SURVIVORS of John Smyth’s campaign of abuse have called for further action, after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s announcement that he would take “personal and institutional responsibility” and resign — a decision that has led to tributes to his leadership from other bishops.
The Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson, said in a statement on Wednesday morning that Archbishop Welby’s decision to resign had displayed “a willingness to take responsibility for the wider Church’s failing”.
It demonstrated “the seriousness of his commitment to those who have suffered as a result” of Smyth’s abuse and institutional inaction, he said.
In 2017, Bishop Watson revealed that he had been a victim of beatings by Smyth (10 February 2017). On Wednesday, he said that his prayers were “first and foremost” with his fellow victims.
“I am deeply grateful for all who have reached out to me over the course of the past week, and for your concern and prayers,” he said, and asked people to pray for the Archbishop and his wife, Caroline, “who have given so generously of themselves in this most challenging of callings”.
He said that churches “have continued to make significant improvements in our safeguarding practice”, and called for this progress to continue with redoubled effort.
One of the survivors of Smyth’s abuse, Mark Stibbe, said in an interview with Channel 4 News on Tuesday evening that “If there are senior clergy who have broken the law then they need to be called to account.”
Later, in a briefing hosted by the Religion Media Centre, Mr Stibbe said that the “quality of leadership” among bishops needed to be a priority, as changes to safeguarding processes were developed.
“I feel that the top echelon of leadership in the Church of England has this disconnect from reality,” he said.
Speaking to the Church Times on Wednesday morning, the Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, said that, when reading the Makin report, she had been “shocked and saddened” by the “extent of the abuse that the survivors suffered”.
Asked whether she thought that Archbishop Welby had been a scapegoat for wider failings, she said: “I wonder, when history looks back, whether what you have just said will become more apparent. I cannot help but wonder.”
She suggested that the criticism of Archbishop Welby in recent days had involved a “conflation” of disaffection with other issues, including the parish system and the Living in Love and Faith process.
“I have a suspicion that of lot of these were conflated and brought on to the Archbishops’ shoulders”, she said, though she said that she was “open to being wrong.”
She said that she understood why survivors were calling for more resignations, but no amount of resignations would “resolve the tragedy”.
“Is this really about resignations, or is it really about us asking, being courageous enough to ask, the question, why did this happen? How did it come to happen? And then address the failures of the church,” she said.
There were issues with certain approaches to leadership, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said, and linked this with theology: “If you examine a lot of the abuse cases that we have seen, you will see a lot of it has to do with out literal interpretations of scripture.”
Some leaders “give the impression, if not sometimes saying it outwardly, that ‘I am the anointed one of God and there you must do what I do and do what I say.’ We’ve got to break that. God is God; we are mere mortals, fallible mortals, to be challenged,” Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said.
In addition there were “issues within the Church about the seal of the confessional”, she said: “there are issues on both spectrums, as it were, of the extremes within our church life that I think are drivers.”
Despite this, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said that she had confidence in church safeguarding. “I know, now, more than ever, and with the help of our present Archbishop, we have dragged the Church to a place where everyone recognises that safeguarding is all of our responsibility.”
However, on Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Rt Revd Julie Conalty, who is the deputy lead bishop for safeguarding, said that “in some ways, we are not a safe institution”.
Bishop Conalty said: “We still have this institutional problem where we are not putting victims and survivors at the centre.”
Also on Wednesday morning, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, who had called on the Archbishop to resign, released a statement, saying that it was “right” for him to go.
“This resignation does not solve the Church’s profound failure over safeguarding and the ongoing trauma caused to victims and survivors of church related abuse nor does it excuse others whose neglect of their duties is exposed by the Makin report,” she said.
“We need to pause and pray for the victims we let down and commit to changing the culture of the old school: a culture that put the reputation of the Church before the protection of the vulnerable. Now is the time for fresh thinking.”
On Thursday, in a letter to priests in the diocese of Newcastle, Dr Hartley wrote: “It has been an incredibly difficult week personally, but I stand by everything I said and the actions I took.
“Effecting culture change in the Church of England over safeguarding is still an urgent task, and it won’t be brought about by me as your bishop (or indeed any other bishop) colluding with a conspiracy of silence.”
The Bishop of Oxford, Dr Steven Croft, also described Archbishop Welby’s move as the “right decision”. In an interview with BBC Radio Oxford, Dr Croft said: “I think the focus of our attention needs to be on the people who are hurt — the victims and survivors of John Smyth and the terrible ordeal that they suffered.”
