The Nine O'Clock Service ("NOS") was a youth-orientated alternative Christian worship service started in 1986 at St Thomas' Church in Crookes, Sheffield, England, by a group of musicians and artists. The service and the group associated with it grew to national prominence, but the service was stopped in 1995 following allegations of sexual and emotional abuse. [1]
Beginning as a simple alternative format service under the leadership of Chris Brain, the group responsible for it developed a leadership structure that was endorsed by the leadership of St Thomas' Church. The average age of the members was 24 for much of NOS's life. The membership was significantly from non-church backgrounds.
Starting with about 10 people who worked on designing and creating the services, the congregation grew to almost 600 members while resident at St Thomas' Church. Main themes included care for the planet and concern about its abuse, simple lifestyle and development of relationships with non-churched people.
By 1988, David Lunn, then Bishop of Sheffield, sanctioned a move to a new site at Ponds Forge Rotunda in the centre of Sheffield. [2] Around the same time, Chris Brain underwent training to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. [3] The Planetary Mass at Pond's Forge was marked by both bold liturgical experimentation and naive hopefulness. The suspended Roman Catholic priest and American Dominican theologian Matthew Fox was consulted.
The number of community members stopped growing and service attendance plateaued at about 300. A significant practical weakness in terms of duty of care was the lack of accountability for NOS and its absence from diocesan accountability. This was allowed because of its perceived international significance, which in the end came to nothing. Plans for communities elsewhere were in talks. [1]
In 1995, a number of complaints began to surface of the sexual abuse of women in the group by Chris Brain. After an investigation by the Diocese of Sheffield, the group was shut down in August 1995. The Bishop of Sheffield demanded Brain's resignation after he confessed to having sexual relationships with young women in the congregation. There were also calls from former members of the congregation that he be defrocked. The Archbishop of York banned Brain from acting as an ordained priest. Initially refusing to step down, Brain eventually resigned in November 1995, the week before a documentary on the abuse scandal was aired. He then checked himself into a psychiatric hospital. [4] [5] The Diocese of Sheffield, through a seconded pastoral team led by Rachel Ross, the Reverend Andrew Teal and the Reverend Peter Craig-Wild, attempted to manage the pastoral care both of Brain and members of the community wounded by the scandal. A remnant of the community continued to meet, under different leadership, for some years afterwards in Sheffield.
On 1 February 2024 South Yorkshire Police announced that Christopher Brain had been summonsed to appear at Sheffield Magistrates' Court on 18 March 2024 to face a total of 34 charges of sexual offences (one of rape, 33 of indecent assault) against 11 members of the Nine O'Clock Service congregation. The police appealed for any further potential victims or witnesses to come forward. [6] [7] [8] [9] On 18 March 2024 Christopher Brain appeared at Sheffield Magistrates' Court. District Judge Marcus Waite granted him unconditional bail and told him to appear again at Sheffield Crown Court on 15 April 2024. [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] On 15 April 2024 Christopher Brain was due to attend Sheffield Crown Court in the afternoon for his plea and trial preparation. [16] On 30 April 2024 Christopher Brain appeared at Inner London Crown Court and pleaded not guilty to one charge of rape and 33 charges of indecent assault regarding 11 women, all members of NOS. The offences are alleged to have taken place between 1981 and 1995. He was released on unconditional bail and is next due to appear for a case management hearing on 10 June 2024 at the same court (Inner London Crown Court). His trial was set for 30 June 2025 and is expected to last eight to ten weeks. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]
Howard, Roland (1996). The Rise and Fall of the Nine O'Clock Service: A Cult Within the Church?. London: Mowbray. ISBN 0264674197.
There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and other members of religious life in the Catholic Church. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
George Pell was an Australian cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as the inaugural prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy between 2014 and 2019, and was a member of the Council of Cardinal Advisers between 2013 and 2018. Ordained a priest in 1966 and bishop in 1987, he was made a cardinal in 2003. Pell served as the eighth Archbishop of Sydney (2001–2014), the seventh Archbishop of Melbourne (1996–2001) and an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne (1987–1996). He was also an author, columnist and public speaker. From 1996, Pell maintained a high public profile on a wide range of issues, while retaining an adherence to Catholic orthodoxy.
Charles Ellsworth Bennison Jr. is an American bishop. He was the 15th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania.
The Congregation of Christian Brothers is a worldwide religious community within the Catholic Church, founded by Edmund Rice.
