Technically Leading
Arron Reza Merat
The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last month, five days after the publication of an independent review into the Church of England’s handling of half a century of testimony concerning the sexual sadism and spiritual abuse by a lay Church officer, John Smyth QC. The Makin Report, commissioned in 2019, describes a culture of ‘abuse hidden in plain sight’ and ‘active cover-up’ by the Church. It found that Justin Welby had ‘acted within the policies in place within the Church of England at the time’ but had not fulfilled his ‘moral responsibility’ to pursue the truth of the allegations. Welby continues to maintain that he had no ‘idea or suspicion’ of the abuse before August 2013 though the report says that Smyth’s crimes were an ‘open secret’ in ecclesiastical networks.
Smyth, who died in 2018, is the most prolific serial abuser in the history of the Anglican Church. During the 1970s and 1980s he had access to Britain’s elite boarding schools to select boys for evangelical Christian camps that served as a springboard to senior positions in the Church and army. Makin describes Smyth’s systematic abuse of teenage boys. Some were struck thousands of times with canes and bats and were given nappies by Smyth’s wife to stop them bleeding on the sofas. Boys reported lacerations not healing for several months. Several attempted suicide. At his home in Winchester, Smyth had a soundproof shed built with a window facing the church next door. He beat boys there, including his son. He also abused children in a shed at Bosloe House, a secluded property he rented from National Trust, where he used to take boys on holiday by sailboat.
Smyth acted with impunity in an elite culture permissive to violent paedophiles. In 1978 a housemaster at Winchester College confronted Smyth: ‘Obviously the boys like coming out for lunch to you,’ Euan MacAlpine told him. ‘But you only invite the good-looking boys.’ MacAlpine recalled in 2017 that Smyth had slowly assumed a foetal position in his armchair. ‘Looking back on it, I’m sure I probably should have gone straight to the headmaster and said this man is dangerous.’
A trip to Bosloe was cancelled in 1982. The parents of some of the victims at Winchester were dissuaded by ‘senior Christians’ from pressing criminal charges in exchange for Smyth’s agreement in writing not to work with children again. John Thorn, the headmaster, brokered the signing of the document and held the only copy of it except for the one in Smyth’s possession (Thorn later claimed to have lost it). In his autobiography, published in 1989, Thorn characterised Smyth’s evangelical clique at Winchester as ‘a kind of backbone of virtue in the place’ and dismissed reports of abuse as ‘absurd and baseless rumours … that he was an unhinged tyrant, the embodiment of Satan’.
Smyth was encouraged by figures in the Church to pack his bags. He moved to Zimbabwe in 1984, where he set up Zambezi Ministries, built another shed and continued to abuse boys. Smyth reportedly had close ties to the Mugabe government, some of whose sons or nephews went to his camps. After Senator David Coltart wrote a report on Smyth’s abuses in 1993, a deportation order was issued but – according to Private Eye – subsequently revoked following Smyth’s lobbying of Mugabe through government channels. In 1995 he was charged with the murder of 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru, who had drowned during a night-time naked swim three years earlier – his body was found by the gardener in the morning – but the case fell apart because Smyth argued successfully that the prosecutor had a conflict of interest.
In many public statements and interviews Welby has said he had no knowledge of the abuse, nor any reason to suspect Smyth, until the summer of 2013, when he was informed about it by his chaplain. He had somehow avoided, for more than three decades, hearing any clerical or lay gossip of the carnival of horrors surrounding Smyth, or any of the details of his legal battles in Zimbabwe.
The proximate series of events that led to the Church’s first communication with the police about Smyth seems to have come just after Jimmy Savile was posthumously exposed in the British press. In March 2012, one of Smyth’s victims wrote to a church officer who had also been abused. Pressure, both internal and external, created a correspondence chain that eventually led to the archbishop who, he said, heard for the first time that the man he had known for decades was a serial abuser of boys in his care.
Welby’s first interaction with Smyth was as a teenager attending his camps in the late 1970s. In 1978, around the time that Smyth was assuming the foetal position in Winchester, Welby was lodging with a vicar from Cambridge, Mark Ruston. According to a witness interviewed by Makin, Welby, then 22 years old, was overheard having a ‘grave’ conversation with Ruston about Smyth. Welby has said that he does not recall the conversation. In 1982, after one of Smyth’s victims wrote anonymously to another clergyman before trying to take his own life, Ruston carried out an investigation into Smyth’s actions, interviewing 13 of the 22 known victims.
The Ruston Report was seen by only nine people. It describes brutality that left boys with lacerations that would not heal, inflicted by beatings that would last hours, followed by the kissing of their necks and backs. Smyth seems to have tied his abuse in the boys’ minds with their own repentance, usually for masturbation, casting himself as an instrument of God’s wrath. Ruston said that Smyth would read from the Bible: ‘No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.’
Welby knew Smyth during this period. He delivered a set of boat keys to Smyth’s house (‘just doing a favour’) and later donated to Smyth’s ‘missions’ in Zimbabwe (Welby cannot remember the details of either when or how much he donated). The two men sent each other Christmas cards over the years, and Welby, when he was working in Paris in the 1980s, was warned by a church chaplain not to associate with Smyth, who had just passed through the city with a group of boys on their way to a skiing holiday, scandalising local clergy. Welby told Makin that the warning was ‘vague’.
The archbishop acknowledges he ‘personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated’. Why did he not do more to ensure that Smyth would face justice before his death in 2018? After the Channel 4 News reports came out in 2017, Welby wrote in an email to colleagues: ‘The tricky question would be about the 2013-17 gap, any ideas for an answer welcome.’ In his resignation statement he said: ‘When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow.’ Why did he not meet victims until 2020, despite regular solicitations and his own public assurances that he would? ‘No archbishop can meet with everyone,’ he said, ‘but I promised to see them and failed.’
Welby’s valedictory speech to the House of Lords was not only tone deaf – ‘If you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary’ – but a lesson in managerial exculpation. ‘There comes a time,’ he told the assembled lords and bishops, ‘if you are technically leading a particular institution or area of responsibility, when the shame of what has gone wrong, whether one is personally responsible or not, must require a head to roll. And there is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough.’ He made a joke about ‘revolting peasants’ playing football with a medieval archbishop’s head, but no acknowledgment of the suffering of Smyth’s victims.
Resigning in disgrace is not how the Most Reverend clergyman sees his undoing. ‘However one takes one’s view of personal responsibility,’ he said, ‘it is clear that I had to stand down, and it is for that reason that I do so.’ Welby, who worked in the oil industry before he was ordained, appears to see himself less as the moral leader of the national Church than as an unfortunate and misled manager, his fall from grace as an unhappy accident. He might consult the Gospel of Luke when reflecting on his responsibility to Smyth’s victims. Jesus tells his followers the parable of the unjust judge, who ‘feared not God, neither regarded man’, but grants a widow justice only to stop her incessant petitions.
Comments
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
The good lord was quite clear on the matter of child abuse and what to do when Caesar's laws are broken.
In any case, I think both verses point to a serious problem for the church: how to deal with moral transgression without succumbing to the retributive logic of the secular state?
The criminal justice system punishes, but Christians are called to penitence, forgiveness and reconciliation. This is, I think, a genuine dilemma for the Christian Church, and not just a hazard arising from lazy or self-interested prelates. I don't hold any brief for Justin Welby (who has done things much worse than this), but we might as well admit that the moral crisis around sex abuse reflects a real conflict point of Christian ethics and the demands of secular culture and the law.