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Head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, announced he would be resigning on Tuesday following a damning report that revealed he withheld crucial information from police.

The holy man had failed to report, without delay, the serial physical and sexual abuse inflicted by a trusted volunteer at Christian summer camps in Britain, Zimbabwe and South Africa over several decades.

The pressure on Welby had been relentlessly mounting, ignited by his refusal to take responsibility for failing to report abuse both in England and Africa in 2013—a decision that stoked public fury over the church’s seeming lack of accountability at its highest levels. By Tuesday afternoon, with criticism at a fever pitch, Welby finally conceded his error, a reluctant acknowledgement in the face of growing outrage.

“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Welby said in the statement announcing his resignation. “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.”

Welby, a former oil executive who left the industry in 1989 to study for the priesthood, was a controversial figure even before the scandal and now his breach of trust and consequential resignation will send ever larger ripples around the world. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the symbolic head of the Anglican Communion, which has more than 85 million members in 165 countries, including the Episcopal Church in the United States. While each national church has its own leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury is considered first among equals.

Statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury.https://t.co/aNnuLBMapo pic.twitter.com/pIIR1911QU

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) November 12, 2024

The Church of England on Thursday 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 130 boys and young men in the United Kingdom and 85 in Africa from the 1970s until his death.

Smyth, who lived across the African continent from 1984, died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by British police. He never faced any criminal charges.

Image: Channel Four News

The report found Smyth identified pupils from leading public schools including Winchester College and took them to his home near Winchester in Hampshire, where he carried out lashings with a garden cane in his shed. It said eight of the boys received a total of 14,000 lashes, while two more received 8,000 strokes between them over three years.

The Iwerne Trust called the practice “horrific” but the claims were not reported to police until 2013 – more than 30 years later.

Despite his “appalling” actions having been identified in the 1980s, the report concluded he was never fully exposed and was therefore able to continue his abuse.

The 251-page report concluded that Welby failed to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the abuse in August 2013, soon after he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Had he done so, Smyth could have been stopped sooner and many victims could have been spared the abuse, the inquiry found.

On publication of the findings in the Makin Review, the Archbishop of Canterbury apologised again to victims, and said Smyth’s abuse had “manipulated Christian truth to justify his evil acts”.

On Tuesday, he said he was told that year that police had been notified and had “believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow”.

As late as Monday, Welby’s office said he had decided not to resign, even as he expressed his “horror at the scale of John Smyth’s egregious abuse.” But his position quickly became “untenable” after some members of the General Synod, the Church of England’s national assembly, started a petition calling on him to step down because he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.”

The strongest outcry came from Smyth’s victims. Andrew Morse, who was repeatedly beaten by Smyth 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.

“I believe that now is an opportunity for him to resign,’’ Morse told the BBC before Welby stepped down.

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.”

[source:apnews]