IN THE story of Christ’s presentation in the Temple, Simeon’s words to Mary arrest the breath: “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” Simeon warns that faithfulness has a cost, and that love comes with pain.
As the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England is back in the Temple. In recent media interviews, she has spoken confidently about how safeguarding culture has changed during the past decade and about the part played by the INEQE Safeguarding Group in providing independent scrutiny across the Church.
That claim sits uneasily alongside more recent and painful realities in the diocese of London itself. It is only five years since Fr Alan Griffin, a Roman Catholic priest who had previously served in the diocese, took his own life after serious safeguarding failures (News, 23 July 2021). It is only weeks since Michelle Burns, a former member of the London Diocesan Safeguarding Team, said in an interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News that the culture of the team was “brutish” and that little had been done to prevent a similar death in the future (News, 19 December 2025).
Bishop Mullally’s claims therefore require testing — not least because she herself offered one of the most searching diagnoses of the Church’s safeguarding and governance failures in an article published in this newspaper last year (Comment, 14 February 2025). That article returned repeatedly to Simeon’s words to Mary, reflecting both on the pain of victims and on the cost of recognising one’s own part within a failing institution. She wrote candidly of accountability, incoherent governance, and weak process, and warned against believing that procedural reform alone could heal deeper wounds.
Those reflections were written in the shadow of the Jay, Makin, and Scolding reports, which exposed not only historic wrongdoing, but persistent cultural weaknesses: defensiveness, opacity, confused responsibility, and a reluctance to act decisively when authority itself was implicated. These reports went to the heart of whether safeguarding could be trusted rather than merely administered.
INEQE’s audits undoubtedly represent an improvement on purely internal review. External expertise and consistency across dioceses matter. But independence is not primarily about tone or professionalism: it is about structure. INEQE is commissioned, funded, and programme-designed by the Church that it audits. It has no statutory powers: it cannot compel evidence, reopen contested cases, or enforce outcomes. Responsibility for action remains with the very bodies whose culture is under review.
The Robson review of the death of Fr Griffin, after a coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths notice, suffered similar limitations (News, 8 July 2022). It, too, was commissioned and overseen within diocesan and national church structures, framed as a lessons-learned exercise, and lacked powers of compulsion or enforcement. It was independent in assessment, but not in authority.
This is not independence in the strongest sense of the word, and it is here that the gap between institutional assurance and survivor experience becomes clear.
When the Church describes reviews such as Robson’s or audits such as INEQE’s as “independent”, it usually means that they are conducted by external professionals and published openly. When survivors speak of independence, they mean something more exacting: that safeguarding is not commissioned by those under scrutiny; that evidence can be compelled rather than invited; that compliance with recommendations is enforceable rather than voluntary; and that accountability does not ultimately return to the same ecclesial structures as have already failed them. These are different definitions, and only one is capable of rebuilding trust.
What sharpens this tension further is that Bishop Mullally herself has identified the deeper problem with clarity. That analysis has only been confirmed by failures occurring well within the period now cited as evidence of progress. It is further intensified by the fact that a CDM complaint described publicly in December by Bishop Mullally herself as having been “fully dealt with” (News, 12 December 2025) has since been reopened by the diocese of London.
Her response to the Jay, Makin, and Scolding reports set a high bar. She rejected easy reassurance and wrote movingly of the cost of leadership willing to face failure honestly. That is why the present moment feels so exacting. As safeguarding concerns are raised in relation to the diocese of London, and calls are made for an independent investigation, the question is no longer how the Church responds to reports about others, but how its most senior leaders respond when scrutiny turns towards their own governance.
FOR these reasons, I have joined those calling for a fully independent inquiry into the safeguarding culture of the diocese of London, and for the process of becoming Archbishop of Canterbury to be paused until such an inquiry is completed. This comes from a recognition that trust is rebuilt not by momentum, but by restraint. When safeguarding credibility is at stake, the willingness to stand aside pending scrutiny can itself be an act of leadership.
At Candlemas, Mary does not look away from the wound; nor does Simeon offer comfort without cost. If safeguarding in the Church of England is truly to be reset, independence must be more than a descriptor, accountability more than an aspiration, and cultural change more than a narrative of progress.
If not now, then how much more pain can be borne?
The Revd Robert Thompson is the Vicar of St James’s, West Hampstead, in London, and a member of the General Synod.
