THE second Past Cases Review (PCR2) of church-related abuse has provoked expressions of dismay and promises to improve safeguarding procedures (News, 7 October). Like other clergy, I have rigorously kept up my safeguarding training. It’s a bit of a faff for a long-divorced, 72-year-old retired priest, but I accept the necessity, just as I recognise the need for a responsible institution to investigate past lapses in safeguarding. Victims of church abuse, and sometimes those accused of possible abuse, complain of a bullying, unaccountable culture in a Church that seems over-dominated by the judgement of lawyers and the requirements of reputational management.

It’s a huge issue. Almost everyone I know in the C of E knows someone who has experienced abuse or bullying, or someone who has been accused of abuse or bullying. Now that there is a vocabulary around abuse, it evokes painful memories in those who may have repressed them; and so more abuses and failures come to light.

This continuing sorry story is a rebuke and a warning, but it also suggests that the contemporary C of E has little grip on the interior life. There have always been lonely, needy, aggressive, and vulnerable individuals who have the potential to be perpetrators of abuse — some have themselves been victims. There are people who use the Church as a context for wielding power over others, or discharging their anger, or satisfying their longings for forbidden intimacy.

Yet the Church reacts as though these instincts belonged to only a few dangerous predators, who can be dealt with by standardising rules and practices, thus ensuring that the Church is a “safe” space. At the same time, it wants to be seen as non-judgemental, inclusive, and loving to all people and all lifestyles, including those who are vulnerable to doing harm as well as being harmed.

The truth is, there is no ultimately safe space: risk is part of church life, as of all life. While the aspirations of safeguarding are sound, and all involved in pastoral relationships need to examine their behaviour, the Church seems to have little to say on the management of ordinary anger and lust, and the virtues of self-examination, restraint, and chastity. What we call abuse does not always spring from an unusually perverse psychology. There are much-loved pastoral priests who have turned out to be abusers; charismatic preachers who have demanded sexual favours; much admired senior clergy who gaslight those who oppose them.

The capacity for abuse is not out there, it is in here, sometimes hiding as an almost inhuman capacity for silence and cruelty justified by well-meant regulations. As Jesus pointed out, the law is not to be abolished, although it can become the enemy of grace, especially when pious hypocrisy is built into the system.