Failed To Challenge?

The embittered unemployable are at it again, with nothing either left or better to do than to defame the dead, so it cannot be said too often that the executive summary published on 3rd May 2023, and the full report into the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle published on 12th June, bear no resemblance to each other. The former is in no sense a shorter version of the latter. They are totally different documents. Something has changed since 3rd May. What is it? And where is the original report?

Nevertheless, it is not in dispute that there was no cathedral sex party. It is not in dispute that the move from the old Bishop’s House to the new one made a profit. And since he would certainly have been arrested by now, at least a year later, then it is not in dispute that there was no allegation of sexual assault against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, who should sue every media outlet that had suggested one.

This time last year, there were apparently 22 safeguarding plans in a diocese with only 112 active priests. No one seriously believes that that might be necessary. Hysterical women? Up to a point. Old guard feminist hostility to intergenerational male friendships, and to the Priesthood as the Church defined it? Up to a very considerable point, as also with the closely connected Thatcherite urge to control working-class men in order to punish them for existing. But mostly, this is because anywhere, never mind in the largely economically deprived land between the Tweed and the Tees, an overstaffed office of the overpaid has to justify its existence. The subjection of one in five active priests to a safeguarding plan indicates quite how much overstaffing and overpayment we must be talking about.