By Democrat reporter
The Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned over a damning report into a barrister thought to have been the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England.
Justin Welby had been facing growing pressure to stand down over his “failures” to alert authorities about John Smyth QC’s “abhorrent” abuse of children and young men.
On Tuesday, Mr Welby said it was “very clear I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.”
“For nearly twelve years I have struggled to introduce improvements. It is for others to judge what has been done.
“I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honoured to serve.”
In calls urging Welby to quit, a petition by some members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – gathered more than 10,000 signatures, while a senior bishop issued a public statement describing the church as being “in danger of losing complete credibility” on safeguarding.
Welby had been resisting the calls for him to resign but reiterated “his horror at the scale of John Smyth’s egregious abuse, as reflected in his public apology”.
Smyth died aged 75 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police, and so was “never brought to justice for the abuse”, the review said.
Across five decades in three different countries and involving as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa, Smyth is said to have subjected his victims to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.
Although Welby knew Smyth because of his attendance at Iwerne Christian camps in the 1970s and “did have reason to have some concern about him”, the review said this was not the same as suspecting he had committed severe abuses and concluded it was “not possible to establish” whether Welby knew of the severity of the abuses in the UK before 2013.
Welby’s resignation comes after the petition described his continuation in the role as “no longer tenable”, while Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley similarly called his position “untenable”.
She told the BBC on Monday that while his resignation is “not going to solve the problem”, it will be “a very clear indication that a line has been drawn, and that we must move towards independence of safeguarding”.
Top of page picture: Archbishop Justin Welby pictured with Pope Francis and Iain MacLeod Greenshields, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 2022 to 2023, on an ecumenical mission to Sudan.