UNITED KINGDOM
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By Alistair Lexden
Last updated: March 28, 2016
Lord Lexden is the Conservative Party’s official historian. His website can be found here.
Until a few months ago, the formidable reputation of George Bell, Bishop of Chichester for nearly 30 years and runner-up for the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1944, seemed totally secure. Within the Church of England he had long been revered as one of its greatest bishops, learned, devout and inspiring. More widely, he was famous for his courageous stands in international affairs. Before 1939 .no one did more to sustain and defend German Christian leaders and Jews of all kinds in the face of Nazi persecution. During the Second World War, he led the protests against the bombing of entire German cities which killed so many civilians. This brought him much criticism to which Churchill contributed richly, but no one questioned his deep Christian integrity. “The Church”, he said in 1943,” has still a special duty to be a watchman for humanity, and to plead the cause of the suffering, whether Jew or Gentile”.
On 22 October last year, everything changed. The Church of England’s media centre issued a statement announcing that, under an out of court settlement, compensation (later revealed to be £15,000) had been paid to an unnamed individual who had claimed to have suffered sexual abuse at Bishop Bell’s hands in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The current Bishop of Chichester, Martin Warner, said “we face with shame a story of abuse of a child”. Yet neither he, nor anyone else among the Church authorities, has divulged any information about the nature of the alleged uncorroborated abuse, where exactly it is supposed to have taken place, the manner in which investigations were conducted or the expertise possessed by the anonymous individuals who examined the undisclosed evidence and apparently found it convincing.
George Bell has been condemned in secret by processes whose character is totally unknown. Today’s Church authorities have denied natural justice to one of the most eminent of their predecessors.
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