The archbishop and the abuser

In the end the pressure became intolerable. On November 12th the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned over his response to a child-abuse scandal. Archbishop Welby had previously insisted he would not go, despite criticism of the Church of England and of him personally in a report by Keith Makin, a former director of social services. It concluded that safeguarding failures meant that “arguably the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England” (CofE) was never brought to justice.

That person was John Smyth, a lawyer and an apparent pillar of the church community, who was a trustee of an organisation that ran Christian summer camps for boys from leading English private schools. Starting in the 1970s Smyth groomed dozens of young men in Britain and performed sadistic beatings on them under the pretext of administering discipline. One victim told the review: “I remember thinking ‘he’s going to kill me.’ I was that scared.” Several tried to take their own lives.

In 1982 an Anglican clergyman wrote a report on the abuse but it was not made public and Smyth was not reported to police. Smyth moved to Africa in 1984, where the Makin report says he “was able to abuse boys and young men in Zimbabwe (and possibly South Africa) because of inaction of clergy within the Church of England”. Mr Makin says that at least 115 boys and young men across three countries were abused; one boy died in suspicious circumstances at a camp in Zimbabwe. Archbishop Welby says that he did not know about the allegations until 2013, although the report finds that it was “unlikely” that he had no knowledge of concerns raised about Smyth’s conduct in Britain in the 1980s, not least because he had as a teenager been in one of the dorms Smyth oversaw at the camps and knew him well enough to exchange Christmas cards.

Church leaders “at the highest level”, the archbishop among them, were formally made aware of the accusations against Smyth in 2013. Yet still no official referral was made to the police until 2017; Smyth, who died in 2018, was never charged with anything. “There was a distinct lack of curiosity shown by these senior figures and a tendency towards minimisation of the matter,” concludes Mr Makin. Archbishop Welby had a “personal and moral responsibility” to pursue the allegations further.

The archbishop, who was anyway required to step down from his role on his 70th birthday in 14 months, initially tried to tough it out. He apologised to Smyth’s victims but said he would not resign, insisting that he had introduced checks and balances to “seek to ensure that the same could not happen today”. Many clergy say safeguarding changes have indeed taken place at parish level; a group of survivors of abuse acknowledged such changes in many dioceses to the Church Times, an Anglican newspaper. But they also said that the 27 recommendations in the Makin report “reflect similar recommendations in dozens of previous safeguarding reports over 40-plus years that the CofE has previously chosen to ignore or disregard”. There is substance to that charge. The CofE set up an Independent Safeguarding Board in 2021, for instance, but it was beset by internal conflicts and was closed in 2023.

Ian Paul, an evangelical on the church’s governing General Synod who, together with a liberal and an Anglo-Catholic, launched a petition calling for the archbishop’s resignation, says that his campaign was not just about claiming a scalp. “What is needed is a wholesale change of culture in the senior leadership of the church. But I did not believe that change could happen while Justin Welby was still archbishop.” Others seem to have reached the same conclusion. The Bishop of Newcastle joined calls for Archbishop Welby to go on November 11th; the next day Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said that victims had been “failed very, very badly”.

The lengthy process of choosing a new archbishop now begins. But whether Archbishop Welby’s successor can do any better on safeguarding is open to doubt. “This is much bigger than just Welby,” says Linda Woodhead, a professor of theology at King’s College London. “There is a danger in getting the scalp”, warns one clergyman, “that the organisation feels it does not have to change any more, because the heat is taken off, and all the other people who support the old culture remain in place.”■

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