Talk:John Ward (archbishop of Cardiff)

A fact from John Ward (archbishop of Cardiff) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 4 April 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that John Aloysius Ward, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cardiff from 1983, took early retirement in 2001, after the later years of his ministry were overshadowed by cases of sexual misconduct by priests in his archdiocese?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/April.

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False Accusations[edit]

There's a problem here. Ward was falsely accused of sexually assaulting a child in the 1960s. The accusation was made (via a tabloid newspaper) in the 1990s, but upon investigation by the police was swiftly found to be baseless. It seems reasonable to suppose that Ward's experience made him inappropriately sympathetic to others subject to similar accusations, including two high-profile cases where the accused turned out to be guilty.

The problem: how to report all this in the article in a way that doesn't insinuate that the accusation against Ward contained some truth? Merely stating the accusation and reporting that the charges were dropped invites the reader to suppose that the question remains unresolved. In fact, there is no objective reason to impute any truth to the allegation. And more to the point, it is precisely his having been subject to false accusations which (probably) made Ward so ineffectual in dealing with genuine cases.

What would be an appropriate NPOV way of building some of the above into the article? C0pernicus 09:54, 1 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]