They are offering my wife the choice to use a conciliation facility to resolve her differences with our vicar.
We will of course look bad and ungrateful and unchristian if we decline.
But the truth is; this offer is derisory. If she had been sexually abused, they would clearly not offer conciliation. It's not the sort of thing where you can just day sorry, there has to be a reckoning. Similarly, for a woman who has been psychologically abused for ten years, it is demeaning, a further insult, to suggest that it can be fixed by conciliation. Conciliation will not restore what she has lost. And even if through the process he comes to allow her more recognition in the church, she will always know that he does this under compulsion not because he talky believes in her.
The offer of conciliation shows that they have not understood the depth of the damage inflicted on her. But furthermore it holds the subtle but really cruel suggestion that this is not a perpetrator and a victim but a battle of equals, and it implies that she has wronged him as much as he has wronged her and that she has to give ground to him.
So we shall decline the inappropriate suggestion of conciliation.
The options available to them were:
1) no further action
2) let the case rest on file
3) conciliation
4) apply a penalty with the consent of the defendant
5) full tribunal.
We are pleased that they have not tried to get away with 1or 2. We are not accepting of the 3 they have selected. The vicar does not seem to be the penitent type who would accept 4. So we will press for 5.
Vicar is only 18 months off retirement, so he may try to stri
ng it out until he can leave the organisation and escape it's disciplinary procedures.
Please pray for this process to ultimately bring justice.
No comments:
Post a Comment