The Archbishop of York’s Christmas speech shows there’s been too much forgiveness in the Church

Perhaps the only comment the Archbishop of York could have made that would have satisfied his critics would have been to announce his resignation during his Christmas Day sermon and head off into the wilderness with Justin Welby, suggests Catherine Pepinster

There’s a delicious scene in the film Doubt involving a priest suspected of an abusive relationship, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who confronts Meryl Streep’s tough old cookie of a nun. She has the priest’s measure, while others give him the benefit of the doubt. “Where’s your compassion?” pleads the priest. “Nowhere you can find it,” Streep wisecracks in reply.

I thought of this yesterday after the outcry began over Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell’s Christmas sermon – a message keenly awaited, given that Cottrell is in the frame for failing to act against an abusive priest some years ago.

Cottrell’s moment in the pulpit was crucial, not only for his own reputation but also that of the Church of England. Cottrell is mired in controversy over what went on when he was Bishop of Chelmsford, when he allowed a vicar, David Tudor, suspended over accusations of abuse, to retain the title of area dean and also allowed him the additional label of an honorary canon. All this is happening when Cottrell is about to effectively mind the Anglican shop after the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby announced he will step down on 7 January over a different abuse case.

So Cottrell was carrying an awful lot on his shoulders when he spoke on Christmas morning. Would he manage a proper mea culpa of the kind demanded by his critics both for his personal failings and those of the institution he represents?

There were certainly lines that Cottrell will have known would be interpreted as about the current situation, such as “the inadequacies of those who talk a good game, but whose words are never embodied in action”. Too right, Your Grace, so why didn’t you act more effectively as Bishop of Chelmsford?

Then there was a welcome, on behalf of Jesus, but being made by Cottrell, representing the Church of England: “Whoever you are, however hard life has become, however difficult it is, however much you feel you may have messed things up, however broken it is, absolutely all are invited.” Hang on, someone might say in response. What do you mean, broken? Isn’t it the Church you represent that is broken, with its failures to act on abuse? Messed up? You’re the ones that messed up!

But then the Archbishop changed tack. “Right now, this Christmas, God’s Church itself needs to come again to the manger and strip off her finery and kneel in penitence and adoration. And be changed.”

There were no specifics. No overt reference to the accusations made in recent days about his role. No mention of Justin Welby or any of the other clerics embroiled in this terrible, damaging row that has shown how the Church, over the years, did not always put victims of abuse first, listen to survivors, or stop covering up.

The equivalent of Meryl Streep in this real-life drama, the avenging angel of the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, broke off from her own Christmas Day to tweet a review of Cottrell’s sermon: “Empty words”. Hartley was the bishop who publicly called for Justin Welby to quit, and now she has taken on the mantle of Cottrell’s chief denouncer. Before her tweet, Hartley had been doing just what people expect Christian leaders to do on Christmas Day, being with people who others turn away from; in her case, the inmates of a prison in her diocese. I doubt she went to that prison to make people feel worse about their crimes on Christmas Day but instead to impart a message of hope. There was no such message of hope for Cottrell from the Bishop of Newcastle, nor the benefit of the doubt.

Hartley wants justice for the abused, and rightly so. But forgiveness – so long part of the warp and weft of Christianity – is not so much in evidence for her fellow senior clerics.

And maybe that’s the point. When it comes to abuse, there’s been too much forgiveness and understanding for too long. It happened in the Roman Catholic Church too, priests were given a second or third chance even though they targeted the vulnerable. Forgive me, I won’t do it again, I promise. How much we Christians want to believe the sinner.

I suspect the only comment Cottrell could have made that would have satisfied his critics would have been to announce his resignation during his Christmas Day sermon and head off into the wilderness with Justin Welby. Staying put is by far the harder option, trying to steady the crooked ship of the Church of England – the institution that’s long been identified with a rather easy-going, not too demanding kind of Christianity. But now forgiveness is not what it was, and the tough talkers imbued with their moral certainties have the loudest voices.