UFO Info Week-End

The 42-year-old met the two most recent victims by exploiting his position as chaplain to Cardiff City Football Club a role he combined

The 42-year-old met the two most recent victims by exploiting his position as chaplain to Cardiff City Football Club, a role he combined with that of parish priest for the town of Barry, near Cardiff.But after the case at Cardiff Crown Court it emerged that Archbishop Ward had ordained Jordan in 1998 in the knowledge that he had been charged but acquitted of indecently assaulting a young boy in 1990, while working in Doncaster.When Jordan moved to Wales in 1995, the Right Rev Christopher Budd, the Bishop of Plymouth – the city where Jordan was there working – wrote to Archbishop Ward informing him of the case.The archbishop sent Jordan to see a psychiatrist but – according to the psychiatrist – he crucially did not ask for a paedophile assessment of Jordan. This was in contravention of the church’s own guidelines for countering child abuse, issued in 1994.It is also alleged that a number of priests who trained with Jordan also raised their concerns over other incidents with the Archbishop but that he did not see any “danger signs”.One such priest Fr Chris Higgins told last night’s BBC Panorama programme: “I related some incidents to the archbishop where Joe had not behaved in an appropriate manner… he concluded the appointment by thanking me for saying what I’d said and then said that he was wise enough to know what was right for Jordan and for his diocese.”Another priest, Fr Philip Dixon, said: “This was a disaster that needn’t have happened.. if the information had been properly acted on. I think he’s unfit for office.”There are also allegations that Archbishop Ward failed to act on warnings from parishioners about Father John Lloyd – one of his close colleagues and a former press spokesman – who was jailed for eight years in 1998 after being convicted of 11 charges of indecent assault, one of rape and one of buggery.The archbishop was yesterday unavailable for comment, but speaking on Panorama last night he said he believed at the time had done nothing wrong in ordaining a man who had been acquitted. He added that he considered the warnings from other priests amounted to nothing more than “immaturity” on the part of Jordan He said he saw no danger signs “I take responsibility for what happened,” he said. “As far as I understood things, I acted appropriately and in good faith I did not deliberately let in anyone who was a paedophile.

I did take what I thought was appropriate at the time.”Those close to the Archbishop say he has been genuinely saddened and concerned by recent events. His decision to write to the Pope asking for him to appoint a successor, followed a meeting with his representative in Britain, the apostolic nuncio, Bishop Pablo Puente, at his home in Wimbledon, south-west London, last week.The archbishop’s address was read aloud in churches in all of the archdiocese’s 79 parishes at services this weekend. But the episode has had an effect far beyond the confines of South Wales, again focusing attention on one of the Catholic Church’s more obvious problems.Nicholas Coote, assistant general secretary to the bishops of England and Wales and a member of the working party which drew up the 1994 guidelines to counter abuse, said: “In a sense the problem has been self-inflicted. When we drew up the guidelines which said you had to report suspicions of child abuse, we did, in a way, bring this on ourselves.”You could say that the fact that some have been found is a mark of our success.”One of the most difficult problems is when you have suspicions of child abuse but when the police or the Crown Prosecution Service does not feel there is sufficient evidence.There is a case at the moment where one archbishop asked the police to investigate a priest and though they said they were not certain the allegations were true, he still placed the priest on administrative leave until the matter can be sorted.”. The traditional figure of fun, the vicar who is after the choirboys, has suddenly been eclipsed by a spate of child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Yesterday the Archbishop of Cardiff announced that he is standing down with the appointment of a coadjutor bishop, Vatican-speak for a troubleshooter.

The traditional figure of fun, the vicar who is after the choirboys, has suddenly been eclipsed by a spate of child-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Yesterday the Archbishop of Cardiff announced that he is standing down with the appointment of a coadjutor bishop, Vatican-speak for a troubleshooter.
Archbishop Ward is held responsible by many people, some inside his own church, for ordaining a priest later convicted of child abuse, even though he had been warned by a brother bishop of a previous trial and acquittal on the candidate’s part.Such negligence can cost more than careers. The Anglican Church of Canada announced this summer that it had been bankrupted by court cases brought against one of its dioceses by people who were abused in orphanages run by the church. And it was a cascade of child abuse scandals which precipitated the collapse of the prestige and then the power of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland.In all these scandals, one curious feature has been the apparent blindness of the hierarchy. This wouldn’t be a puzzle if the scandals were as rare and aberrant as Catholics would like them to be; nor would it be surprising if Catholic priests were as cruel and power-crazed as they are supposed to be in atheist propaganda.

But they’re not.They are for the most part good and conscientious men who work long hours for fairly unselfish motives, and who do a great deal of good. So why does the system produce this cascade of scandal and in many instances – although not in this – cover-up?The real answer, I believe, lies in the profound institutional doublethink that has come to surround the celibacy of the clergy. Everyone knows that lay catholics ignore the official teaching on birth control, usually with the tacit consent of their priests. What is less well-known is the degree to which the clergy are uncelibate. The best scholarly research I know of, by the former monk Richard Sipe, suggests that about 50 per cent of the priesthood in the western world is sexually active at any one time – in the third world, he says, the figure approaches 100 per cent.Most priests who have sexual relationships do so with women – although Sipe reckons that about 25 per cent of the American clergy are gay.