Only a woman can fill the moral void at the top of the Church of England

As a second leading cleric – who was favourite to succeed the Archbishop of Canterbury – is urged to stand down over his handling of a child sex abuse case, Peter Stanford says the bishop who first called on Justin Welby to resign stands alone in understanding the severity of the institution’s failures

As a Catholic, there is much to like about the Church of England: its democratic decision-making in the General Synod, as opposed to the Pope telling you what to do; its committed presence in every left-behind community around the UK where the vicar is the one professional who lives there 24/7.

But when its senior leadership continues making the same incomprehensible, horrific mistakes year after year about safeguarding, I despair for its future.

Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York – otherwise in my brief experience of working with him, a likeable, down-to-earth, rounded human being whose own humble background has taught him plenty about real life – is the latest in the spotlight.

For 10 years as Bishop of Chelmsford, prior to being promoted to York, he allowed David Tudor – a priest in his diocese whose past record was such that the church had since 2008 banned him from being alone with the children or going into schools – to carry on in active ministry, where inevitably he had some access to children. He even promoted him to be an honorary canon.

The irony is that Cottrell is about to fill in the interregnum until a successor is appointed to Justin Welby, who was forced to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury after an independent report condemned his failure to bring to book his friend, John Smyth, a barrister who used his involvement in Church of England circles as a lay reader to abuse young boys in the UK and Africa.

Cottrell is, for sure, a very different character from Welby. Certainly, he is not a man who would have made a joke in his resignation speech in the House of Lords about apologising to his diary secretary for his sudden departure from Lambeth Palace, when there are hundreds of victims of Smyth who continue to live every day with the consequences to the trauma to which they were subjected.

Yet when it came to the absolutely crucial matter of safeguarding, Cottrell showed the same institutional instinct to cover up. What is it about adults sexually and sadistically preying on children that makes clerics think they can look away and retain any sort of moral authority?

That Cottrell could think he could step into the breach for the utterly disgraced Welby when he had Tudor on his conscience, suggests one of two things. Either he thinks he hasn’t done anything wrong. Or, worse, that he just doesn’t get how fatal safeguarding failures are to the Church’s mission.

After all the scandals, revelations and resignations, both Catholicism and the Church of England continue stubbornly to resist submitting themselves and their actions in regard safeguarding to wholly independent regulation. Unless and until they do, nothing can save these institutions from themselves.

In the storm around Welby, just one senior Anglican prelate – Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle – stood up and called on him to resign. She definitely gets it, and yet she said afterwards on Radio 4 that her fellow bishops – presumably Cottrell among them – have cold-shouldered her.

She has now made the same appeal to the Archbishop of York. He would do well to listen.

One more good thing about the Church of England from my Catholic perspective is that it has embraced female ordination. Bishop Helen’s actions in recent weeks should change the minds of even the most obstinate opponents of women priests and bishops. As an outsider, she knows its tradition of male-generated, keep-it-quiet fudges do nothing to protect its reputation.

If anyone can still save the Church of England and fill that void in leadership, it is surely her.

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald