Bishop’s warning over ‘WildWest’ Internet

SOME CLERGY guilty of viewing child pornography have had the “innocent view” that it is not as bad as child abuse, the Bishop of Chester has said.

Bishop Peter Forster made his comments as he warned of the dangers of the internet and in particular online gambling.

During a House of Lords debate, he said: “I have had a particular problem with two or three clergy in my diocese who have innocently thought that accessing child pornography on the internet was somehow not as serious as interfering directly with an actual human being.

“Of course, the law quite properly says that accessing child pornography on the internet is to be complicit in the actual original abuse.

“People have that sort of innocent view of the internet so often. The more checks and balances that we can introduce, the better.”

In a recent case the Rev Ian Hughes, the former priest in charge of St Luke’s, Poulton, and St Paul’s, Seacombe, in Wirral in Chester Diocese, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in January after pleading guilty to 16 counts of pos- sessing pornography.

Supporting some restrictions on gambling websites, Bishop Forster said: “I often think that we are now, in the digital age, in a digital version of the wild west, where there was all the excitement and discovery and all the positive aspects in America when it opened up, but the reality of law and order had to come in later. We must provide proper protection to people in the online world.”

He added: “With the introduction of the internet, we are living through a revolution that is probably more powerful than the invention of steam power or the internal combustion engine.”

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