Overwhelmed. When Justin Welby looks back on the early months of his tenure as archbishop of Canterbury, that is the word that comes to his mind. In his first interview since his resignation, Welby told the BBC that he was shocked by the torrent of safeguarding cases that flooded across his desk when he entered Lambeth Palace in 2013: historic cases, recent cases, disputed cases; bishops, deans, archdeacons and priests accused or suspected of abusing choirboys, parishioners, even their fellow clergy. “Safeguarding was the crisis I hadn’t foreseen – I didn’t realise how bad it was,” Welby said. The scale of the problem was why, Welby now says, he failed to adequately respond to the case that would ultimately bring his tenure to an end 11 years later.
An independent investigation into the abuses of John Smyth – which were first reported to the Church of England (C of E) in summer 2013, months after Welby took office – was published last November. The Makin review criticised Welby for not ensuring those early allegations reached the proper authorities. Within days of its publication, Welby resigned, becoming the first ever head of the Church to step down in disgrace.
In the BBC interview on 30 March, Welby apologised: “I am so sorry for what I failed to do [and] for what the Church did do with John Smyth… I am so sorry that I did not serve the victims and survivors… as I should have done, and that’s why I resigned.”
He attempted to explain, if not justify, his failures. He was new and inexperienced in the job when the accusations came across his desk. The national Church then had a single, part-time staffer for safeguarding (under Welby, the team grew to almost 60). The rules said it was the local bishop in Ely, not Canterbury, who should take the lead. The police asked him to hold off while they looked into the case themselves. He was distracted by another scandal that was going through the courts and seemed more pressing. “It was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks,” Welby said. “That’s not an excuse… The reality is, I got it wrong. As archbishop, there are no excuses for that kind of failure.”
If the former prelate hoped his self-abnegation might salvage what was left of his reputation, he was wrong. The response to the interview has mostly been anger at what many victims see as an attempt to shift the blame. Some continue to believe Welby is obscuring the extent to which he knew about Smyth’s abuse before 2013, given he had attended camps with Smyth in the 1970s.
Smyth was perhaps the most prolific abuser in the modern history of the Church of England. Around 130 teenage boys, many of them groomed while attending evangelical summer camps co-led by Smyth, were sexually, psychologically and physically abused by him. After this was discovered in 1982 by the trust that ran the camps, Smyth was quietly pushed out. But the trust chose not to pass on what they knew to the Church authorities or the police. Smyth went on to set up camps in Zimbabwe, where he began abusing boys again.
The Makin report concluded that Smyth’s crimes were an “open secret” among many in the conservative-evangelical wing of the C of E. But it took a Channel 4 News documentary in 2017 to expose him. Survivors continue to demand every clergy member named in the report resigns or be disciplined. The Church has identified ten – including a former bishop of Durham and George Carey, archbishop of Canterbury from 1992 to 2002 – whose involvement in the “cover-up”, as the report calls it, warrants formal disciplinary proceedings.
There has also been outrage over Welby’s admission to the BBC that if Smyth were still alive, he would forgive him. The former archbishop went on to say that it was up to victims to decide for themselves if they wished to extend the same grace to Smyth, who died in 2018 shortly after the TV exposé of his abuse. One victim told the BBC that, never mind Smyth, he could not even forgive Welby for continuing to “blank” survivors.
While the Church reeled in the wake of the Makin report, other dark secrets were forcing their way to the surface. Weeks after Welby’s resignation, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, now the de facto interim head of the C of E, was implicated in a scandal over an Essex vicar known to have a history of sexual offences against children. In January, the bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath, was forced from office after it emerged two women – one of them now a bishop herself – had made complaints against him for sexual harassment and misconduct. Then, Channel 4 revealed that the evangelical vicar who led the cover-up of Smyth’s abuse in the 1980s, David Fletcher, was also an alleged abuser himself. Fletcher’s brother, Jonathan, a prominent church leader in London for decades, is awaiting trial for indecent assault and grievous bodily harm during his ministry.
What is it about the C of E that allows – perhaps even enables – such cases to proliferate? No doubt some abusers deliberately infiltrate the priesthood knowing it grants clergy ready access to vulnerable potential victims. There is also a powerful culture of deference to the dog-collared elite. Even more pervasive is the fear that exposing abuse will harm the mission of saving souls; this is lofty, eternity-minded work too important to be threatened by bad press. In truth, abuse scandals have afflicted a panoply of other institutions: the BBC, the NHS, parliament, too many schools to count. But, rightly, none is held to moral standards as high as its the nation’s established church.
In an attempt to halt the onslaught, in February the C of E’s governing body, the General Synod, considered radical reforms to Church safeguarding. Independent safeguarding had long been demanded by many in the survivor community, who do not trust the Church to “mark its own homework”. Indeed, Welby told the BBC he had been in favour of such a reform for years. But to the surprise of many observers, the Synod instead voted for a pared-back version of independence: the national team was transferred to a new, independent employer, but local safeguarding was kept within dioceses. Unwilling to defend the status quo but not yet ready for radical reform, the C of E is caught in a messy compromise that will please few.
Welby’s successor, due to be announced in the autumn, will be under no illusions about the scale of the crisis facing Lambeth Palace. Speedily implementing the outsourcing of the national safeguarding team, a legally and logistically complex task, must be apriority. The Church must also begin to rebuild trust with both survivors and the wider public. Yet the archbishop of Canterbury does not have the executive powers of the pope; they are not CEO of C of E plc. “I would have loved to be able to wave a magic wand and get it all right,” Welby told the BBC regarding the Church’s struggle to introduce gay marriage. “But that isn’t the reality, and I didn’t have the votes.” Without friendly majorities in the Synod, archbishops can only achieve so much.
Many of those angered by Welby’s tenure are placing their hopes in a fresher, more modern next resident of Lambeth Palace. A change of tone at the top would no doubt help the Church begin to regain the nation’s trust. But the 106th archbishop of Canterbury will be just as constrained – by millennia of tradition, by complex internal systems and cultures, and by ordinary human weaknesses – as Welby.
[See also: Where to find meaning]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?