Suffer little children
Church of England , Issue 1500 THE Rt Revd Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester, is the longest-serving bishop in the Church of England. He has frequently spoken out about the evils of pornography.

“There is growing evidence of a direct and potentially permanent impact upon the brain itself,” he said in a Lords debate in 2015, adding: “I have had two of my clergy prosecuted for downloading child sexual abuse images, usually called child pornography. Both these priests were given custodial sentences and both are unlikely ever again to exercise the Christian ministry for which they were trained.”

Entirely penitent
Unlikely, but not certain. Giving evidence under oath at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) last week, Bishop Forster revealed that he had personally intervened to prevent one of those clergy, Rev Ian Hughes, from being banned from ministry for life.

Forster told the inquiry he had flouted church guidelines advising that a priest who goes to prison is permanently barred from ministry for life because of Hughes’s “relative youth” (he was, er, 46), plus “the fact that he was entirely penitent from the outset as to what had happened, and his previous record of ministry was excellent”. The bishop explained that people like Hughes can be “lured into the downloading of child pornography” while “working late-night on their computer and whatever”.

That’s one way of putting it: Hughes was jailed in 2014 after pleading guilty to possession of 8,000 images of child pornography, of which 800 were of the most serious kind.