I can still smell the fog of his disgusting cigars. And the sickly sweet tonic with which he slicked back his hair. I was seven when it started. I am 60 this month. It is more than half a century ago, but that sort of abuse never leaves you. Coming home on the tube the other evening, I picked up a discarded newspaper. “Church’s 40-year abuser cover-up” read the front-page headline. It referred to a report by Keith Makin which laid out in horrific detail the crimes of John Smythe, the most prolific serial abuser ever to be associated with the Church of England. It also detailed the scandalous negligence of the Church leadership. I sat at home with the paper laid out on the dining room table, unable to hold back the years or the tears. I was a volcano of anger.
My experience was different from that of John Smythe’s victims. I don’t remember any sort of sexual or religious element. That said, my abuser was, like Smythe, an old school conservative evangelical in his theological disposition. And the gloomy chapel corridor was where we had to wait to be beaten. Smythe beat his often-naked victims in a sound-proofed shed at the bottom of his garden. I was never asked to strip. But to be alone, as a child, in the company of a sadist, was bad enough. My abuser had a range of canes behind his study door. The thin whippy ones would cut. The thicker ones would bruise. Six of the best was what people used to say. But it was rarely just six. Night after night I would go to bed with blood in my underpants. Many of us did.
I now have a son of seven — the same age I was when I was abused. This morning he is doing what children should be doing: playing with his Lego, kicking a football about, mucking around with his brother. I say this to explain that I have no calm objectivity about this subject. “It is better that a millstone were hanged around his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” was how Jesus described his feeling towards those who abuse children. It is not a very priestly thing to say, but even that feels too good for them.
Smythe died in 2018, having abused at least 115 children and young men. The report was commissioned in 2019 and many of us wondered if it would ever be published. Then, last week, it landed with all its horrifying detail. As Makin said: “Many of the victims have carried this abuse silently for more than 40 years.” And it concludes that Smythe was able to get away with abusing so many for so long because of a cover-up by what the report calls “powerful evangelical clergy” which may or may not have included the current Archbishop of Canterbury. “The report is clear that I personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated,” Justin Welby said. After the full extent of Smythe’s crimes was documented by Channel 4 in 2017 Welby promised to meet with victims. But failed to make himself available to them until 2020, a full seven years after he had been officially told what had been going on. “This was wrong,” Welby has admitted.
“That Justin Welby knew nothing about the Smythe abuses before 2013 is, for many, hard to fathom.”
Not wrong enough for him to resign, though. Last week, when asked if it was time to go, the Archbishop responded: “I’ve been giving that a lot 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 suspicions, that would be a resigning matter then and now. But I didn’t.”
That Justin Welby knew nothing about the Smythe abuses before 2013 is, for many, hard to fathom. The report itself concludes that it is “unlikely that Justin Welby would have no knowledge of the concerns regarding John Smythe in the 1980’s in the UK”. Welby was a friend of Smythe, a voluntary “dormitory officer” on the Christian camps where it happened, he was in the circle of trust of Church of England evangelical Christians, and the knowledge of what was going on was widespread in those quarters. As early as 1981, reports were being written about what Smythe was up to. “The scale and severity of the practise was horrific,” one vicar wrote in the Eighties. “Eight received about 14,000 strokes, two of them having some 8,000 strokes over three years.” The young men who received these beatings would have talked to each other. Is it credible a dormitory officer, with some level of pastoral responsibility, would really be so unaware? Indeed, the whole thing was even spoken about publicly in sermons. It was, the Makin Report concludes, an “open secret amongst a whole variety of people connected with the Conservative Evangelical network”, and “badly kept”. So the Makin Report is surely correct soberly to conclude it is “unlikely” that Justin Welby didn’t know. And so, if he really did know, then this would be a resigning matter on Welby’s own admission.
Clergy are naturally cautious creatures, and yet many are increasingly saying that the Archbishop’s position has become completely untenable. Vicars retweeting Welby Resign hashtags is not a good look for the Church. As one west country vicar wrote: “If this were any other member of clergy, a safeguarding review and risk assessment for their future suitability to continue to operate would be undertaken. Is there a reason it isn’t for Welby?” The Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, Vicar of Charlbury in Oxfordshire, wrote to the Archbishop at the weekend: “We will continue to pray for you, but I for one will be praying that you will resign … If you will not go for the love of the institution, if you will not go for the love of its people and priests, if you will not go for the victims, if you will not go for reasons of your own embarrassment or shame, then I pray you; for love of God, and Him alone, go.”
Welby can’t survive this. And his resignation should send a necessary shock wave through the Church of England like nothing else could. No Archbishop would ever again treat the whole matter so lightly. As Kilburn Vicar Rev. Robert Thompson put it at a speech to General Synod after calling for Justin Welby to resign. “Apology, after apology, after another bloody apology will not do!”
Read it all in Unherd
