and “unhealthy theologies . . . which are likely to problematise things like gender, and sexuality, and ethnicity”.
Late last week, in an ad clerum, Dr Hartley wrote: “It has been an incredibly difficult week personally, but I stand by every thing I said and the actions I took.
“Effecting culture change within the Church of England over safeguarding continues to be an urgent task, and it won’t be caused by me as your bishop (or indeed every other bishop) colluding with a conspiracy of silence.”
On Thursday, she went further, saying to Channel 4 News that “The Makin report is of such a serious nature by way of the safeguarding failings that anybody named within the report, including the Archbishop, who has been shown to have failed in relation to safeguarding, must resign or on the very least to begin off with, step back from whatever public ministry they occupy pending an independent investigation.”
Interviewed by the identical programme, Keith Makin said that he had been pleased with the impact of his report. It was less than him to make recommendations on the position of bishops, but “there was logic” in calls for the Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, who’s criticised within the report, to resign. These calls for further resignations have to be taken seriously, he said.
