A very important message was just posted on Anglican Ink. Excerpts:
Several months ago Rachel Thebeau released a bombshell letter following a cataclysmic breakdown in the Stewart Ruch trial. In it she declared, “The proper channels are now compromised. Our sheep deserve better from our shepherds who are called to lay down their lives for us, not the other way around.” She also remarked, “confidentiality is used [by the Province] as a tool to minimize, scapegoat, and intentionally distort and avoid important facts.” While we cannot confirm the background to her own complaint, we can sadly confirm her conclusions. Indeed in our opinion all the proper channels are compromised and they have been for a long time.
We call upon the Province and the College of Bishops to undergo a process of repentance, as well as structural, synodical, and canonical reform.
The throes of this current situation are rooted not only in failures of canon, but more importantly in failures of culture, courage and character. The background to our current troubles, in our view, is that the church has habitually failed to properly vet its leaders, to which previous misconduct cases like that of Todd Atkinson attest, and furthermore that the College of Bishops has likewise habitually failed to hold each other accountable. These are not new issues, in fact they go back to the very formation of the ACNA and are a direct product of its unresolved DNA. They are features, reinforced by the glue with holds the Province together, negotiated division.
It is due to these features that the Province is now in a crisis of credibility when it comes to its handling of credible cases of abuse, which yesterday evening was further aggravated despite our best efforts to prevent it. Do not for a minute believe the Provincial messaging that “ACNA remains steadfast in its commitment to accountability and to establishing and upholding best practice standards to protect those who experience harm from the Church.” These corporate talking points of the Province are aspirational, they are not descriptions of reality, and there is documentation two miles deep to prove the point. In our opinion, the people who should have the most confidence in the current system are abusers, as they can rest assured almost certainly nothing will happen to them.
Recent statements to the effect that the Province and its leaders are responsible and quick to respond to credible complaints of abuse are also not supported by evidence, which should be apparent to anyone who has read the undisputed background material. The reality is that the victims of the ACNA have been made to wait in silence for years after the original hearers of their reports dismissed them or failed to act, following which Provincial systems often favored the suppression or compartmentalism of the truth, sometimes in our opinion even to the point of taking material shared in confidence to establish narratives that are less than forthcoming and absolving of Provincial inaction. These are systemic issues as well as personal failures. There has been without doubt a fundamental failure, and dereliction of officership by the church’s leaders. We call upon the ACNA not to have supernatural abilities of discernment or safeguarding, but simply the normal moral clarity and employee systems provided by your average business and secular Human Resources departments.
We submit to you that the College of Bishops in the past has been willfully ignorant, grossly incompetent, and negligent, and that this is attested by the fact that none of them knew that Derek Jones, the previous chaplaincy endorser for the ACNA, registered his personal 501c3 with the Armed Forces Chaplains Board while claiming to represent the entire denomination as the ACNA endorser. No one disputes these facts. What is remarkable is that we have been writing and speaking to the leaders of the Province, and the Provincial misconduct office, of Derek’s malign efforts to avoid Provincial oversight for years. None of this was a surprise to us. We have pages and pages of documents speaking to this effect.
In fact in 2021 a brave priest in our number pointed out the background to this situation to the Archbishop, Foley Beach. Foley has admitted that Derek misled him for years into his Archiepiscopacy by not disclosing that he was in fact a part of the Anglican Church of Nigeria and not fully a canonical member of the ACNA, under whose oversight he was supposed to be under according to Canon 11, but never was. This admission, made by multiple bishops, means that essentially for the last ten years the ACNA has not had control of or even the basic facts regarding its own endorsing agency. In fact it has not even have the wherewithal to know what questions to ask in order to provide effective oversight of it, putting its 300 or so chaplains in credible risk, which hundreds of pages of evidence can prove beyond doubt. We acknowledge that the ultimate blame resides with Derek Jones but simply state that leaders had a duty to know.
Again, this fact has been pointed out to Provincial leadership, going back at least four and a half years. When this brave priest, acting as a whistleblower, was discovered to have told on Derek Jones’ misbehavior, by going to the Archbishop of the Province and warning him about the issues in his own endorsing agency, all of which are now manifestly known and agreed upon, and for which the Archbishop was ultimately accountable to, Derek immediately inhibited him. Foley, instead of acting immediately upon this credible claim of abuse, recused himself, and handed the matter over to the Dean of the Province, Ray Sutton.
Ray Sutton had in that moment a sacred responsibility of jurisprudence that he and others now say is working and effective, but even in this single case he did not go to the one now universally known to have been falsely accused, but to Derek Jones, the abuser, whose view and opinion he later enshrined in his findings. This is just one example in our opinion of the pervasive clericalism that exists within the province, which favors the claims of clergy over laity and the claims of bishops over priests.
Leave a Reply