Catholic women's group withdraws Charity Tribunal appeal

Governance | Tania Mason | 31 Aug 2011

Catholic Women’s Ordination has dropped its appeal to the Charity Tribunal against the Charity Commission’s refusal to grant it charitable status.

The group, which campaigns for women to be ordained as priests and offers support to female lay members of the Church, had lodged an appeal in July in the wake of the Commission’s decision last year not to accept its application to become a charity.

But now it has withdrawn the appeal following some changes in the composition of the trustee board. Gareth Morgan, a senior consultant at the Kubernesis Partnership who was representing CWO on a pro bono basis, said that some new members of the board felt the benefits conferred by charitable status would not be worth the time and effort that would be required to pursue the appeal. “Securing charitable status was not such a priority for some of the trustees,” he said.

He stressed that the organisation remained convinced that its work was genuinely charitable and that it had good grounds for appeal, but realised it would be an “uphill battle” to convince the tribunal of that.

“The Charity Commission clearly felt that because of the campaigning work, there were questions about whether all CWO’s activities were linked to charitable purposes.”

CWO has existed as an unconstituted organisation since 1993, though it has members throughout Great Britain. Its income is currently less than £10,000 a year. It decided to apply for charitable status so that it could then merge with another charitable trust, the Lisieux Trust for Women’s Ministry.

But the Commission turned down the application, partly because of the campaigning nature of much of CWO’s work.

Morgan said it was a pity in some ways that the case had not gone ahead because it had the potential to be “very interesting, especially for organisations that carry out campaigning as part of their work”. It is only the second time that an organisation has appealed against the Commission’s refusal to grant charitable status; other cases heard by the Tribunal have been about different issues.

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