The Truth Must Out

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There can be no compromises when it comes to protecting children in church. Too often, however, the church has scandalously backed away from the sort of complete transparency that alone is needed in order to restore trust.
Unless the church does everything in its power to keep its children safe it betrays a sacred trust and winds up complicit in the very evil it has pledged to destroy. So why do churches always seem to be getting it wrong?
Partly it’s a fear of the press. Faced with the prospect of headlines linking the church and child abuse, the temptations to batten down the hatches and sort things out “in-house” are overwhelming. But if the Church of England has anything to learn from the scandals that have rocked the Roman church it is that one mustn’t try and confine the scandal of child abuse to the confessional. The truth will out. And, for the protection of future children, the truth must out.
Some years ago I discovered an elderly member of my congregation had once been to prison for abusing children. He couldn’t go to his local church without being recognised. So he travelled miles across town to seek the anonymity of our church where nobody knew anything about him or his past. Was he a very simple old man, who had been punished, and was now seeking forgiveness? If so, then it would be quite wrong for the church to turn him away. Or was he a clever predator, still on the look out for another opportunity? Needless to say, we watched him like a hawk.
He is dead now, and has faced the judgment of his maker. But as a parish priest, with over 500 children currently registered in our Sunday school, I have to make judgments that will protect kids this side of eternity. Which is why today’s church is much hotter on child protection issues than it ever has been. And that means, at some level, I have to treat everybody that comes to my church, and works within it, with the same degree of suspicion. The days of an amateurish ’he seems OK to me’ are now long gone.