In September, an independent audit commended the diocese of Oxford for progress in its safeguarding systems (News, 23 September).
A report published last year on the abuse perpetrated by a priest, the late Trevor Devamanikkam, criticised Dr Croft for his response when, as Bishop of Doncaster, he had been informed about the abuse in 2012 (News, 11 May 2023).
When a survivor made a disclosure to Dr Croft that he had been raped by Devamanikkam in 1984, the Bishop “did not follow the policies and procedures in place at the time”, the review said. In 2023, Dr Croft apologised, and said: “I did not act sufficiently on the disclosures.”
ON WEDNESDAY, the diocese of Winchester announced that the Revd Sue Colman and her husband, Sir Jamie Colman, had been asked to step back from their involvement with St Leonard’s, Oakley, where Ms Colman is a non-stipendiary minister, and Sir Jamie volunteers.
The Makin report described the Colmans’ support for Smyth’s work in Zimbabwe. Sir Jamie chaired the trustees of Zambesi Ministries from1989, after the other trustees resigned when warned about Smyth’s abuse in the UK.
Sir Jamie, the report says, “viewed John Smyth as being repentant and with sufficient effective controls on his behaviour, despite all the evidence being to the contrary”.
In 2017, after Channel 4 News made public the extent of Smyth’s abuse, Ms Colman said that she was “devastated to learn of the seriousness of the allegations against John Smyth of which I was unaware until very recently” (News, 3 March 2017).
In the Makin report, the reviewer writes: “Sue Colman has advised us that she was aware of the allegations of abuse at the time she became a Trustee, was reluctant, and was persuaded to take up the role by her husband. . . Sue Colman advises that she did not know the full details of the abuse in the UK, but that she was told that some level of abuse had taken place,” the report says. “It is likely, on the balance of probabilities, that both Jamie and Sue Colman had significant knowledge of the abuses in the UK and Africa, given their positions as Trustees.”
The Makin report says that Sir Jamie, an heir to the founder of Colman’s mustard, declined to participate in the review during the evidence-gathering phase.
Others referred to in the Makin report include the Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, the Bishop of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, the Rt Revd Martin Seeley, and the Anglican Communion’s Bishop for Episcopal Ministry, Dr Jo Bailey Wells.
On Wednesday, Bishop Seeley reiterated what he had told Mr Makin in the course of the review: that he had no recollection of asking a question about Smyth at a selection conference, before he was a bishop.
“I am truly horrified by the abuse that John Smyth perpetrated on young Christians,” he said, but he said that he remembered the selection conference and did not recall asking a question about Smyth. “I am also certain I would have reported any information I was given relating to a safeguarding concern.”
The man who told the Makin review that Bishop Seeley had asked the question was the Revd Rico Tice, who left the Church of England earlier this year over the introduction of blessings of same-sex couples. The Makin report says that Mr Tice learnt of Smyth’s abuse in 1987.
During Bishop Conway’s episcopate in Ely, the diocese was contacted by a survivor of Smyth’s abuse. The Bishop’s safeguarding adviser spoke with the victim and contacted the police. Bishop Conway wrote to a bishop in South Africa, where Smyth was by then living.
On Tuesday, BBC News reported the comments of an anonymous survivor of Smyth’s abuse, who called on the Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, to resign. “Conway should resign for obstructing the Smyth victims in our long road to justice,” the survivor said.
In a statement on the same day, Bishop Conway said: “I made a detailed disclosure to Lambeth Palace and contacted the relevant diocese in South Africa to alert them to the issue. It was my understanding that this matter was reported to the Police in Cambridgeshire and duly passed on to the Police in Hampshire where the abuse had occurred.
“I am clear that I did all within my authority as a Bishop of the Church of England, bearing in mind that I had no authority over an entirely independent province on another continent.”
He said that he was at fault for “not rigorously pursuing Lambeth about that province-province communication, and for this I am deeply sorry”.
Dr Wells, released a statement on Wednesday referring to her involvement in responding to disclosures of Smyth’s abuse.
While serving as chaplain to Archbishop Welby, Dr Bailey Wells received information from the diocese of Ely, which she passed on to the Archbishop.
