The groundswell of ethical outrage on the failure of the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby to cope with a distressing sex scandal is growing every day following the publication of the Makin Report last week.
One of the burdens of accepting leadership and the control of an establishment is that you just develop into personally liable for it. You cannot have the perks without being willing to pay the value. The Archbishop of Canterbury wants the perks. He won’t pay the value. But someone must.
There is all the time a price to be paid for moral failure. That’s the type of universe we live in. Christians understand it higher than most. You would hope that an Archbishop might understand that higher than most Christians, but not it appears, within the case of Justin Welby.
John Smyth was an evangelical barrister who got here to dominate a sub-culture throughout the Church of England and secretly sexually and violently molested over 100 young men.
He ran summer camps for the Iwerne Trust. Only the poshest boys from the poshest schools were invited as future leaders of state and church. In 1984, with murmured suspicions about his activities breaking surface, he slipped over to Zimbabwe to begin camps of his own there. This culminated in his arrest in 1997 on suspicion of culpable homicide, as a part of the investigation into the drowning of Guide Nyachuru, a 16 12 months old on the Marondera camp. Nyachuru’s unclothed body was present in Ruzawi school pool in December 1992. Smyth then fled to South Africa.
In England despite the scale of his molestation, and a non-public record that had begun to be put together – The Rusten Report – justice was not possible to come back by for the victims.
The leaders of the evangelical movement all swore one another to secrecy. After 1984, it was common knowledge that something corrupt and dreadful had happened, but nobody with any responsibility for the Iwerne camps was talking.
In 2013 the then Archbishop of Canterbury was officially informed of the dimensions and scope of the issue, and asked to act on it.
Welby maintained that this was the primary he had heard of the abuse by his old friend. But there was an issue: Welby had been considered one of the luxurious boys helping run the Iwerne project and was involved within the camps personally. Welby had been a dormitory officer and later a speaker on the camps held within the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster. So the query ‘how much did he know?’ has develop into necessary.
Lots of individuals, when asked, said they knew nothing and had forgotten. That included Lord Carey whose college Smyth did some refresher Bible courses at.
Noted within the Makin Report is one contributor’s claim that they overheard Welby having “grave conversations” about Smyth with Canon Mark Ruston, the compiler of the unique report into Smyth in 1982. Welby said he didn’t do not forget that.
Talking to Nick Ferrari in 2017, Welby claimed he went to work in Paris from 1978 to 1983 and had no contact with the people involved with the camps in any respect during that period. But records detailed within the report state that in 1979 Welby was listed as a speaker on the summer camp, and in 1983 welcomed Smyth to the Anglican chaplaincy in Paris one Sunday as Smyth passed through with a cohort of boys. It also documents that he gave money to support Smyth’s ministry.
These are unhappy contradictions. Fast forward to 2013 and Welby has develop into Archbishop and the complete horror of what Smyth got as much as is delivered to his door at Lambeth Palace. It has develop into his personal and institutional responsibility to ascertain what happened and why it happened, and to whom.
And then institutional failure in some way sets in. The blow by blow story of what happened, or to place it higher, what didn’t occur under Welby from that time on is astonishing. Eleven years later, published this month, the Makin report details exactly what happened.
The quickest way of grasping the dimensions of incompetence and the damage done is to read the immediate response of the victims. They have responded to the newest report with misery and the deepest morally energised frustration.
In a press release after the Makin report’s publication, they write that they’re “concerned that the review demonstrates that the complete Church hierarchy still has no understanding of trauma-informed approach despite this being established persistently previously.”
“We note that publication of the Makin Review is greater than 1,630 days late. Justice delayed is justice denied, particularly to all those John Smyth victims who’ve now died. We attribute the overwhelming majority of that delay to the deliberate under-resourcing of the project by the C of E. We have been making this point to the C of E for the last five years.”
The report nevertheless demonstrates that perhaps one of the vital egregious failures by the Archbishop personally emerged when, within the 2017 LBC interview, he made specific assurances that the activities of Smyth had been reported as a criminal offense to the police. The Church was not coping with it perhaps, however the police were. But this wasn’t true. His office had not reported it to the police, and this was considered one of the explanation why until Channel 4 News’ Cathy Newman got involved in 2017, nothing more happened.
Newman herself has just interviewed Welby to ask him if the failures he oversaw amounted to a cover-up – the failure to bring Smyth’s abuse into the sunshine; the failure to report it to the police; the failure to satisfy the victims for years after making a promise to; the failure to oversee proper and competent due safeguarding process.
After all, not exposing it allows it to stay covered up. The decision to refuse to act is in itself an motion.
The way he replied was devastating.
Newman: “Are you ever torn between doing what’s right and protecting the institution?”
Welby: “Never … I do not give a hang concerning the institution. I actually, genuinely don’t. If this report was a lethal blow to the institution, so be it. God will raise up one other institution.”
Newman: “So your failing is incompetence moderately than cover up – your personal failing?”
Welby: “Yes. Incompetence? Yes, all right, I’ll provide you with that one.”
If you’re a victim the incontrovertible fact that you will have had neither proper help, recognition or redress due to incompetence moderately than mendacity makes little difference.
But admitting that your incompetence has added not possible burdens of additional distress to people wounded within the institution you preside over is a really serious matter.
And give it some thought for a moment. This isn’t just the denial of a cover-up (which in fact it effectively was). This is a denial that the Church under his care matters very much.
The Church isn’t and is rarely just ‘an establishment’. It is the struggling, wounded, aspiring and glorious body of Christ. Accepting the role of Archbishop involves being given responsibility to oversee and take care of it.
To suggest that whether it is killed off through his or anyone else’s incompetence it doesn’t matter because one other one will emerge at a while is a type of detached pseudo-pietistic irresponsibility of the worst kind.
Welby has to resign. And he must achieve this, not simply because he did not act to show the corruption that polluted the evangelical enterprise that he represented and was a part of, but because someone has to take responsibility for the failure to do what needed to be done, to bring it to light, acknowledge it and help those wounded by it.
When he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, he accepted responsibility. That’s what the office means. It’s not only the highest of a social tree that through his connections he has managed to climb up.
Taking responsibility and paying the value is the moral currency of recognising truth, virtue and justice; and when crucial sacrificing oneself for them.
Welby claims to serve a God who taught the pattern of sacrifice as the best way of creating a broken world higher.
One of his clergy, the Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie, has written to him, putting the moral case at its most poignant.
“We will proceed to wish for you, but I for one will probably be praying that you’re going to resign. The damage you will have done to this church will take a really very long time to repair.
“More importantly, those belongings you did and did not do inflicted such damage on people—made within the image of that very same God—might never heal. Any healing of people or the institution must now be in His hands, not yours. The way you may serve that process best now could be to resign.
“If you is not going to go for the love of the institution, in case you is not going to go for the love of its people and priests, in case you is not going to go for the victims, in case you is not going to go for reasons of your individual embarrassment or shame, then I pray you, for love of God and Him alone, go.”
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