St Mary’s Theologian Addresses Bishops Conference

Dr Stephen Bullivant, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at St Mary’s University, Twickenham recently spoke to the plenary meeting of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, where he discussed abuse within the Church. The talk, which was held at Hinsley Hall in Leeds, was based on a report produced by Dr Bullivant on behalf of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC), which reviews statistics from the past ten years relating to abuse allegations within the Church. During the meeting, Dr Bullivant also made several recommendations about how current practices for collecting and presenting such statistics at a national level might be improved. The research will be published as part of the NCSC Annual report in July. Dr Bullivant specialises in this area of research and, in 2011, was appointed Director of the European Society for Catholic Theology’s three-year ‘Redeeming Power: Overcoming Abuse in Church and Society’ research project. The project was launched with an international conference at St Mary’s in September 2012, followed by a second conference in July 2013 in Manila, Philippines. Later this year, Dr Bullivant will report on the project’s outcomes at the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology’s congress in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.