Church ‘was wrong to name paedophile bishop’
George Bell is a victim of grave miscarriage of justice, it is claimed
THE Church of England’s decision to name the former Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, as a paedophile has been strongly criticised by a group of senior Church leaders, academics, politicians and retired police officers.
The group claims that the internal inquiry which found Bishop Bell guilty of abuse committed a “grave miscarriage of justice” after failing to interview key witnesses or examine documents that may have cleared him.
Before he was condemned as a child sex abuser in October last year, Bishop Bell had been one of the most revered figures in the Anglican church, praised for his work in speaking out against Hitler in the Thirties, welcoming refugees from Germany and criticising the Allied destruction of German cities.
But his reputation was destroyed after the Church accepted the claims of a woman who came forward to say she was sexually abused by him during the late Forties and early Fifties, when she was aged between five and nine. The Church subsequently settled a compensation claim by the woman, paying her £15,000.
Now campaigners have written to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, calling on him to apologise to the family of Bishop Bell and launch an investigation into the process which led to his “public denigration”.
Frank Field MP, a member of the George Bell Group, said: “There has been a grave miscarriage of justice here. The church acted in secrecy. We don’t know what the charges were, who were the authorities which made the judgment and how that judgment was arrived at.
“If this could happen to a man like Bishop Bell it could happen to someone who is unknown and does not have influential friends to fight for them. We need a much more robust system for dealing with this kind of allegation.”
The woman first made her allegations in 1995, but her complaint was effectively ignored by the then Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, who died in 2009.
It was not until she contacted the office of Archbishop Welby in 2013, that the allegations were finally investigated by the Church.
Although Bishop Bell, who died in 1958, could not be questioned, the Church said it had investigated the victim’s allegations and accepted them as being true on the balance of probabilities. Bishop Bell’s supporters complain that the Church investigation failed to interview his personal chaplain, Canon Adrian Carey, a decorated war hero, who had been with him for much of the period to which the allegations relate. They also claim the Church failed to examine the Bishop’s diary and papers to check whether he was in the country at the time of the alleged abuse.
The row comes after the Church indicated it is to make far-reaching changes to the way it deals with cases of sex abuse, following a highly critical independent report detailing how senior Church figures repeatedly failed to act upon disclosures of an unrelated 1976 assault by a cleric.