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Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, resigned on Tuesday after an investigation found that he failed to tell police about serial physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps as soon as we became aware of it.
AP reports that pressure on Welby had been building since Thursday when his refusal to accept responsibility for his failure to report the abuse in England and Africa in 2013 kindled anger about a lack of accountability at the highest levels of the church.
However, by Tuesday afternoon, Welby acknowledged that mistake.
He said, “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024. I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honored to serve.
His resignation will send ripples across the world. The Anglican Communion has more than 85 million members in 165 countries, including the Episcopal Church in the United States. While each national church has its leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury is considered first among equals.
Welby is a former oil executive who left the industry in 1989 to study for the priesthood. He was a controversial figure even before the scandal. A skilled mediator who has worked to resolve conflicts in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, he struggled to unite the Anglican Communion, which has been riven by sharply divergent views on issues such as gay rights and the place of women in the church.
On Thursday, the Church of England released the results of an independent investigation into the late John Smyth, a prominent attorney who the report said sexually, psychologically and physically abused about 30 boys and young men in the United Kingdom and 85 in Africa from the 1970s until he died in 2018.
The report of the Makin Review concluded that Welby failed to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the abuse in 2013, soon after he became Archbishop. If he had done so, Smyth could have been stopped sooner, and many victims could have been spared the abuse, the inquiry found.
Welby said he didn’t inform law enforcement agencies about the abuse because he was wrongly told that police were already investigating. But he took responsibility for not ensuring that the allegations were as thoroughly pursued as they should have been.
Some members of the General Synod of the Church of England’s national assembly started a petition calling Welby to step down because he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.”
However, the most vigorous outcry came from Smyth’s victims. Andrew Morse, who Smyth repeatedly beat over five years, said resigning was a chance for Welby to start repairing the damage caused by the church’s broader handling of historical abuse cases.
Welby’s resignation comes against the backdrop of widespread historical sexual abuse in the Church of England. A 2022 report by the Independent Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse found that deference to the authority of priests, taboos surrounding the discussion of sexuality and a culture that gave more support to alleged perpetrators than their victims helped make the Church of England “a place where abusers could hide.”
Welby had some supporters; they argued that he should remain on the job because of his role in changing the church’s culture.
Church officials were first made aware of Smyth’s abuse in 1982 when they received the results of an internal investigation into complaints about his behaviour at Christian summer camps in England. The recipients of that report “participated in an active cover-up” to prevent its finding from coming into the limelight, the Makin Review found.
Smyth moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 and later relocated to South Africa. He abused boys and young men in Zimbabwe, and there is evidence that the abuse continued in South Africa until his death in August 2018, the investigation found.
Smyth’s actions were finally made public in 2017 by Britain’s Channel 4 television station. The police in Hampshire then started an investigation. Police were planning to question him at the time of his death and had been preparing to extradite him.
Stephen Cherry, dean of the chapel of King’s College Cambridge, told BBC, “There are circumstances in which something happens whereby a person in a position of prominent leadership essentially loses the trust and the confidence and the capacity to do that really wonderful thing that someone like an archbishop does, which is represent everyone at a certain moment publicly.
“And the pain in the victim community and the history of not listening to people and not responding to people who are profoundly hurt by those in positions of power means that this is no longer a person who can carry the representative role of that office.”
