Clergy are bullied
The BBC report on bullied clergy:
Workplace bullying of the clergy has become “rife”, according to the union Unite which says priests are being picked on by bishops and parishioners.
The union has set up a hotline where the clergy can report abuse, and says it deals with up to 150 cases a year.
“Bishops have got a lot nastier”, says the Reverend Gerry Barlow, chair of the faith workers branch of Unite. Unite says the bullying frequently comes from superiors within the church who may be under financial pressure.
“A bullying case can go on for a long time”, says Terry Young, a former minister who runs the helpline. “They’re picked on for everything they do wrong, so in the end the person runs around terrified. You see these people unsupported, driven into depression and a nervous breakdown.”
The Church is home to some truly great people whose lives are a testament to genuine love and self-sacrifice. But I also know for sure that there is a shameful degree of severe and mind-bendingly awful bullying within the Church, not just from Church superiors but from others within the structure too. I’m not surprised there are clergy who leave depressed and broken.
More useful thoughts and questions on the topic from David Keen at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor.
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I notice it didn’t mention the continual bullying of women priests.
There is a very subtle form of bullying people further up the hierarchy can engage in. It usually takes the form of a sustained refusal to answer your questions in the terms in which you put them, and proceeding as if previous conversations hadn’t occurred. Further pushes for clarity are then met with visceral expressions of irritation as if one were too obtuse to get the point or just ‘being difficult’. The difficulty clergy face isn’t just about having difficulties with superiors and putting one’s ‘job’ at risk. The whole domestic ecology is vulnerable: spouses, children, schools, home, the prospects of work outside the church (let alone within). There is a continuing culture of deference at play in the Church- public school writ large to my mind – which is inappropriate in this age and needs to be systematically challenged and expunged.
I don’t think those kinds of problems are confined to the clergy by any means.
Maybe not. But they are exacerbated in clergy context by the lack of employment rights or quasi-employment rights for most non-incumbents. Moreover, for the majority of clergy – with tied accommodation – you lose your job, you lose your home.
, plain and simple. And, as I say, there is still a culture of deference in the Church which I haven’t experienced to nearly the same extent in other ‘establishment’ positions I have occupied. This expectation may not always be overt, but it is there nevertheless. Incidentally, it is particularly laughable in cases of evangelicals raised to the episcopacy who expect deference from their clergy, but who themselves wouldn’t have dreamt of being told what to do by the ‘powers-that-are’. when they were jobbing parish clergy.
The situation will, however, will be improved somewhat when the proposed system of ‘common tenure’ become operative in January 2011.
Great observations, Mark. I have been pondering for some time the persistence of public school (or even prep school) culture within the church, after some recent experiences of my own.