Should Cardinal Vincent Nichols resign?

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Though the report talks about scathing criticism of Cardinal Nichols, I didn’t see anything that directly implicated him in a coverup. Most of the coverups appear to be the workings of his predecessors. My analysis is simply based on what I read in the article.
 
The full report is available here: The Roman Catholic Church Case Study: Archdiocese of Birmingham Investigation Report.

I’ve started reading the report and I’ve got to grips with three out of the four main issues it raises. The final area where Cardinal Nichols is criticised is with regard to the relationship between the Archdiocese of Birmingham and the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (of whose management board he was chair 2001–08). This is probably the most important point raised, but it is also the most complicated. To summarise what I’ve read so far:
  1. Cardinal Nichols is criticised over his reaction to a 2003 episode of the BBC documentary series Kenyon Confronts called ‘Secrets and Confessions’, which focused on Father James Robinson, who was at the time living in the USA. Archbishop Nichols issued a press release which complained about “the tone of the programme” and accused the BBC of institutional hostility towards the Church. He also believed that the programme was deliberately broadcast the night before the silver jubilee of Pope John Paul II. It was felt that he was more concerned about maintaining the reputation of the Church rather than hearing valuable testimony from victims. He also complained that priests had felt “harassed” when approached by journalists.
  2. Archbishop Nichols failed to follow correct procedures with regard to the appointment of Jane Jones as child protection coordinator for the Archdiocese of Birmingham. Mrs Jones had worked for the previous child protection coordinator in a supporting role for three years. When that child protection coordinator left her post, the archdiocese did not advertise the vacancy but simply asked Mrs Jones to submit a CV before appointing her to the role. Archbishop Nichols had been unaware that eight years previously Mrs Jones had drafted a position paper which blamed victims and their parents, suggested that victims sometimes enjoyed the abuse that they suffered, and described a perpetrator as ‘the first victim’.
  3. Archbishop Nichols was aware of the existence of a note dating from 1968 detailing sexual abuse committed by Father John Tolkien. The existence of this note was, much later, disclosed to the police. However, Archbishop Nichols did take measures to seek to avoid having to disclose the note in the context of civil proceedings against the archdiocese by as many as six of Tolkien’s victims. The archdiocese paid £15,000 to one victim without admitting liability and avoided court proceedings. He wrote to the archdiocese’s solicitors that “the Archdiocese would prefer not to disclose this note even if this means settling the action”. He later claimed that what he had meant to say was, “The Archdiocese would prefer not to take this matter to court and therefore not to disclose the note”. However, he never wrote to the solicitors to correct this alleged error of expression. He also admitted that “it did not occur to him that people might have a legitimate interest in knowing that in 1968 the Church had failed to take action against Father Tolkien”.
 
I see. Thanks for supplying that info. The only point I see as particularly serious is #3. And it seems that this issue is the one that the media has honed in on, based on the titles of the articles supplied in the OP. Still, I’m not sure at this point that I see it as serious enough to warrant the Cardinal’s resignation.
 
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No, I’m not convinced that he should resign either. However, as soon as the report came out people were calling for his resignation. I wondered whether people here felt that there was a case for that. On the one hand, people have done much worse and kept their jobs, but on the other hand, I do find myself thinking each time a new scandal breaks that it is hopefully only a matter of time before there is a generation of bishops coming up through the ranks who won’t have been tainted by this period of the Church’s history.
 
Londoner said:
only a matter of time before there is a generation of bishops coming up through the ranks who won’t have been tainted by this period of the Church’s history.
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And hopefully sooner rather than later.
 
4. Cardinal Nichols was also criticised with regard to a long-running disagreement between the Birmingham Child Protection Commission and the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA). The dispute centred on the case of a former teacher who became a priest in the archdiocese. He had been accused of sexually abusing boys during his teaching career. Further allegations were made during his ministry as a priest and he then returned to teaching. He was charged in connection with some of the allegations, but the prosecution was stayed by the court because of a delay in reporting. This meant that the allegations were not automatically disclosed in the course of the usual disclosure and barring procedures. The archdiocese therefore referred the case to COPCA for advice.

There ensued a dispute between the archdiocese and COPCA which persisted for two years. Although the archdiocese acted correctly in informing the police that the priest had returned to teaching, which led to his resignation from his teaching post, there was, in short, a dispute between the archdiocese and COPCA as to whether the archdiocese was required to disclose the priest’s name to COPCA or whether it could refer the matter anonymously. An anonymous referral meant that the priest remained unknown to the Church nationally, meaning that he could potentially move to another part of the country where he would not be known as a suspected paedophile.

Archbishop Nichols maintained that the archdiocese was within its rights to refuse to comply with a COPCA recommendation, making it the only diocese in England and Wales to do so. He said that it was “not a matter, in one sense, of any great substance”. The Inquiry concluded, “Archbishop Nichols should have intervened to ensure that the dispute was resolved and to ensure compliance with the COPCA protocol. His failure to intervene contributed to the two-year-long exchange of correspondence which was time-consuming for those involved and contributed to the difficult relationship between the Archdiocese and COPCA.”
 
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5. During the period of Vincent Nichols’s tenure as archbishop of Birmingham, the archdiocese was found to be non-compliant with a number of safeguarding practices. These principally related to poor recording-keeping, in particular with regard to people serving the archdiocese in voluntary capacities, and consequently a failure to complete background checks on some of these people. Two paragraphs are worthy of quotation in extenso:
  1. In 2009, the Chair of the NCSC [National Catholic Safeguarding Commission], Bill Kilgallon, received a letter from Archbishop Nichols which enclosed a paper written by Mrs Jones. In this correspondence, the Archbishop queried whether it was necessary for everyone that fell within the scope of the CRB [Criminal Records Bureau] regime to undergo a CRB check, whether the confidential declaration form was excessive, and referred to a debate around the term ‘volunteer’. This latter point was connected to a passage in the enclosed paper which appeared to suggest that people ‘well known’ within the parish who took on parish roles should not be required to complete a CRB check.
  2. This correspondence caused both the NCSC and Mr Child concern. Mr Child was troubled because there appeared to him to be a suggestion from the Archdiocese that national standards did not need to be followed if people within parishes were known in the Church community.
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Clearly it is completely unacceptable to believe that volunteers do not require the appropriate background checks to be completed if they are “well known”. It is obvious that one of the main ways in which people have been able to commit these offences is by becoming “well known”.
 
CTBcin said:
And hopefully sooner rather than later.
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Yes, I wonder how long it will now be until we have a generation of bishops who are not affected by this issue. I had imagined that these problems now belonged to the somewhat distant past, but in the archdiocese of Birmingham failings clearly were taking place as recently as ten years ago. Cardinal Nichols is expected to retire next year anyway. Perhaps his successor will be somebody completely untainted by the kind of scandal that has shocked the Church in England and Wales under Cardinal Hume, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, and now Cardinal Nichols (to be fair, his record is not nearly as bad as those of his two immediate predecessors).
 
Londoner said:
Yes, I wonder how long it will now be until we have a generation of bishops who are not affected by this issue.
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It will be a slow process of turnover. I think that the major turning point will be when guys ordained in the late 1990s and after are being made bishops and cardinals. They’re the guys who have spent most, if not all of their priesthood in the shadow of the abuse scandal.
 
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Yes, that sounds about right. The next decade or two should see the retirement of the last of the bishops to have been involved in any kind of cover-up. At the same time, priests ordained in the late 1990s and early 2000s will start to be appointed as bishops. Hopefully this will herald a new dawn for the Church in an era when it will no longer be almost universally tainted with scandal.
 
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