Key members of Clifton safeguarding team quit

From The Tablet 28 January 2012 (see http://www.thetablet.co.uk/latest-news/3779)

LEADING MEMBERS of the safeguarding team in the Diocese of Clifton have resigned ... Roger Bird, the chairman of the diocese’s safeguarding commission; Jane Dziadulewicz, the safeguarding coordinator; and Eugene Gallagher, the safeguarding officer, have all announced they have left. ... the departures come on the back of the resignation of Baroness Scotland as chairwoman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC).

Mr Bird, a retired judge who was chairman of the Clifton safeguarding commission for 11 years, has also resigned from the board of the NCSC. Declan Lang, the Bishop of Clifton, is vice chairman of the NCSC.

It is understood that the resignations are the result of a dispute over the handling of a priest in the diocese who was convicted for downloading child pornography. He was later accused, but not convicted, of breaching the terms of his sex offences order.

Mrs Dziadulewicz ... has begun a legal action against the diocese for constructive dismissal.

She has worked in safeguarding for 23 years and last year addressed the Anglophone Safeguarding Conference in Rome.

STOP CHURCH CHILD ABUSE! - Meeting Friday 27 January 2012

(A call for a Public Inquiry into abuse of children and vulnerable adults by Clergy in England and Wales.) MEETING OF INTEREST GROUPS
Friday 27^th January 2012 at 1.30 pm – Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

Time for the Catholic Church to Open its Secret Archives

Please see http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/richard-scorer/catholic-church-abuses-secret-archives_b_1208905.html

Before the child abuse scandal of the last decade, Catholic priests held influential and highly respected roles within the community. They enjoyed the trust of the public and unquestioned access to children. We know that created extensive opportunities for sexual abuse.

What we don't know is the true scale of that abuse. Child abuse is accompanied by fear and shame, and most victims never come forward. Only around 10% of sexual abuse allegations result in criminal convictions. And there's a further reason, which is that for many decades the Catholic Church persistently ignored and in many cases covered up complaints of abuse. As a lawyer acting for victims, I've seen evidence of cover ups on many of my cases - victims warned against taking their complaints to the police, priests transferred away from parishes suddenly until complaints die down.

The Catholic church now maintains that it abhors child abuse and that it wants to root it out. If the Catholic church is serious about this - and I've no doubt that there are at least some in the church hierarchy who are determined to confront the problem - then in my view it has a responsibility to come clean about past abuse. And there's a simple way for the Catholic church to do this - open its secret archives to the police.

"Secret archives" sounds like something from a Dan Brown novel. But this isn't the Da Vinci Code we're talking about, it's the Code of Canon Law. Canon Law is the legal system of the Catholic church. Canon 489 is very clear that every diocese of the Catholic church must maintain:

"...a secret archive, or at least in the ordinary archive there is to be a safe or cabinet, which is securely closed and bolted and which cannot be removed. In this archive documents which are to be kept under secrecy are to be most carefully guarded."

Canon 489 forbids any documents to be removed from the secret archive under any circumstances and only the Bishop is permitted to have the key to it. The documents which Canon 489 says must be kept in the secret archive are:

• Documents from historic criminal cases (ie within Canon law) concerning "matters of a moral nature"

• Documentary proof of canonical warnings or corrections when someone has been about to commit an offence, or is suspected of having committed one, or has been guilty of scandalous behaviour

• Documents relating to preliminary investigations for a penal process that was closed without a formal trial; and

• Documents relating to any other matters the bishop considers secret.

In simple terms, every diocese has a secret archive of information about past allegations of abuse. I've come across this myself on cases where we've forced the church to make a disclosure affadavit detailing what information is held in the secret archive about a particular priest. The church has accepted in those cases that the secret archive exists and that only the Bishop has access to it, so that only the Bishop can make the disclosure affadavit. I've no doubt that stored in those archives is a mass of information about past abuse allegations. And because so many of these allegations were hushed up at the time, many of them will never have been known to the police. It's time they were.

So the choice for the Catholic church is simple. It has in its possession documentary evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Is it prepared to hand that evidence over to the proper authorities? It is prepared to open the secret archives? It seems to me that there's no better test of whether the Catholic church is genuine about confronting the evil of child abuse by priests.

Specialist abuse lawyers call for public inquiry into church abuse

The Times has today published an article responding to a letter sent to the editor and signed by leading law firms including Pannone Solicitors calling for a public inquiry into abuse within English and Welsh Church institutions.

Richard Scorer, lead author of the letter and head of the Serious Injury Group at Pannone Solicitors, is quoted alleging that the “Catholic Church has an endemic problem, a culture of denial and a culture of cover-up”.

Under Canon law, all clergymen are under an obligation to ensure that in each diocese there is “a secret archive or at least in the common archive a safe or cabinet, completely closed and locked, which cannot be removed”. The documents to be enclosed within these safe places are to be any documents containing “matters of morals” or “criminal cases”, and only the bishop of the diocese is to have the key for access.

Within our letter to the editor as cited by the article, specialist child abuse lawyers call for a public inquiry with powers to access the documents enclosed in these safe areas. As specialists in clergy abuse, we feel that the culture of cover-up within the Catholic Church cannot be challenged without a full public inquiry being permitted to take place.

Whilst we acknowledge that child protection has improved since the Nolan reforms, it is difficult to fully assess this due to the nature of these cases and the period of time before a victim of abuse feels able to talk of the childhood abuse they suffered. Despite these steps towards improving the safeguards and systems in place to identify and prevent clergy abuse, the Times suggests that the Church appears unlikely to accept requests to open the secret archives to scrutiny. The Church fiercely contests the majority of legal cases brought by victims of abuse by priests, by teachers, and by other members of the Clergy.

A public inquiry would help ensure that victims of any abuse as a child can obtain the justice they deserve, whilst allowing the Church to implement further safeguards to prevent future abuse from occurring.

Locked archives that guard the Catholic Church's guilty secrets - The Times 17 January 2012

Resignation of Baroness Scotland confirmed by 'The Times'- 14 January 2012

Chair of National Catholic Safeguarding Commission resigns after only 10 months in post

Concerned About Abuse in the Catholic Church in England and Wales understands that 10 months after she announced that she was "delighted to have been appointed as Chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission", former Attorney General PPatricia Scotland has resigned as chair of the NCSC.

Is she responding finally to the calls from survivors for her resignation or could it be that the realities of how the Church deals with safeguarding issues has sapped her delight?

See the following links for background

http://caaccew.blogspot.com/2011/08/abuse-victims-demand-baroness-scotland.html

http://caaccew.blogspot.com/2011/08/should-we-be-surprised-that-survivors.html