Justin Welby has spoken of a “deep sense of private failure” over how allegations of horrific sexual abuse by the late John Smyth were handled.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury also said he was “profoundly ashamed” of a farewell speech within the House of Lords during which he appeared to make light of the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation.
Welby stepped down within the wake of the Makin Review which concluded that he could have and may have done more to stop Smyth’s abuse. Smyth died in South Africa in 2018 while still under investigation by UK police.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, Welby said that he must have stepped down sooner.
“What modified my mind was having been caught by the report being leaked and probably not thought it through enough, to be honest,” he said.
“Over that weekend, as I read it and reread it and as I reflected on the horrible suffering of the survivors which had been, as a lot of them said, greater than doubled by the institutional Church’s failure to reply adequately, it increasingly became clear to me that I needed to resign.”
He said he had didn’t properly handle allegations of historical child sex abuse because they were on an “overwhelming scale” with more cases arriving daily.
Asked if he would forgive Smyth, Welby said, “Yes, I believe if he was alive and I saw him.
“But it’s not, it’s not me he has abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a big extent, irrelevant.”
Asked if he desired to be forgiven by abuse survivors, he said, “Obviously, nevertheless it’s not about me. When we speak about safeguarding, the centre of it’s the victims and survivors.
“I even have never, ever said to a survivor, ‘you have to forgive’, because that’s their sovereign, absolute individual alternative. Everyone desires to be forgiven, but to demand forgiveness is to abuse again.”
He said that after taking on office as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013 he was not as “pushy” as he might have been, and that he “didn’t realise how bad it was”.
“I’d been in post 11 weeks and safeguarding had been the crisis I hadn’t foreseen,” he said.
“I must have pushed harder because I knew enough to know that folks, very rarely, almost never abuse once.”
Welby got here under fire for his farewell speech within the House of Lords given shortly after announcing his resignation during which he suggested that a head needed to roll.
“And there is barely, on this case, one head that rolls well enough,” he said.
The speech was met with dismay not only by victims but senior clergy within the Church of England.
Looking back on his words made him “profoundly ashamed”, he told Kuennssberg, adding that he “wasn’t in a very good space on the time”.
“It’s certainly one of those moments where, when I believe of it, I just wince. It was entirely incorrect and completely inexcusable,” he said.
During the interview, he repeated an apology to victims: “Just for the avoidance of doubt, I’m utterly sorry and feel a deep sense of private failure each for the victims of Smyth not being picked up sufficiently after 2017 once we knew the extent of it, and for my very own personal failures.”
