PERSONAL ambition may have motivated some bishops to keep 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 only bishop in 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 disappointed that other colleagues had not joined her call, and that she knew of some who “privately were discerning that it was probably the right thing for the Archbishop to resign”.
She suggested that there was “a culture of silence and fear among the Bishops”, and that some might have chosen not to speak out because of a fear of being “reprimanded or rebuked”.
Others, she said, might be “silent because they see themselves as succeeding to be the new Archbishop of Canterbury”.
In an interview with The Guardian on Monday, the Archbishop of York said that a rethink was needed about the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. “We’re now in a period of transition and reflection,” he said. “One of those reflections will be what sort of person we’re looking for to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, and what our expectations are of that person.
“Sometimes, Archbishops are treated as if they’re the CEO of C of E plc, and that isn’t how we work. We are at our greatest 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 did not want the “very, very difficult job”, and any bishop thinking 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 same day, said that the Makin review had “blown the lid off” a lot of “dysfunction” in the Church, surrounding leadership and “unhealthy theologies . . . which tend 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 everything I said and the actions I took.
“Effecting culture change in the Church of England over safeguarding is still an urgent task, and it won’t be brought about by me as your bishop (or indeed any 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 in terms of the safeguarding failings that anybody named in the report, including the Archbishop, who has been shown to have failed when it comes to safeguarding, ought to resign or at the very least to start off with, step back from whatever public ministry they occupy pending an independent investigation.”
Interviewed by the same programme, Keith Makin said that he had been pleased with the impact of his report. It was not up to 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 is criticised in the report, to resign. These calls for further resignations need to be taken seriously, he said.