by Tim Wyatt on substack
The second church safeguarding story we couldn’t really ignore this week was, again, about Sarah Mullally. I said on the day she was announced as the next ABC that she did have some baggage when it came to abuse. She was not by any means someone with a squeaky clean record, and so the Crown Nominations Commission had taken something of a risk by choosing her to follow the first ever archbishop forced to resign over a safeguarding scandal.
And lo, it has come to pass. The Martin Sargeant-Alan Griffin case, which I’m going to assume you’re all up to speed on but read this if you’re not, has reared its ugly head. Who else but Cathy Newman from Channel 4 has a series of stories this week which are all marketed as exclusives, but aren’t really. I should know, having spent nine months investigating the story and publishing what I would argue is the definitive account thus far all the way back in April 2024.
After recounting the story which is already long in the public domain, Newman’s piece moves on to get bogged down in recriminations over whether or not Mullally ever read the infamous brain dump report which led to Griffin’s suicide. This was a real bugbear of many of the 42 clergy on the list I spoke with years ago – Mullally says she didn’t, they insist she must have and is lying. It’s not unimportant, but doesn’t strike me as the most important thing about this story.
And also, it’s used by her attackers as a no-win stick to beat her with. If she did read the report, then she clearly failed to deal with it very well and should have stopped her diocese from pursuing the scuttlebutt and innuendo it contained. If she didn’t, then she’s in dereliction of her duties as bishop for overlooking something so important. She really can’t win. Mullally says she didn’t read it because it was not her job to assess its contents, but her safeguarding professionals’. She was, however, appraised by her team about which of her clergy were mentioned in it.
Anyway, the bigger picture here is that nothing substantially new has been revealed, despite Newman’s enthusiastic attempts to pretend she’s breaking news. The next day, she followed that up with another report which was at least new information: she spoke with a former member of the Diocese of London’s safeguarding team who says the team was poorly led and organised, and that she felt her concerns about some priests’ mental health were ignored. Eventually, she said she became ostracised and so bruised by her time working there she attempted suicide herself.