Breaking news!
Hollingworth has conceded he thinks the job of GG was wrong for him (see here). Let’s hope it hasn’t taken him until now to come to that conclusion, because abuse victims could have told him that years, if not decades, ago. They could have told him that when he reassured victims he was “keeping a close eye” on how abuse complaints were being dealt with, but which later inaction he justified as “not being directly involved in”. They could have told him that when he refused to defrock a clergyman (a bishop by the time of the complaint) for underage sex, which he justified as the (14yo) victim’s instigation. They could have told him that when he appointed a clergyman against whom there were two known abuse allegations to a post on the diocesan sexual misconduct complaints committee.
And now Hollingworth tries to justify his failure based on some perceived, or unperceived (it’s not really clear which) separation of church and state. He obviously still doesn’t get it! The public disillusionment with him was nothing to do with any link or otherwise between church and state – it was simply and purely that he stood exposed as miserably inadequate in dealing with sexual immorality in his subordinates, and pitifully shameless in his attempts to wriggle out of responsibility for his poor judgement. Moreover, his supposed moral (religious) and ethical (social welfare degree) education had obviously done nothing to improve him.
Churchman or not, such qualities are not what we want to see in a GG.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
One can only surmise that what he meant by ‘separation of church and state’ was that he had moved (apparently without giving a moment’s thought to what it might entail) from a job in which he was free to operate according to the Church’s – or at least local churchmen’s – notion of reality (and thus of appropriate behaviour) to a job where reality and appropriate behaviour were defined by a considerably broader demographic of opinion, most of the constituents of which view child sexual abuse rather more sternly than do all too many churchmen (abusers or not). In other words, what Hollingworth ‘underestimated’ with regard to the separation of church and state was the fact that, as G-G, Christian authority would no longer protect him from public censure: he would be accountable to the population at large rather than just the powerbrokers of the Anglican church – a rather more rigorous standard, as it turned out.