As the months turned into years there were suspicions that the long-awaited report on John Smyth, thought to be the Church of England’s most prolific abuser, wouldn’t appear until the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, had retired. Five days after its publication on 7 November – more than four years after the original deadline – and in the wake of an angry, horrified reaction, he announced his resignation. On 12 November the Prime Minister said that Smyth’s victims had been failed “very, very badly”. Welby resigned hours later in a statement that acknowledged “personal and institutional responsibility” for the failure to address the abuse, about which he was officially informed in 2013.
From the late 1970s, Smyth, a barrister who was authorised to preach in the Church, carried out sadistic beatings and sexual abuse of children and young men, using a cane to deliver blows that left them bleeding and traumatised. His wife supplied nappies. Victims were told the beatings were “an appropriate step in their Christian progression”. Many were groomed at Winchester College. In 1982 one young man tried to take his own life after being told by Smyth that his 21st birthday would be marked by a particularly severe set of beatings.
An investigation carried out in 1982 by Cambridge vicar Mark Ruston was kept secret in what the review identifies as a deliberate cover-up spanning decades. Smyth moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 and continued to perpetrate brutal abuse. In 1995 he was charged with culpable homicide after a 16-year-old boy was found dead in suspicious circumstances. Smyth died in 2018 without facing justice, 18 months after a Channel 4 News investigation finally prompted police action.
Among the review’s devastating conclusions is that Smyth was able to abuse boys and young men in Africa “because of inaction of clergy within the Church of England”. The review says that Welby had “a personal and moral responsibility” to ensure action to stop Smyth was taken. Welby followed safeguarding policies at the time, trusting that the matter was being handled by others and that a police investigation was underway (it wasn’t), but he did not personally pursue the matter.
In 2019, Welby claimed in a statement that he was not part of the Evangelical “circles” in which Smyth moved. As a young man in the late 1970s, however, he was a dormitory officer at the Iwerne holiday camps in Dorset, where young men from leading public schools were schooled in the Christian faith. Smyth was chair of the Iwerne Trust, and a volunteer leader on the camps – a role that provided him with another opportunity to groom and abuse victims. Welby also briefly encountered Smyth in Paris in 1981 (Smyth was taking a group of victims on a skiing trip) and was later told by the rector of the Paris church he attended to “stay away” from Smyth, after one of the boys confided in him. Welby has maintained that this was “vague”, and that he was unaware of the abuse until 2013.
The review concludes that, “on the balance of probabilities… it was unlikely that Justin Welby would have had no knowledge of the concerns regarding John Smyth in the 1980s in the UK”. Smyth’s abuse was, the review says, an “open secret”.
While those who buried the 1982 report (several of whom have since died) are identified as the heart of the cover-up, it is Welby who has become the focus of the pain and anger that erupted after its publication. On 11 November the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, called for him to resign, as did a petition organised by three members of the clergy, which had collected more than 14,000 signatures by the time he stepped down.
As attested by Smyth’s survivors, the review is just the latest in a long line of documents produced in the wake of abuse scandals in the Church of England. Its themes – abuse of power, deference, the exploitation of theology – are depressingly familiar. “Nothing over the last ten years,” Welby told Channel 4 News on 7 November, “has been as horrible as dealing with not just this one, but innumerable other abuse cases.”
In September, a report concluded the abuse perpetrated by Mike Pilavachi, a Church of England priest in Watford, had been enabled by a “wholesale failure of organisational culture”. The KC who produced the report, Fiona Scolding, was lead counsel on the investigation of the Anglican Church during the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA), diagnosing in the Church an inability to believe that people who appeared to be good “could be capable of great harm towards children and young people” and a “culture of excessive deference”. Outside the Church of England, Welby has witnessed the fall of a personal hero, Jean Vanier, the Catholic founder of a charity for people with disabilities, found posthumously to have sexually abused women.
Welby was not inactive in response to such failings. During his tenure the number of employees on the National Safeguarding Team increased from one (part-time) to 55. Independent assessments of the Church’s track record remain critical, however. Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired IICSA, has concluded the only solution is to hand over safeguarding to independent bodies, free from Church control.
Welby’s other attempts to reform the Church were tortuous. His observation that sex belongs “within a committed relationship” rather than only heterosexual marriage, led to demands for “personal repentance” from the leaders of Anglican churches abroad, even as more liberal Anglicans argued that the Church treats its LGBT flock as second-class citizens.
There were successes, too. The Church of England now has women bishops – a development championed by Welby, who also proved to be a shrewd analyst of economic matters, not least in his time on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. A commitment was made to enact a “bias to the poor” in the Church’s use of its own multi-billion-pound assets, through investment in ministry on housing estates among other areas.
What was evident throughout his tenure was an authentic commitment to his role as a pastor. During the Covid-19 pandemic he spent time secretly volunteering as a chaplain at St Thomas’s Hospital, praying with the dying.
Welby was not, however, able to stem the continued numerical decline of the Church of England. A recent assessment highlighted that attendance is down almost 30 per cent since 2015, while financial deficits in dioceses are set to exceed £60m this year. This is now an existential crisis for the Church as its leaders reckon with responsibility for thousands of listed churches (and a repair bill estimated to exceed £1bn) and over-stretched clergy and volunteers struggling to keep the show on the road. Welby told The Rest is Politics on 20 October that he no longer read social media because he too readily believed accusations that he was “the worst Archbishop ever”.
In his resignation statement, he expressed a hope that his decision would make clear “how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change”. Whoever is enthroned at Canterbury must now pursue these safeguarding reforms in the “remorseless” manner Justin Welby should, he says, have used to ensure Smyth met with justice.
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World