Speaking in the Lords last September, Alistair Lexden condemned the Church of England for driving a priest, whom he knew well long ago, to suicide. Replying to last year’s debate, the Bishop of Blackburn accepted that the Church’s conduct had been “reprehensible and unacceptable.”
The London diocese commissioned a report. It ought to have been considered with care at the most recent meeting of the Church of England’s Synod, but that toothless body has done nothing. In an attempt to draw attention to the report’s shortcomings, Alistair Lexden wrote to the Church Times, where the case featured prominently a year ago. The paper declined to publish the letter. Further comment will be made in the next debate in the Lords on Church of England legislation.
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Dear Sir
In September last year I resigned from Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee because the disgraceful treatment of Alan Griffin, a loving friend in our undergraduate Cambridge days, destroyed my faith in the Church’s institutional integrity. What reputable organisation would first hound an innocent man to death, and then ask a coroner to cover up its misdeeds? I can still hardly believe that the organisation in question was my own Church, where I have worshipped all my life.
I have now read - or rather tried to read - the report on Alan’s suicide commissioned by the London diocese. It is completely useless. Laden with jargon and obsessed with footling details of a safeguarding system that does not work, the report evades the only questions that matter. Who were the people whose errors led to the loss of a man’s life? How is an effective, fair and intelligible safeguarding system, based firmly on the advice of leading lawyers, to be constructed?
When I knew him Alan Griffin was a witty, handsome young man who was laying the foundations of a successful career as a classical scholar. The priestly vocation came later. How I wish that he had never entered the service of a Church that in our lifetimes would cease to be able to run its own affairs decently at the highest level, or explain itself in the fine English prose for which it was famous for so long.
Yours faithfully
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords
