Safeguarding in Church and State over the Last 50 Years: ‘From Ball and Banks to Beech via Bell’

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-193
Author(s):  
Peter Collier

This article describes the changes in criminal law and procedure that the author saw take place during 50 years of practice, turning a criminal justice system in which it was difficult to prosecute cases involving multiple child witnesses into one much better adapted to cases alleging sexual assault and the needs of vulnerable witnesses. The article reviews, decade by decade, the major developments in people's understanding and perception of the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse, touching on a number of high-profile events. It traces the development of the Church of England's safeguarding policy, noting how it tracks the development of secular policies. In parallel it identifies a number of significant cases of sexual abuse by clergy which were/are the subject of ‘lessons learned’ reviews. A note of caution is however sounded arising from the cases of Carl Beech and Bishop Bell, in particular the danger of not following well-established investigative procedures but jumping to judgement. The article concludes by suggesting how investigation and fact-finding might take place in the future, independent of the bishops, but under the supervision of a ‘judge’, and argues that effective risk assessments can only be based on findings of fact.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-589
Author(s):  
Julius Landwirth

When alleged child sexual abusers are prosecuted and brought to trial, child witnesses are often exposed to procedural requirements of the criminal justice system that may cause further psychologic trauma. These procedures are driven by the dual interests of pursuing the truth and protecting the constitutional rights of the accused to a fair trial with a presumption of innocence. Proposals for judicial reforms designed to balance both interests while shielding children from potential adverse effects of the process are discussed.


1992 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Taylor

In January 1736 an anonymous pamphlet appeared under the title,The Alliance between Church and State, or the Necessity of an Established Religion, and a Test Law demonstrated. Its author was William Warburton, a well-to-do but still comparatively obscure country clergyman. Although this was only his second publication in the field of divinity, he was already revealing the taste for controversy which was to characterise his literary career. TheAllianceappeared at the height of the campaign by the Protestant dissenters to repeal the Test Act of 1673, and only weeks before the defeat, on 12 March 1736, of a motion for its repeal in the House of Commons. Clearly intending his work as a contribution to this debate Warburton was concerned less with giving an account of the relationship between Church and State than with providing a coherent and forceful justification both of the establishment of the Church of England and of the defence of that establishment by the Test Act. In the preface he claimed to treat the subject ‘abstractedly’.


2020 ◽  
pp. 243-257
Author(s):  
Никита Кузнецов

Данная статья посвящена обзору и анализу взглядов дореволюционных канонистов Московской духовной академии на церковно-государственные отношения, преимущественно профессоров Николая Семёновича Суворова и Николая Александровича Заозерского. Были проанализированы их библейские, святоотеческие и исторические аргументы по данной теме. Представлены их взгляды на следующие системы церковно-государственных отношений: симфония, иерократия, слияние Церкви с государством, государственная церковность, отделение Церкви от государства. Автор статьи дает оценку мнениям вышеуказанных канонистов и комментирует их. В работах Суворова и Заозерского также отражена их реакция на провозглашение свободы совести Манифестом 17 октября 1905 г., что рассматривается автором статьи. Преимущественное внимание к западной постановке проблемы взаимодействия Церкви и государства и её решению сказалось на их положительном отношении к сложившемуся синодальному строю в Российской империи при общем христианском понимании специфики вопроса. This article reviews and analyzes the views of pre-revolutionary canonists of the Moscow Theological Academy on church-state relations, mainly professors Nikolai Semenovich Suvorov and Nikolai Alexandrovich Zaozersky. Their biblical, patristic and historical arguments on the subject were analyzed. Particular attention to this issue was due to the general upgrade of Russian theological and canonical science and the exacerbation of this issue in the West. The second half of the XIX- beginning of the XX centuries was marked by the processes of separation of the Church and State. Their views on the following systems of church-state relations are presented: symphony, hierocracy, the merger of Church and State, state churchness, separation of Church and State. The author gives each system its own assessment and comment on the opinions of the above canonists. Their work also reflects the reaction to the beginnings of freedom of conscience, which were proclaimed by the Manifesto on October 17, 1905. Most of their attention to the western formulation and the solution of cooperation between the Church and the state affected their positive attitude to the existing synodal system in the Russian Empire with a general Christian understanding of the specifics of this issue.


1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.


Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman

Chapter 7 reveals how Radical Republicans during Reconstruction adopted a new state constitution that disqualified ministers of the gospel from preaching for failure to take a Test Oath professing present and past loyalty to the Union. Northern evangelical church leaders made a declaration of loyalty and a profession that slavery and slaveholding amounted to sin into a litmus test for church membership. Opposition to the Test Oath produced the ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Cummings v. State of Missouri. This decision undercut the Radical redefinition of Protestant faith and citizenship. It also provided the legal grist with which southern evangelicals reclaimed the church lands and buildings that Union soldiers, Radicals, and their northern evangelical allies had seized during the war. High-profile litigation over church property reflected the preferences of partisan judges. These disputes and their judicial outcomes further clouded the boundaries of church and state.


1966 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Dinka

THE relations between the Church and State have been for many years the subject of interest to the political theorist, the student of contemporary totalitarian movements, and of particular concern to the student of comparative political institutions and systems. To the student of political theory it invokes the old conflict between the spiritual and the temporal authorities, between the papal authority and the claim of the emerging national states. For the student of modern totalitarianism it raises, without answering, the crucial question of the extent to which a totalitarian system can tolerate competing ideologies within the same national community. Finally, for the student of comparative institutions, in certain circumstances (for example, in Poland), it presents certain features of uniqueness that call for explanation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61
Author(s):  
Colin Buchanan

A title such as this hardly suggests one is breaking new ground. But I edge into print on the subject, stirred by the interesting Speaker's Lecture given by the outgoing Second Estates Commissioner, Sir Tony Baldry, in December 2014, and published in the May 2015 edition of this Journal. It reads as the enthusiastic, even romantic, expression of the State–Church relationship by an almost doctrinaire establishmentarian; and I use the word ‘doctrinaire’ deliberately, for I have spent a lifetime of bumping up against leaders of both Church and State, from Enoch Powell to George Carey (let alone Derek Pattinson and Philip Mawer), who exude a firm conviction that the establishment of the Church of England is entrenched somewhere in the Apostles' Creed. Sir Tony continues in this tradition as he serenely asserts ‘We come then to the reign of Henry VIII. I think the important point here is that the Church of England is the creation of Parliament.’ But would not Augustine, Anselm and the drafters of Magna Carta (who are cited in Baldry's previous paragraph) all be turning in their graves? And what apoplexy would have come upon Newman, Pusey and Keble to have learned that their Church was thus created? Or, more to the point, is the ecclesiastical action of Parliament in the days when church and nation were co-terminous of any relevance to whether and how an unbelieving Parliament should hold control of a Christian body today? However, it is his brief section on ‘Parliament and Anglican liturgy’ which prompted the present submission.


1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 283-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall

There are those ready to admire the Puritans almost for the very name (as did Spurgeon), and there are others who like Sir Andrew Aguecheek when confronted with ‘a kind of Puritan’ are ready ‘to beat him like a dog’ (as did Macaulay): but may we not with Sir Toby say to both these groups, ‘For being a Puritan? Thine exquisite reason?’—for Sir Toby, even in his cups, saw the need apparently to distinguish and define.The problem of Puritanism is to define what it was and who the Puritans were—a fact often recognised but leading to little change in the treatment of the subject which is nearly always regarded as a comprehensive but homogeneous entity. Three examples may suffice to show what difficulties may arise for those who, seeking instruction, go to the most respected authors. First, A. S. P. Woodhouse, in Puritanism and Liberty, writes that ‘Puritanism is an entity’ capable of being extended to cover ‘the varied forces generated by the Protestant Reformation and given their opportunity by the revolt against the Crown and the Church in the first half of the seventeenth century.’ However, it is also possible to describe the Puritans as ‘the more conservative,’ ‘the strictly calvinistic,’ who ‘followed the Genevan pattern in Church and State’ and were ‘synonymous with Presbyterians.’ But, ‘the cleavage between the Presbyterians and sectaries is marked,’ yet this division leaves ‘the problem of the centre party, the Independents.’ Following Troeltsch one can speak of ‘a Puritan church type and a Puritan sect type, the ideal of the holy community is true of all the Puritan groups.’ Finally, ‘it is not necessary to posit a unity but there is continuity in Puritan thought.’ Here, as elsewhere, as soon as a statement is made a qualification of it, if not a contradiction of it, becomes necessary.


2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Belton

Parole has been the subject of scrutiny in recent years, both due to offences that are committed by high-profile parolees, and for the perceived leniency that it provides by allowing offenders early release from imprisonment. This paper analyses the operation of parole in New Zealand with reference to the case of Reid v New Zealand Parole Board, together with a review of the Law Commission’s report on sentencing and parole, and the resulting amendment to the Parole Act. It concludes that parole is an effective tool in the criminal justice system, and should certainly be retained.


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