IT IS not often that I come to the defence of a bishop — or a “Rt Rev” as the BBC’s illiterate website has it — but it is hard to see why the rage at the scandal at Blackburn Cathedral (News, 16 August) should be directed at Bishop Julian Henderson.

It helps here to think of news stories as something like Japanese plays in which all the players wear wooden masks. There are a limited number of masks available for each play. If the play is about abuse in a church context, then one of the masks is, obviously, the wicked abuser. There are several for the innocent victims.

But the masks for an authority figure must all display a villainous character. There is one for the man who covers things up, one for the man who doesn’t care, another for the man who is complicit. But there is no mask for the bloke doing his best in an impossible situation. That would lack dramatic oomph. There are no masks for the lawyers, either — in fact, there’s no place for them on the stage at all, even though they are the characters who determine what all the others may do or say.

So far as I can make sense of the Blackburn case, it is about a man under suspicion — Canon Andrew Hindley, who has insisted that he never posed a danger to young people or has been a safeguarding risk — who has been sheltering behind the law. That can be frustrating, but, in some sense, it is what the law exists to do. It does not attempt to distinguish between the innocent and those who cannot be found guilty.

Ah, you will say, but this is safeguarding! We cannot let pettifogging legalities get in the way of action to protect the vulnerable. This is exactly the line taken by the independent safeguarding expert Ian Elliott, who is quoted in the BBC’s account as saying: “You’re not trying to apply a criteria of ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ within safeguarding. You’re not going to reach that level of proof. But from a safeguarding point of view, you can’t lose sight of the fact that you must act. You have to intervene, to eliminate and manage the risk that has been identified. And that has to come first, before legal considerations.”

Few people take this attitude consistently: some of those currently outraged over the failure to act against Canon Hindley were just as outraged when Christ Church, Oxford, suspended Dr Martyn Percy on safeguarding charges that had not been investigated in any depth.

But, in Blackburn, the relevant point is that the cathedral authorities did finally intervene against the canon, and took the legal consequences afterwards. This is exactly what the safeguarding lobby would recommend, and it cost the Church more than £220,000 in a legal settlement. That is then denounced as “a pay-off” by Mr Elliott. But, when a character wears the mask of a church authority in these morality plays, there is no honourable part for them to play.

The Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) is obviously a very bad law. It seems unable to deliver justice to either the innocent or the guilty. Both in Blackburn and in the Percy case, there are allegations that CDM complaints have been lodged as harassments against witnesses “on the other side”. But that is a story about law and lawyers, and you can’t put that on stage. You might get sued if you tried.

FOR light relief, it is worth watching the transformation of a Church into a Thing through successive right-wing papers. The story started, of course, here in the Church Times (News, 16 August). It was picked up by Canon Giles Fraser on UnHerd, who turned a tendency into a strategy: “The Church of England is ditching the word church. . . And the exciting new name for church is to be . . . I kid you not: ‘New Things’.”

What he really wanted to complain about was the schism at St Helen’s, Bishopgate: “Of the 900 New Things reported by the dioceses, only five of them are from this more Catholic side of the church coalition. New Things ‘has been, and remains, essentially an evangelically driven project’. . .

“This new status quo — whereby our New Things don’t have priests, they have leaders — threatens a vital part of our whole constitutional settlement.” I do not remember Canon Fraser writing much in defence of our constitutional settlement when he was on The Guardian.

He gave subsequent rewriters of the story everything they needed. In the Telegraph, “The Anglican church appears to be increasingly avoiding the word ‘church’ when discussing the creation of new worshipping communities and congregations, a report has found. . .

“Dr Giles Fraser, Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew, told the Telegraph that this apparent reluctance to use the word ‘church’ reflects ‘a misplaced desire to be relevant and modern-sounding’.”

And so to GB news, where the intro told you exactly which play was being put on for your entertainment: “The Church of England looks set to undergo a woke rebrand yet again.”