LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Telegraph
May 8, 2019
By Gabriella Swerling
The Church of England is ignoring abuse victims, survivors claim, following a report which said that clergy should report sex abuse confessions to police.
The seal of the confessional is a priest’s obligation under canon law to hear a person’s confession of sin, or imagined sin, in complete confidence.
Under these rules, nothing that a priest is told during will be repeated or disclosed under any circumstances. This is also the rule of the Roman Catholic Church.
In 2015 the House of Bishops and the Archbishop’s Council commissioned a working party to assess this law in relation to safeguarding and protecting victims from sexual abuse.
The result was a report published today [WEDS] which concluded that the Church of England would uphold the confidentiality of confession – despite the urging of the Archbishop of York.
However the working party decided against abolishing the seal of the confessional – or even qualifying it with a loophole that priests had to report disclosures of abuse.
Now, unless Church of England’s bishops decide differently next week when they consider the working group’s report, led by the Bishop of Durham, confessions of criminal acts will not automatically be reported to police.
Abuse survivors reacted with frustration and dismay to the working group’s report – which was published a year later than its schedule of March 2018.
Phil Johnson, chair of the campaign group, Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors (MACSAS), said that the Church of England’s failure to admit agree that abuse disclosed during confession should be reported shows that the institution “has missed a golden opportunity to take the moral high-ground”.
“The Church of England is a law unto themselves… they are far more concerned about reputational damage than they are about the welfare of children and all the victims who come forward and disclose abuse. The danger here is that the perpetrators and not the victims are being protected.”
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