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ISF vice president resigns over rape case decisions
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 AUSTRALIA. The imprisonment of
Mervyn Johnson for child rape and other offences in January 2007 has
returned to haunt the International Spiritualist Federation (ISF), of
which he was president, a year later. Johnson was sentenced to five
years imprisonment by a Swedish court. Now Australian Garth Willey, ISF
vice president (left), has resigned over the federation’s failure to
remove Johnson as a member.
His decision was made known to his fellow Executive Committee members in an “Open Letter of Resignation” dated 11 February, 2008.
Garth Willey became acting president during the troubled period in 2006 when Johnson was facing prosecution and had to stand down. Since then, Ann Luck has been appointed ISF president and Garth Willey resumed his duties as vice president.
But the Mervyn Johnson episode has continued to simmer while the English medium and healer lanquishes in prison, having lost two appeals against the sentence (Healer loses appeal against child rape conviction).
He still has many supporters within ISF, who presumably do not accept the court’s verdict and assume him to be innocent. But others believe he has done untold damage to the Spiritualist movement, both in Sweden – where he lived and worked – as well as elsewhere in the world.
Willey disagreed with the Executive Committee’s decision taken at its 2007 meeting in Rochester, New York – birthplace of modern Spiritualism, incidentally – “not to take steps available under the ISF’s constitution to remove Mervyn Johnson from membership of the ISF; and rather, that his membership was actually ratified in the positive”.
 As if that were not bad enough, in Willey’s eyes, the ISF committee, in a teleconference meeting of 9 February this year, decided to hold its 2009 Convention Week in Sweden – where Johnson (right) is imprisoned.
In his resignation letter, Willey spells out why he feels so strongly on these issues:
“Mervyn Johnson, whilst president of the ISF, was convicted (and lost two appeals) on various sexual charges, including rape of a minor, conducted in the course of his providing ‘spiritual healing’. This, in my view, is a great stain in the history of the ISF and the Spiritualist movement as a whole – and I find it quite appalling that we did not taken action to remove him from our membership list as soon as he was convicted.
“I can understand that as his close friends and colleagues over a considerable period, you have great sympathy for his situation; but I do feel that you have allowed your personal feelings to over-ride your sense of what is right and proper for the ISF.
“We, the Executive Committee, have a responsibility to defend the ISF’s image not only within the Spiritualist movement but to the world at large, let alone to other ISF members who feel the same way that I do, many of whom have now resigned from our ranks or have not bothered to renew their membership subscriptions.”
Willey describes the decision to take the ISF 2009 Convention Week to Sweden as “a show of support for some of our members there, many of whom continued to show their support for Johnson throughout his trial(s).”
In doing so, he charges, the Executive Committee “have shown yourselves to have been oblivious to the many other members (and former members) in Sweden, especially those associated with Johnson’s victims; and now you have voted to officially visit their country. I think it is absolutely inappropriate to hold a Convention Week in that country whilst Johnson is a confirmed member of the ISF.”
Since he “cannot condone these decisions and do not wish to be associated with the Committee that has seen fit to make them” he has resigned as vice president and withdrawn his willingness to be nominated for re-election at the forthcoming ISF meeting.
Australian Garth Willey and his wife Audrey, a trance medium, run the Woodlands Sanctuary Foundation, a non-profit educational organisation for the advancement of spiritual understanding, in the Yarra Valley on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia.
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Posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Category: Spiritualism
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