clergy bullying ii
Church Mouse adds his comments to the clergy bullying debate, and points out that this isn’t a new discussion with these links:
December 2009 – Unite calls for two bishops to resign for allowing ‘culture of bullying’ in Worcester Diocese (Unite)
April 2008 – Clergy ‘bullied’ by congregations (Ekklesia)
September 2007 – Unite calls for employment protection for the clergy (Unite)
Mouse thinks that although it’s a significant problem, trade union action isn’t going to solve it. I kind of half-agree with Mouse, although I think that the problem is so woven into Church culture that it will take pressure from quite a lot of angles to make any difference to the issue, and trade unions making a lot of noise might possibly irritate the more powerful elements into action.
But Clayboy also adds some words of wisdom here. There is the potential difficulty that making a big deal out of just one case will turn the whole thing into an individual fisticuffs. Demands for the Bishop of Worcester’s resignation won’t help at all – that simply adds more stress to a good man.
I reiterate what I said yesterday – that as well as bullying within the Church, there is also an immense amount of love and grace. It’s not all bad or all good, and in one sense that makes it harder to tackle – if it was all bad, most people would just leave. It’s much harder to change a few bad threads in something that overall is very good. What’s needed is a calm and honest appraisal of why bullying is such an endemic problem, rather than making a feast out of one public the whole situation, and in particular to make it possible for those who suffer in silence, not in the press, to be given the genuine help they need.
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What happens when the parish priest is the bully? In our church this was the case.Bullying can be subtle & disguised. It was so bad that some of us left the parish church where we had been nourished and grown in faith for the last 20 years. The church hierarchy closes around it’s vicars – it doesn’t matter how bad they are (- look how long it’s taken for them even to acknowledge serious child abuse) (one person who left – a teacher – said if one of his teachers performed/acted so badly – they would have been dismissed immedately). Once a clergy person has the Living unless their behaviour is gross – adultery/drunk in charge of a holy service – they can stay for keeps! What about the battered congregations? One elderly lady said to me “I would love to leave, but where can I go at my age? I can’t start over again, I don’t have transport… so they have to stay and put up with what amounts to emotional abuse!!
I think it’s grim when any one is a bully – and it stands to reason that if a member of the clergy is bullying junior clergy, they are probably bullying the congregation too. The whole problem needs a serious overhaul.
Of course it isn’t a problem unique to the Church, although some aspects of it have particular effects – for instance the fact that fpr a bullied clergy-person their home is tied to the job, and it’s a system that precludes you just quietly apply for another job somewhere else.