In November, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby announced his resignation as the leader of the Church of England after an independent review into the crimes of John Smyth exposed his persistent failure to take the necessary steps to bring the prolific child abuser to justice. He will officially step down in early January.
The independent Makin review found that Smyth, a barrister involved in Christian ministry, abused as many as 130 boys and young men at Christian summer camps in Africa and England over four decades. Smyth, who the review found had subjected his victims to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, died in 2018 at the age of 75, without facing full accountability.
The abuse suffered at the hands of John Smyth was “prolific and abhorrent”, the inquiry found. “Words cannot adequately describe the horror of what transpired.”
The testimonies of the victims who took part in the inquiry make heartbreaking reading. Many say they waited for over four decades to disclose the abuse because they feared that they would be blamed or disbelieved.
The barrister’s horrific abuse of boys involved in Christian camps was first identified in the 1980s, the review found, but the Church of England failed to take appropriate action and practically allowed him to continue his abuse, both in England and Africa.
Archbishop Welby volunteered at some of the holiday camps in which Smyth abused boys in the 1970s but denied he had any knowledge of concerns about the barrister at the time. The Makin review concludes that this is “unlikely”. Welby may not have known the full extent of the abuse, the authors conceded, but he knew it had happened.
Archbishop Welby says he was first informed of Smyth’s crimes in 2013, but accepts that he somehow failed to officially file a report with the police. The review found that had Welby reported the abuse to the authorities at that time, “on the balance of probabilities”, Smyth would have been brought to justice “at a much earlier point”. This would have saved Smyth’s victims some 10 years of added agony, gave them more time to hold him accountable for his crimes before his death, and showed that the church and its leaders actually care about victims of clergy abuse.
In his resignation statement, Welby said he “must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024”.
Yet Welby’s resignation did not come easy – he had to be forced out of the role under immense pressure. Just as he failed to take action to bring Smyth to justice, Welby also failed to take responsibility for his role in shielding an abuser from accountability.
After the publication of the Makin review, Welby initially told the media that he was not planning to resign. It was only after some senior clergy, such as Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle, called on him to step aside, Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to offer his support, and public criticism began to pile up on social media that he acknowledged his responsibility and reluctantly agreed to step down.
Regrettably, Welby is not the only high-ranking figure in the Church of England being criticised for his inadequate response to child abuse.
Earlier this month, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, who is the second most senior bishop in the Church of England, had to offer an apology after scrutiny mounted over his handling of another Church of England-linked abuse case in 2019. Cottrell is being accused of allowing a priest to remain in post, despite knowing that he had been banned from being alone with children and had paid compensation to a sexual abuse victim.
As the next most senior bishop in the Church, Cottrell will temporarily take over the position of Archbishop of Canterbury in January while a permanent replacement for Welby is selected.
So far, Cottrell has been rejecting growing calls for his resignation, claiming the abuser priest’s continued employment, which according to reports immensely distressed victims, was not his fault and he should not lose his job over it. “I am deeply sorry that we were not able to take action earlier,” he said, “but that was the situation I inherited.”
It seems no one, not even its highest-ranking leaders, feels truly responsible for the Church of England’s apparent inability to protect children, acknowledge abuse when it happens, remove abusers from their positions, and deliver justice to victims of all ages without being pressured by the public.
Welby’s reluctant and belated resignation is undoubtedly welcome, and should be followed by others. But the ever-growing crisis at the church clearly shows that what is needed today is not any individual resignation, but instead, true institutional responsibility and meaningful action.
The church urgently needs to implement a serious programme of training about boundary violations and sexual exploitation in all its seminaries and theological training colleges, and develop appropriate disciplinary procedures across the board to tackle the sexual, physical and emotional exploitation of adults and children alike.
A system must be put in place that would guarantee the immediate removal from the ministry of any offender. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse Report (IICSA), published in 2022, found that in the United Kingdom, clergy abuse is endemic, and that senior members of the church very often protect perpetrators by moving them to another parish in the event of rumours – or even where the abuse has been reported by the victim(s). Sending an alleged abuser to “exile”, of course, achieves little other than keeping the church free of scandal for the time being. The victims cannot find justice or an opportunity to heal. Untreated and unpunished, the abuser simply continues his abuse in his new setting. As was the case with Smyth, this sad pattern repeats itself until someone, often a victim, manages to make the crime public. Then the buck-passing begins. Church leaders start talking about “inherited situations” and claim ignorance.
This cannot be allowed to continue.
It’s time for the church to accept its responsibilities, stop shielding abusers and focus on supporting victims.
It also needs to be remembered that this is in no way a problem specific to the Church of England. Scandals of this nature periodically emerge in churches across the globe, from the UK and Ireland to the United States and Australia.
In Spain, it is estimated that more than 200,000 children have been abused by the Roman Catholic clergy since 1940. An independent inquiry published its report on the scandal in 2023, and deemed the church’s response to the endemic abuse as “insufficient”. Under severe political pressure, the Catholic Church started a complaints procedure for clergy abuse in 2020. This led to almost 1000 victims coming forward. But it is widely known that this is only the tip of the iceberg.
In France, a 2021 inquiry into clerical abuse found that at least 216,000 children had been sexually abused in the French Catholic Church since 1950, by at least 3,000 abusers. The report’s authors accused the church of showing “cruel indifference” towards the victims. They said this abuse took place in Catholic schools, churches and holiday camps across France, with the vast majority of victims being between the ages of 10-13. Many had tried to report the abuse to church leaders and had not been believed.
Clergy abuse is systematic and cannot be written off as individual instances committed by atypical “rogue” perpetrators.
There is copious evidence that many, many perpetrators continue to operate in various churches across the world, with little or no scrutiny from religious authorities or indeed, law enforcement. This absence of supervision means that they can continue their abuse in plain sight, feeling invincible.
To this day, clergy abuse seems to be exposed, and abusers punished, due primarily to the bravery and strength of victims.
It was 20 years ago that the Centre for Women’s Justice, a charity I co-founded, awarded its highest accolade, the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize, to Dr Margaret Kennedy, a survivor of and a leading campaigner on sexual abuse by clergy. She founded MACSAS (Minister & Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors), a national organisation supporting women and men who have experienced sexual abuse by clergy or ministers, as a child or as an adult. MACSAS is still going strong today, and doing important work supporting survivors and bringing abusers to justice.
Margaret Kennedy, and all the other brave survivors who have spoken out over the decades in order to expose the atrocity of abuse by clergy, however, should not have to campaign for justice. It should be readily administered. The church, along with every other religious institution, should make it their utmost priority to clean their ranks of abusers, exploiters and child rapists.
The time for buck-passing, excuses and belated, reluctant resignations by a few leaders is well over.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
