The writing is now on the wall for Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby after the Church of England’s lead bishop on safeguarding refused to back him staying in post.
On BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Programme on November 10, veteran presenter Edward Stourton asked Bishop Joanne Grenfell whether Archbishop Welby should resign within the wake of the Makin Review which exposed the C of E’s cover-up of the John Smyth abuse scandal.
She said: “I actually appreciate that the Archbishop has wholeheartedly apologised for what he could have and will have done in another way in 2013.
“I also recognise his commitment over his tenure to actually having tried to vary safeguarding. I believe there’s still an awful lot to do, but I do think that builds on a number of the changes we have seen during the last ten years.”
Stourton noted that she had not given a straight ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ answer to the query whether Archbishop Welby should resign. She said: “I support the Archbishop’s apology. I’m glad he’s made it.”
Archbishop Welby told Channel 4’s Cathy Newman on November 7 when the Church of England published the Makin Review that he had considered resigning that very morning.
He told her: “I’ve given it lots of thought. I’ve taken advice as recently as this morning from senior colleagues. And no, I’m not going to resign for this. If I’d known before 2013 or had grounds for suspicion, that might be a resigning matter then and now. But I didn’t.”
Was the lead bishop on safeguarding one among the ‘senior colleagues’ Welby consulted? Probably not. Though she has a really significant role within the C of E, she just isn’t a diocesan bishop but quite the suffragan (area) Bishop of Stepney in London Diocese.
She is due to this fact not in Archbishop Welby’s inner circle of advisers at his London residence Lambeth Palace. But that provides her an independence that makes her refusal to back him all of the stronger.
Lambeth Palace has said the Archbishop doesn’t “intend to resign” amid the growing calls for him to accomplish that. But the politician-speak there would look like deliberate because what he intends to not do today can easily change.
The media calls for Archbishop Welby to resign are easier to resist particularly from the right-wing press. Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who was Joint Chief of Staff to former Prime Minister Theresa May, made an articulate and informed case for Archbishop Welby’s resignation in The Telegraph on November 11:
“Within the Church, Welby has presided over declining congregations, the closure of hundreds of churches, and ‘pastoral reorganisations’, which critics worry will kill off the local parish. He launched a divisive Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice, which last week accused some rural parishioners of racism. The Commission is chaired by Lord Boateng, a Labour peer, who has accused the Church of being rife with structural and systemic racism.
“If Welby believes the Church he has led for greater than a decade is systemically racist, perhaps he should take responsibility for that. More likely, he, like other liberals, has gone together with ideological fashion, knowing he won’t be amongst those that suffer the purges and punishments that follow his decisions.
“It was, perhaps, an identical carelessness that led to the non-public and institutional failure to reply in 2013 to clear evidence of kid abuse. Smyth, now dead, has escaped justice. But for the sake of his victims, and the Church itself, Welby should show the integrity he once said was missing in others – and resign.”
But, articulate though this resignation call is, it may possibly be dismissed among the many higher echelons of the C of E as par-for-the-course Conservative criticism of Archbishop Welby. There isn’t any love lost between him and the Conservative Party after he so vehemently opposed the previous government’s Rwanda plan to take care of illegal immigration.
Bishop Grenfell, nonetheless, is among the many up-and-coming ‘progressive’ bishops. It is important that on November 11, the day after Bishop Grenfell’s BBC interview, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, one other leading revisionist, told the BBC that Archbishop Welby’s position was “untenable”.
Given the importance of Bishop Grenfell’s role because the lead bishop on safeguarding, heading up the C of E’s response after multiple abuse scandals, her studied refusal to support him means the high-level pressure is piling up on Archbishop Welby to go.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
