Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has apologised after "inadvertently" failing to pass on allegations of abuse against Anthony Pierce, a then priest in the Church in Wales more than two decades ago.
Allegations that Pierce had admitted abusing a 15-year-old were said to be known amongst senior clergy in the Church in Wales in the 1990s and a written file was given to the then Archbishop of Wales, Alwyn Rice Jones.
The allegations were then passed to Jones’ successor Rowan Williams, however he told a review he only briefly glanced at the file and didn’t realise it contained allegations of criminal conduct. He then took the file with his personal papers rather than passing it to his successor in Wales, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002. He accepts this was an error and told BBC Wales: “I regret it very much if my delay in reading it further complicated the process of dealing with the criminal activity.
"I am very conscious that Pierce's victims and their families will feel that the processes of the Church did not adequately protect them at that time, and am very sorry indeed for any ways in which I contributed to this, however inadvertently."
The Church in Wales has just published its review into the way in which Pierce, the former Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, was appointed to senior church roles in the 1990s despite senior clergy knowing of sexual abuse allegations against him.
The current Archbishop of Wales, Most Rev Cherry Vann said the review shows “in painful detail the missed opportunities, the harmful assumptions and the inadequate processes which characterised the Church’s response to these allegations of abuse for far too long.
“This catalogue of failures can only be a source of shame for the Church and will have caused further trauma to abuse victims and their families.”
Pierce, who was Bishop of Swansea and Brecon between 1999 and 2008, was jailed for four years in March last year after admitting separate sexual offences against a boy aged under 16, committed between 1985 and 1990, when he was a parish priest in the West Cross area of Swansea.
When those offences were admitted in 2025, the Church in Wales reviewed how issues relating to Pierce had been handled in the past and found that senior clergy had apparently been aware of sexual abuse allegations against him when he was appointed Archdeacon in 1995 and then Bishop of Swansea and Brecon in 1999. These allegations were not reported to the police until 2010.
Pierce has now been deposed from holy orders and is no longer a priest of the Church in Wales. A spokesperson for the Church in Wales said:
“The Church in Wales is determined to demonstrate that it is a safe place, and that anyone coming forward will have their concerns or disclosures taken seriously, treated with compassion, and taken forward according to the highest current standards. If our people and processes have failed victims and survivors of abuse in the past, we intend to take responsibility for that fact and to fully apply the lessons which have been learned.
“There is no place for any form of abuse in the Church in Wales. We give the highest priority to the care and protection of children and vulnerable people in our communities. To this end we regularly review our safeguarding procedures and provide extensive training to staff and volunteers.”