When you look at a high-up cleric – someone like Justin Welby, say, dressed in all his finery, vestments trimmed with gold thread and a bejewelled clasp on his cope, as he was at the coronation of King Charles III – it’s hard to believe this has any connection with a wandering rabbi on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with his band of 12 followers.
But Welby and his fellow Church of England prelates take as their guiding light the teachings of that rabbi, Jesus. His words were not all milk and honey. Take, for example, this passage from the gospel of Matthew: “If anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
In the case of Welby, who resigned as archbishop of Canterbury on Tuesday, that millstone turned out to be the Makin review, a recently published independent report that charted the brutal savagery of serial abuser John Smyth. Makin was even more disturbing in its account of how some people in the C of E knew about what Smyth was up to and covered it up.
It is not the first such organisation to make its own wellbeing rather than the survivors of abuse a priority, nor will it probably be the last. We’ve seen it before with schools, for example. The Roman Catholic church has also been culpable and reading the Makin review, I found so much that was all too familiar from my own reporting on Catholic scandals: the failure to act, not taking children’s suffering seriously, making the reputation of the institution a priority, delay in bringing people to justice that leads to other children being exposed to abuse.
Makin was very clear about Welby’s own culpability. The report said that in 2013, soon after his appointment as archbishop of Canterbury, he was informed of the Smyth case and told that complaints had been reported to the police. But no formal referral had actually been made. Instead, the review said, Welby and other senior church figures showed “a distinct lack of curiosity” and “a tendency towards minimisation of the matter”.
How could this have been his response? In 2013, he was new to the role of archbishop of Canterbury. Perhaps with a desk piled high with papers, and issues demanding his attention, he missed how important this was. Welby was predicted to be a super-efficient archbishop, given he joined the church after years in important roles in oil businesses. People believed he would act decisively and run the church more effectively.
Certainly, when you spoke to him, you sensed he was a CEO who had mentally allocated you five minutes before passing on to the next matter to be dealt with. That is agenda-driven episcopacy, rather than a listening episcopacy. You can’t run a church with a handbook full of business buzzwords like “low-hanging fruit” or “good to go”.
But given that background, let’s take a few more phrases that Welby might have learned from the business world. Learning curve is one. And for him, there has been a very steep one in the past few days. His first response to the report was to apologise and say he wasn’t going to resign. He quickly learned that nowadays it is survivors of abuse who have moral authority rather than archbishops and when they demanded that he go – as well as the thousands who signed a petition urging him to quit – he had to do so.
His resignation statement spoke of him taking “personal and institutional responsibility”. That was entirely right. As he’ll also know from business, the buck stops with the boss. But there’s a danger in that. Makin showed that others – including at least four serving bishops – failed children, too. Others need to examine their consciences, not just Welby.
Then there is the future. Professor Alexis Jay, who was commissioned by the C of E to look at its safeguarding, recommended it move to an independent system but says it is now dragging its feet. When the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell – now the most senior Anglican cleric – spoke on Radio 4’s Today programme, he indicated that delays were in part due to the church’s structure, requiring its synod to be involved in reforms.
That suggests – using another of those business phrases – it really needs to go back to the drawing board. Think about streamlining what it does when it comes to safeguarding. Listen more to survivors and preach a little less.
The Church of England is unlikely to cast aside hundreds of years in an instant for dramatic reforms – although the voluntary resignation of an archbishop of Canterbury was unprecedented. But it would do well to focus harder on that wandering rabbi, who spoke so powerfully of those who harmed children. Otherwise not only will more be damaged but all that it stands for – the food banks, the warm spaces in winter, work with the homeless, the places we can go when we need to be still and silent – will be irreparably harmed too.
Catherine Pepinster is a writer on religion and a former editor of the Tablet, the Catholic weekly
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