UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
@harrietsherwood
Thursday 31 December 2015
Letters written by a former archbishop of Canterbury and a coterie of establishment figures – including a former government minister and a high court judge – in support of a bishop accused of sexual abuse more than 20 years ago have been disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.
The confidential letters to police and prosecutors springing to the defence of Peter Ball, the former bishop of Lewes and Gloucester, are likely to fuel accusations by survivors of sexual abuse of a cover-up at the heart of the Church of England and wider establishment.
Ball escaped prosecution at the time, resigned his post as bishop and retired to a rented cottage on the Prince of Wales’s Duchy of Cornwall estate. After a fresh investigation was opened in 2012, Ball, now 83, was sentenced to 32 months in prison in October 2015 after pleading guilty to abusing 18 vulnerable young men between 1977 and 1992.
George Carey, who was archbishop of Canterbury at the time when police were investigating claims of sexual abuse by Ball, wrote to the director of public prosecutions and the chief constable of Gloucester police in February 1993. While repeatedly stressing he was not trying to influence the outcome of the investigation, Carey wrote of Ball’s “excruciating pain and spiritual torment” and the implications for the state of his mental health.
A separate letter from Tim Renton, then the Conservative MP for Mid Sussex and a former government minister, spoke of Ball “suffer[ing] terribly” during the investigation while implicitly acknowledging that the bishop may have broken his vows of chastity.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.