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Location: Blogs Roy Stemman's blog |
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| Posted by: Roy Stemman |
7/8/2008 9:57 AM |
The International Spiritualist Federation (ISF) seems, at last, to be making the right decisions about Mervyn Johnson (Wright), its disgraced former president who is currently in a Swedish prison, having been found guilty of serious sexual acts against young women.
It is doing so, however, not because it wants to, but because it really has no alternative but to respond to the outcry that has greeted its Executive Committee’s cavalier attitude to the feelings of many of its members.
The latest to show its displeasure is the Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) whose reasons for breaking its long association with the ISF are given on this website. I invited the ISF to comment on the SNU decision but its general secretary, Sue Willison, declined “as the Executive Committee are at present looking at the possibility of taking this matter to our legal department, as there are inaccuracies in the statement released by the SNU and others”.
Matthias Güldenstein, who has been re-elected to the ISF Executive Committee, has revealed in an e-mail to friends that “the new EC has decided to terminate the membership of Mervyn Johnson without delay, as asked [for] in the motion of David Hopkins and the SNU at the BGM. Accepting the vote of the membership, the new EC has decided to take the necessary steps according to the constitution”.
That is a decision that I and many others have also called for, yet as far as I know the ISF has not yet confirmed it publicly.
The only remaining area of contention is the Fraternal Week to be held in Sala, Sweden, next year, 20 miles from Västeras where Johnson committed his crimes. And, as reported in The Times, “Victims’ groups say that [Johnson] Wright is likely to be in an open prison by then and could attend the convention”.
Why on earth has the ISF not yet reversed its decision to hold its next meeting in Sweden? Does it not realise that doing so will just allow this sad episode to continue for the best part of another year?
It has been argued that it is doing so to support Johnson’s victims, but no one I have spoken to sees it that way. If they are so concerned about his victims why did their publication Yours Fraternally ask members to pray for Johnson but not for his victims? Also, if their first concern is his victims, why is the ISF going against their wishes by holding the meeting elsewhere?
I do not need psychic powers to predict that an ISF meeting held in Sweden next year will be the subject of high-profile protests and heated controversy, which will inevitably spill over into the media, further damaging the federation’s reputation as well as having a negative impact on the Spiritualist movement in general.
My message to the ISF is simple:
You have, at last, done what you should have done from the outset. You are taking away Johnson’s membership and banning him from ever holding office in the federation. Now you should announce that you will postpone visiting Sweden for your Fraternal Week until Johnson has finished his term of imprisonment. In that way you will be demonstrating your desire to distance yourself from him and his actions.
To do otherwise will be to shake the very foundations on which your federation has been built, and the ISF’s future will be put at risk.
You owe it to Johnson’s victims and to the federation’s pioneers – who built a Spiritualist organisation of which everyone could be proud but which currently seems to be slipping slowly, but not peacefully, into oblivion – to do so immediately.
Only then will the ISF, those abused by Johnson in the name of Spiritualism, and the rest of the Movement be able to move on.
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