Referring to this period in his resignation statement, Archbishop Welby said: “When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Dr Bailey Wells said that, at the time, she had “sought to fulfil everything asked of me, and check that all correct procedures were being followed. I had confidence the case was being overseen at diocesan level and as part of a police investigation. I was not aware of the nature or extent of the allegations. In hindsight, I regret that I did not do more to verify the assurances given or query assumptions.”
She said that she was “committed to the church continuing to learn and implement robust safeguarding procedures — not just in England but all around the Communion — in order to continue building a safer church for all.”
GRATITUDE for Archbishop Welby’s ministry, including his work on safeguarding, was expressed by bishops both in England and the wider Anglican Communion.
Bishop Hudson-Wilkin, who became Archbishop Welby’s suffragan, with responsibility for the day-to-day running of the diocese of Canterbury, in 2019. On Wednesday, she said that she knew his “sadness and his compassion for those who are survivors, for those who have been abused within the Church”, and said that he had worked “tirelessly” to improve safeguarding in the C of E.
“We have an Archbishop who is faithful, caring, compassionate, and I want his ending not to be bundled out, but to reflect the person and all that he gave to this role,” she said.
The Archbishop of Cape Town, Dr Thabo Makgoba, similarly paid tribute to Archbishop Welby. In a statement on Tuesday, he said: “I am numbed and deeply saddened at losing an Archbishop who is much loved across the Anglican Communion,”
He said that Archbishop Welby had made a “courageous decision to accept accountability”, which reflected his “compassion for those affected by the Church’s ills”.
It amounted to an “important step towards eradicating, root and branch, the scandal of abuse in the Church worldwide”, Dr Makgoba said. “The scandalous abuse of innocent people, often at the most vulnerable times of their lives, affects us all.”
Smyth lived in South Africa from 2001 until his death in 2018. On Wednesday, a spokesperson said that Dr Makgoba had requested a “detailed timeline of events” of Smyth’s involvement with the Anglican Church during this period (News, 13 November).
The Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, the Rt Revd Anthony Poggo, said in a statement that he understood and supported Archbishop Welby’s “courageous decision to announce his resignation, as he seeks to carry both personal and institutional responsibility. . . However, I also want to reflect on the important contribution the Archbishop of Canterbury has made in championing the work of safeguarding during his ministry in the Anglican Communion.”
Bishop Poggo highlighted Archbishop Welby’s support for the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission, and the inclusion of safeguarding in the agenda of the Lambeth Conference in 2022 (News, 2 August 2022).
“In the days and weeks ahead, let us continue to pray for our Communion, and re-commit ourselves to the ongoing responsibility of safeguarding in all churches and communities around the globe,” the Bishop said.
The chairman of the Gafcon Primates Council, the Archbishop of Rwanda, Dr Lauren Mbanda, said in a statement on Thursday that the leaders of Gafcon were “saddened by the news” of Archbishop Welby’s resignation.
“While the Gafcon Primates have been critical of the Archbishop’s leadership, the circumstances of his resignation is not an occasion for rejoicing, but for grief and self-reflection,” he said.
Dr Mbanda described child sexual abuse as a “pernicious evil, which has brought devastating, long-term effects upon survivors and their families”, which was “only exacerbated by negligence or inaction in pursuing and prosecuting perpetrators for their crimes”.
Australian Anglican to pray for victims of abuse, and for Archbishop Welby. The Australian Primate, the Most Revd Geoffrey Smith, who is Archbishop of Adelaide, said on Wednesday that Archbishop Welby was a good man with a focus on protecting vulnerable people; clearly acknowledging his failures, he had taken responsibility as leader of the Church of England, writes Muriel Porter, Australia correspondent.
A senior Melbourne priest and academic, the Revd Professor Dorothy Lee, has commented that it was the victims who needed to be front and centre. “It’s not a story about how things are going personally for the archbishop, although there are those who will be concerned about that, but it’s a story about victims being failed – again.” It was “shameful” it had taken so long for the Church of England to act and believed there had been a dereliction of duty.
The situation in the Church of England, which has done the world-wide church great discredit, should make the Australian Church aware that the issue of child sexual abuse was still alive, she added. “We claim to be representing God, and we have not. We’ve actually denied God and denied justice,” she said.
Sarah Meyrick, Madeleine Davies, and Francis Martin discuss the Makin review and the Archbishop’s resignation announcement on the Church Times Podcast here.