The Diocese of Ballarat, based in Ballarat, Australia, is a diocese in the ecclesiastical province of Melbourne. It is a suffragan diocese of the Archdiocese of Melbourne and was established in 1874. Its geography covers the west, Wimmera and Mallee regions of Victoria. The cathedral is in St Patrick's Cathedral, Ballarat.
The Diocese of Cleveland is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church in northeastern Ohio in the United States. As of September 2020, the bishop is Edward Malesic. The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, located in Cleveland, is the mother church of the diocese.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, established in 1989, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization support group of survivors of clergy sexual abuse and their supporters, founded in the United States. Barbara Blaine, a survivor of sex abuse by a priest, was the founding president. SNAP, which initially focused on the Roman Catholic Church, had 12,000 members in 56 countries as of 2012. It has branches for religious groups, such as SNAP Baptist, SNAP Orthodox, and SNAP Presbyterian, for non-religious groups, and for geographic regions, e.g., SNAP Australia and SNAP Germany.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
Daniel Robert Jenky, CSC is an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church who served as bishop of the Diocese of Peoria in Illinois from 2002 until his retirement in 2022. He also served as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in Indiana from 1997 to 2002.
As distinct from abuse by some parish priests, who are subject to diocesan control, there has also been abuse by members of Roman Catholic orders, which often care for the sick or teach at school. Just as diocesan clergy have arranged parish transfers of abusive priests, abusive brothers in Catholic orders are sometimes transferred.
St Thomas Church, Crookes — now known as 'STC Sheffield' — is an ecumenical church with united Anglican and Baptist traditions, in Crookes, Sheffield, England. STC Sheffield is a large evangelical Anglican and Baptist Church, situated in the west of Sheffield.
From the late 1980s, allegations of sexual abuse of children associated with Catholic institutions and clerics in several countries started to be the subject of sporadic, isolated reports. In Ireland, beginning in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children over decades. Six reports by the former National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church established that six Irish priests had been convicted between 1975 and 2011. This has contributed to the secularisation of Ireland and to the decline in influence of the Catholic Church. Ireland held referendums to legalise same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018.
Catholic sexual abuse cases in Australia, like Catholic Church sexual abuse cases elsewhere, have involved convictions, trials and ongoing investigations into allegations of sex crimes committed by Catholic priests, members of religious orders and other personnel which have come to light in recent decades, along with the growing awareness of sexual abuse within other religious and secular institutions.
Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in Canada are well documented dating back to the 1960s. The preponderance of criminal cases with Canadian Catholic dioceses named as defendants that have surfaced since the 1980s strongly indicate that these cases were far more widespread than previously believed. While recent media reports have centred on Newfoundland dioceses, there have been reported cases—tested in court with criminal convictions—in almost all Canadian provinces. Sexual assault is the act of an individual touching another individual sexually and/or committing sexual activities forcefully and/or without the other person's consent. The phrase Catholic sexual abuse cases refers to acts of sexual abuse, typically child sexual abuse, by members of authority in the Catholic church, such as priests. Such cases have been occurring sporadically since the 11th century in Catholic churches around the world. This article summarizes some of the most notable Catholic sexual abuse cases in Canadian provinces.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations. Italy is an exceptional case as the 1929 Lateran Treaty gave the Vatican legal autonomy from Italy, giving the clergy recourse to Vatican rather than Italian law.
Several cases of sexual abuse in St. John's archdiocese have been reported, starting in 1988. It is an important chapter in the series of clerical abuse affairs that occurred in the dioceses of Canada.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Latin America is a significant part of the series of Catholic sex abuse cases.
The sexual abuse scandal in the English Benedictine Congregation was a significant episode in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in the United Kingdom. The dates of the events covered here range from the 1960s to the 2010s.
Christopher Alan Saunders is an Australian prelate of the Catholic Church who was the bishop of the Latin Church diocese of Broome from 1996 to 2021, when he resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct.
Vincent Gerard Ryan was an Australian Catholic priest convicted of sexually abusing 37 children. He was first charged in October 1995 and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Ryan was the first Catholic priest in the Newcastle, New South Wales, region to be charged with child sexual abuse, and one of the first in the world to be convicted of such abuse.
He would talk regularly about how we were discovering a postmodern definition of sexuality in the church, but it was really one bloke getting his rocks off with forty women.