A fifth of General Synod members joined a mutiny in a failed attempt to bar the Archbishop of York from addressing the church’s parliament.
With bishops remaining divided over whether he should resign, the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell said trust had been broken in the Church of England in his opening address in London on Monday. The meeting was the first since Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury over a safeguarding scandal.
It is set to discuss an overhaul of the way the church deals with abuse cases, debating proposals to move its safeguarding teams to an independent body.
Sam Margrave, a lay member, described Cottrell’s position as untenable because of questions over his handling of abuse allegations. He said Cottrell should not be “given the platform” to address the chamber and the nation.
In a vote on whether to skip Cottrell’s “presidential address”, a fifth of synod members — 73 of the 355 assembled at Church House in London or participating online — backed Margrave’s call to prevent Cottrell from speaking.
Forty-three members, 12 per cent, abstained, meaning that almost a third of the synod failed to give Cottrell their backing to speak. A two-thirds majority was needed to cancel Cottrell’s speech, but 239 synod members, 67 per cent, voted against it.
Before the first session, the Bishop of Newcastle, the Right Rev Helen-Ann Hartley, called for Cottrell to step down. It was her intervention over Welby in November that was seen as the deciding factor in forcing him to announce that he would step down over the case of John Smyth, an Anglican barrister and child abuser.
Hartley told Today on BBC Radio 4 that she found it “abhorrent” that Cottrell had allowed a priest, the Rev David Tudor, to remain in post despite known abuse allegations against him. Cottrell said church rules had prevented him from removing Tudor.
Hartley said: “I do not think it’s appropriate for the Archbishop of York to be in post and certainly to be leading change that the church needs at this time. I think he’s the wrong person.”
• Archbishop of York: I won’t quit over abuse crisis. I’ll bring change
Cottrell said in his address that “trust has been broken and confidence damaged” in the church, adding: “I am more sorry about this than I can say. I know mistakes have been made. I have made mistakes. But I am determined to do what I can to work with others … to lead the change we all know we need.”
He acknowledged the “anguish, anger, sadness, and regret of abuse victims”.
He could not “pretend that we are not in difficult and challenging times” and added that “for many, understandably, their patience has run out”. He said: “We must work together for these changes before the next Archbishop of Canterbury occupies what I know can be a lonely and difficult vocation.”
Cottrell backed the idea of creating an external body to handle abuse cases.
Jim Gamble, an independent expert who has led audits of the church’s safeguarding policies, warned however that outsourcing the church’s handling of abuse cases to an external body could jeopardise the “building and growing confidence that safeguarding is getting better” in the church.
The synod backed a call to stop referring to past cases of abuse as “historic”, noting that those cases still had “continuing effects on the lives of those victims and survivors who suffer the consequences of the prolonged cover-up by the Church of England”.
Cottrell told The Times last week that “nobody asked or required the Bishop of Warrington [and] certainly not me … to take some extended sabbatical leave” after the Right Rev Bev Mason accused the Bishop of Liverpool of harassment, an allegation he denies.
Mason has now said that Cottrell did “encourage me to take extended leave”. However, she added: “I am aware of the recent calls for the resignation of the Archbishop of York. I would like to openly and publicly state that I do not support such calls.”
