SURVIVORS of John Smyth’s campaign of abuse have called for further motion, after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s announcement that he would take “personal and institutional responsibility” and resign — a choice that has led to tributes to his leadership from other bishops.
The Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson, said in a press release on Wednesday morning that Archbishop Welby’s decision to resign had displayed “a willingness to take responsibility for the broader Church’s failing”.
It demonstrated “the seriousness of his commitment to those that have suffered in consequence” 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 “at first” together with his fellow victims.
“I’m deeply grateful for all who’ve reached out to me over the course of the past week, and in your concern and prayers,” he said, and asked people to hope for the Archbishop and his wife, Caroline, “who’ve given so generously of themselves on this most difficult of callings”.
He said that churches “have continued to make significant improvements in our safeguarding practice”, and called for this progress to proceed 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’ve broken the law then they must be called to account.”
Later, in a briefing hosted by the Religion Media Centre, Mr Stibbe said that the “quality of leadership” amongst bishops needed to be a priority, as changes to safeguarding processes were developed.
“I feel that the highest echelon of leadership within 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 ponder, when history looks back, whether what you’ve got just said will turn out to be 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 even have a suspicion that of lot of those were conflated and brought on to the Archbishops’ shoulders”, she said, though she said that she was “open to being unsuitable.”
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 query, why did this occur? How did it come to occur? 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 loads of the abuse cases that we’ve got seen, you will notice loads of it has to do with out literal interpretations of scripture.”
Some leaders “give the impression, if not sometimes saying it outwardly, that ‘I’m the anointed one in every of God and there you could do what I do and do what I say.’ We’ve got to interrupt that. God is God; we’re mere mortals, fallible mortals, to be challenged,” Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said.
In addition there have been “issues inside the Church concerning the seal of the confessional”, she said: “there are issues on each spectrums, because it were, of the extremes inside our church life that I believe are drivers.”
Despite this, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said that she had confidence in church safeguarding. “I do know, now, greater than ever, and with the assistance of our present Archbishop, we’ve got dragged the Church to a spot 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’s the deputy lead bishop for safeguarding, said that “in some ways, we should not a secure institution”.
Bishop Conalty said: “We still have this institutional problem where we should not putting victims and survivors on the centre.”
Also on Wednesday morning, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, who had called on the Archbishop to resign, released a press release, saying that it was “right” for him to go.
“This resignation doesn’t solve the Church’s profound failure over safeguarding and the continued 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 have to pause and pray for the victims we let down and commit to changing the culture of the old skool: a culture that put the popularity of the Church before the protection of the vulnerable. Now is the time for fresh pondering.”
The Bishop of Oxford, Dr Steven Croft, also described Archbishop Welby’s move because the “right decision”. In an interview with BBC Radio Oxford, Dr Croft said: “I believe the main target of our attention must be on the people who find themselves 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 12 months 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 concerning 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 “didn’t follow the policies and procedures in place on the time”, the review said. In 2023, Dr Croft apologised, and said: “I didn’t 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 opposite trustees resigned when warned about Smyth’s abuse within the UK.
Sir Jamie, the report says, “viewed John Smyth as being repentant and with sufficient effective controls on his behaviour, despite all of the evidence being on 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 used to be 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 on the time she became a Trustee, was reluctant, and was persuaded to take up the role by her husband. . . Sue Colman advises that she didn’t know the total details of the abuse within the UK, but that she was told that some level of abuse had taken place,” the report says. “It is probably going, on the balance of probabilities, that each Jamie and Sue Colman had significant knowledge of the abuses within the UK and Africa, given their positions as Trustees.”
The Makin report says that Sir Jamie, an heir to the founding father of Colman’s mustard, declined to take part in the review through the evidence-gathering phase.
Others referred to within 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 middle of the review: that he had no recollection of asking an issue about Smyth at a range conference, before he was a bishop.
“I’m truly horrified by the abuse that John Smyth perpetrated on young Christians,” he said, but he said that he remembered the choice conference and didn’t recall asking an issue about Smyth. “I’m also certain I might have reported any information I used to be given referring to a safeguarding concern.”
The man who told the Makin review that Bishop Seeley had asked the query was the Revd Rico Tice, who left the Church of England earlier this 12 months 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 press release on the identical day, Bishop Conway said: “I made an in depth disclosure to Lambeth Palace and contacted the relevant diocese in South Africa to alert them to the problem. 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’m clear that I did all inside my authority as a Bishop of the Church of England, taking into consideration that I had no authority over a completely independent province on one other continent.”
He said that he was at fault for “not rigorously pursuing Lambeth about that province-province communication, and for this I’m deeply sorry”.
Dr Wells, released a press release 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 era in his resignation statement, Archbishop Welby said: “When I used to be informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow.”
In a press release on Wednesday, Dr Bailey Wells she said that, on the time, she had “sought to fulfil all the things asked of me, and check that every one correct procedures were being followed. I had confidence the case was being overseen at diocesan level and as a part of a police investigation. I used to be not aware of the character or extent of the allegations. In hindsight, I regret that I didn’t do more to confirm the assurances given or query assumptions.”
She said that she was “committed to the church continuing to learn and implement robust safeguarding procedures — not only in England but throughout the Communion — with a view to proceed constructing a safer church for all.”
GRATITUDE for Archbishop Welby’s ministry, including his work on safeguarding, was expressed by bishops each in England and the broader 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 many who are survivors, for many who have been abused inside the Church”, and said that he had worked “tirelessly” to enhance safeguarding within the C of E.
“We have an Archbishop who’s faithful, caring, compassionate, and I need his ending to not 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 press release on Tuesday, he said: “I’m numbed and deeply saddened at losing an Archbishop who is far loved across the Anglican Communion,”
He said that Archbishop Welby had made a “courageous decision to just accept accountability”, which reflected his “compassion for those affected by the Church’s ills”.
It amounted to an “vital step towards eradicating, root and branch, the scandal of abuse within the Church worldwide”, Dr Makgoba said. “The scandalous abuse of innocent people, often at essentially 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 era (News, 13 November).
The Secretary-General of the Anglican Communion, the Rt Revd Anthony Poggo, said in a press release that he understood and supported Archbishop Welby’s “courageous decision to announce his resignation, as he seeks to hold each personal and institutional responsibility. . . However, I also need to reflect on the vital contribution the Archbishop of Canterbury has made in championing the work of safeguarding during his ministry within the Anglican Communion.”
Bishop Poggo highlighted Archbishop Welby’s support for the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission, and the inclusion of safeguarding within the agenda of the Lambeth Conference in 2022 (News, 2 August 2022).
“In the times and weeks ahead, allow us to proceed to hope for our Communion, and re-commit ourselves to the continued responsibility of safeguarding in all churches and communities across the globe,” the Bishop said.
