Calls for the archbishop of Canterbury to resign over “failures and omissions” regarding the sadistic abuser John Smyth have not come out of the blue.
Welby was notified of allegations of Smyth’s abuse 11 years ago. Channel 4 News brought them to public attention seven years ago, and last week’s independent review of the way the church handled the allegations has been more than five years in the making.
Smyth groomed public schoolboys who attended evangelical Christian summer camps in the late 1970s and early 80s. He took them to a garden shed at his home near Winchester and viciously beat them.
The review, led by Keith Makin, said Smyth, who died in 2018, had subjected his victims to “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks. The impact of that abuse is impossible to overstate and has permanently marked the lives of his victims.” Some have tried to kill themselves.
A 1982 investigation secretly carried out by the Iwerne Trust, which funded the holiday camps, was covered up. Winchester college, the public school attended by many of the victims, banned Smyth from its premises but did not report his crimes to the police.
Smyth moved to Zimbabwe, where he continued to abuse boys, and faced charges of killing a 16-year-old boy at a holiday camp in 1992. The case was dismissed. Smyth relocated to South Africa where in 2017 he was removed as a leader of his local church in Cape Town after claims of inappropriate behaviour.
Welby had come across Smyth when he volunteered at the Iwerne Trust holiday camps in Dorset. He said in 2017: “As I recall him, he was a charming, delightful, very clever, brilliant speaker. I wasn’t a close friend of his, I wasn’t in his inner circle or in the inner circle of the leadership of the camp, far from it.”
He has said he had no inkling of the abuse or of concerns about Smyth at the time. Last week’s report said this was “unlikely”. Welby “may not have known of the extreme seriousness of the abuse, but it is most probable that he would have had at least a level of knowledge that John Smyth was of some concern”.
In 2013, a few months after Welby took up his role as archbishop, he and other senior figures were notified of the allegations. Last week, he acknowledged that he did not “ensure that this was pursued as energetically, as remorselessly as it should have been”. It was, he said, a “really shaming failure”.
By 2013, there was no excuse for not acting. Thirty years earlier, when initial evidence about Smyth’s abuse was uncovered, it could be argued there was a culture that failed to recognise the damage caused by abuse and that allowed institutions to prioritise reputation over justice.
But the magnitude and repercussions of abuse in the Catholic church had created shock waves around the world by 2013, and the C of E’s own history of abuse and its covering-up was becoming known.
Welby’s instinct on Smyth, as with other cases, appears to have been to hope the issues would go away and the survivors would give up their fight for the truth. Many survivors say the trauma of abuse has been compounded by the way they have been treated by the church. It is like being abused all over again, some say.
Since Welby became archbishop, the C of E has published a string of reports on its handling of abuse cases. Nearly all have found evidence of concealment, cover-up and efforts to contain reputational damage.
The C of E has poured money and resources into its efforts to improve safeguarding and correct the mistakes of the past. There has been some improvement, but most survivors say that overall the church’s response has been inconsistent and often damaging under Welby’s watch.
What marks out this case is that Welby is personally embroiled in it. He was at the holiday camps when Smyth – a man he greatly admired – was grooming boys for sadistic gratification. He was in a position of power when survivors came forward and he failed to act. The C of E has dragged its feet over the review it commissioned into Smyth’s crimes. No wonder the calls for Welby’s resignation are growing.
Some of those with the loudest voices have other disputes with Welby. Traditionalists resent his managerialism and what they see as his failure to cherish small parish churches that have been the C of E’s backbone for centuries. They also say he has gone too far in embracing same-sex couples. Others with a more progressive outlook say he has not gone far enough and that the C of E is out of touch with societal change. Now the two sides appear to be finding a common ground.
For now, Welby appears set on adding to the pile of previous apologies and admissions of shame regarding clerical abuse in the hope of riding out the storm. Plans were already in place for him to announce his retirement in the next couple of months, to take effect when he turns 70 in January 2026. While he will be desperate not to be forced to quit ahead of schedule, he may be keenly looking forward to quieter times ahead.
