Sex abuse, scandal and an incompetent Archbishop

He ran summer camps for the Iwerne Trust. Only the poshest boys from the poshest schools were invited as future leaders of state and church. In 1984, with murmured suspicions about his activities breaking surface, he slipped over to Zimbabwe to start camps of his own there. This culminated in his arrest in 1997 on suspicion of culpable homicide, as part of the investigation into the drowning of Guide Nyachuru, a 16 year old at the Marondera camp. Nyachuru’s unclothed body was found in Ruzawi school pool in December 1992. Smyth then fled to South Africa.

In England despite the size of his molestation, and a private record that had begun to be put together – The Rusten Report – justice was impossible to come by for the victims.

The leaders of the evangelical movement all swore each other to secrecy. After 1984, it was common knowledge that something corrupt and dreadful had happened, but no one with any responsibility for the Iwerne camps was talking.

In 2013 the then Archbishop of Canterbury was officially informed of the scale and scope of the problem, and asked to act on it.

Welby maintained that this was the first he had heard of the abuse by his old friend. But there was a problem: Welby had been one of the posh boys helping run the Iwerne project and was involved in the camps personally. Welby had been a dormitory officer and later a speaker at the camps held in the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster. So the question ‘how much did he know?’ has become important.

Lots of people, when asked, said they knew nothing and had forgotten. That included Lord Carey whose college Smyth did some refresher Bible courses at.

Noted in the Makin Report is one contributor’s claim that they overheard Welby having “grave conversations” about Smyth with Canon Mark Ruston, the compiler of the original report into Smyth in 1982. Welby said he didn’t remember that.

Talking to Nick Ferrari in 2017, Welby claimed he went to work in Paris from 1978 to 1983 and had no contact with the people involved with the camps at all during that period. But records detailed in the report state that in 1979 Welby was listed as a speaker at the summer camp, and in 1983 welcomed Smyth to the Anglican chaplaincy in Paris one Sunday as Smyth passed through with a cohort of boys. It also documents that he gave money to support Smyth’s ministry.

These are unhappy contradictions. Fast forward to 2013 and Welby has become Archbishop and the full horror of what Smyth got up to is brought to his door at Lambeth Palace. It has become his personal and institutional responsibility to establish what happened and why it happened, and to whom.

And then institutional failure somehow sets in. The blow by blow story of what happened, or to put it better, what didn’t happen under Welby from that point on is astonishing. Eleven years later, published this month, the Makin report details exactly what happened.

The quickest way of grasping the scale of incompetence and the damage done is to read the immediate response of the victims. They have responded to the latest report with misery and the deepest morally energised frustration.

In a statement after the Makin report’s publication, they write that they are “concerned that the review demonstrates that the entire Church hierarchy still has no understanding of trauma-informed approach despite this being established many times previously.”

“We note that publication of the Makin Review is more than 1,630 days late. Justice delayed is justice denied, particularly to all those John Smyth victims who have now died. We attribute the vast majority of that delay to the deliberate under-resourcing of the project by the C of E. We have been making this point to the C of E for the last five years.”

The report however demonstrates that perhaps one of the most egregious failures by the Archbishop personally emerged when, in the 2017 LBC interview, he made specific assurances that the activities of Smyth had been reported as a crime to the police. The Church was not dealing with it perhaps, but the police were. But this wasn’t true. His office had not reported it to the police, and this was one of the reasons why until Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman got involved in 2017, nothing more happened.

Newman herself has just interviewed Welby to ask him if the failures he oversaw amounted to a cover-up – the failure to bring Smyth’s abuse into the light; the failure to report it to the police; the failure to meet the victims for years after making a promise to; the failure to oversee proper and competent due safeguarding process.

After all, not exposing it allows it to remain covered up. The decision to refuse to act is in itself an action.

The way he replied was devastating.

Newman: “Are you ever torn between doing what’s right and protecting the institution?”

Welby: “Never … I don’t give a hang about the institution. I really, genuinely don’t. If this report was a lethal blow to the institution, so be it. God will raise up another institution.”

Newman: “So your failing is incompetence rather than cover up – your personal failing?”

Welby: “Yes. Incompetence? Yes, all right, I’ll give you that one.”

If you are a victim the fact that you have had neither proper help, recognition or redress because of incompetence rather than mendacity makes little difference.

But admitting that your incompetence has added impossible burdens of additional distress to people wounded in the institution you preside over is a very serious matter.

And think about it for a moment. This is not just the denial of a cover-up (which of course it effectively was). This is a denial that the Church under his care matters very much.

The Church is not and is never just ‘an institution’. It is the struggling, wounded, aspiring and glorious body of Christ. Accepting the role of Archbishop involves being given responsibility to oversee and care for it.

To suggest that if it is killed off through his or anyone else’s incompetence it doesn’t matter because another one will emerge at some time is a form of detached pseudo-pietistic irresponsibility of the worst kind.

Welby has to resign. And he needs to do so, not just because he failed to act to expose the corruption that polluted the evangelical enterprise that he represented and was part of, but because someone has to take responsibility for the failure to do what needed to be done, to bring it to light, acknowledge it and help those wounded by it.

When he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, he accepted responsibility. That’s what the office means. It’s not just the top of a social tree that through his connections he has managed to climb up.

Taking responsibility and paying the price is the moral currency of recognising truth, virtue and justice; and when necessary sacrificing oneself for them.

Welby claims to serve a God who taught the pattern of sacrifice as the way of making a broken world better.

One of his clergy, the Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie, has written to him, putting the moral case at its most poignant.

“We will continue to pray for you, but I for one will be praying that you will resign. The damage you have done to this church will take a very long time to repair.

“More importantly, those things you did and failed to do inflicted such damage on people–made in the image of that same God–might never heal. Any healing of individuals or the institution must now be in His hands, not yours. The way you might serve that process best now is to resign.

“If you will not go for the love of the institution, if you will not go for the love of its people and priests, if you will not go for the victims, if you will not go for reasons of your own embarrassment or shame, then I pray you, for love of God and Him alone, go.”

END

Sex abuse, scandal and an incompetent Archbishop

By Gavin Ashenden
CHRISTIAN TODAY
11 November 2024

The groundswell of moral outrage at the failure of the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby to deal with a distressing sex scandal is growing daily following the publication of the Makin Report last week.

One of the burdens of accepting leadership and the control of an institution is that you become personally responsible for it. You can’t have the perks without being willing to pay the price. The Archbishop of Canterbury wants the perks. He won’t pay the price. But someone needs to.

There is always a price to be paid for moral failure. That’s the kind of universe we live in. Christians understand it better than most. You would hope that an Archbishop might understand that better than most Christians, but not it appears, in the case of Justin Welby.

John Smyth was an evangelical barrister who came to dominate a sub-culture within the Church of England and secretly sexually and violently molested over a hundred young men.