In June 2017, Archbishop Justin Welby asked his predecessor Dr George Carey to step down as an honorary assistant bishop. He cited the findings of an independent report investigating the handling of abuse, years earlier, by Peter Ball, sometime Bishop of Gloucester. This found that the Church of England had ‘colluded over a 20-year period with (the) disgraced former bishop who sex ually abused boys and men’. In relation to this, ‘Both Carey and Rowan Williams, also a former archbishop of Canterbury, had apologised to the victims of Ball after being criticised for their failures in relation to him’.
Neither of the former Archbishops, it should be made very clear were in any way accused of any sexual misconduct themselves. Rather, Lord Carey in particular was singled out for criticism of how he had handled the processes and response of the Church. The judgment of Justin Welby upon all involved was strikingly fast, loud, and clear, stating, ‘This is inexcusable and shocking behaviour’. The Bishop of Oxford then announced that Welby had written to Lord Carey asking him to ‘carefully consider his position’ and that he had ‘voluntarily agreed to step back from public ministry’. It later emerged that Lord Carey’s Permission to Officiate (PTO) had then been withdrawn by the Bishop of Oxford and was only much later restored.
In a separate instance, the former Archbishop of York, John Sentamu was ‘forced to step down from his Church of England role after a review into how he handled a child sex abuse allegation’ where a safeguarding report by ‘a senior social care consultant’ Jane Humphreys, had, ‘found Lord Sentamu should have sought advice when the victim made his disclosure’. Thereafter ‘Church safeguarding officials met the former archbishop and concluded he would now “respond appropriately” to any disclosures made to him’. Despite this, the Bishop of Newcastle (former Bishop of Waikato in New Zealand), Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, suspended him from all public ministry, as she felt his initial response to the review was ‘inconsistent with the tone and culture I expect around safeguarding in Newcastle Diocese’ and because ‘she had asked Lord Sentamu to apologise and was “extremely disappointed” that he would not’. Lord Sentamu meanwhile made clear that he ‘rejected the findings, insisting there had been a “fundamental misunderstanding” on Ms. Humphreys’ part of the “jurisdictional, pastoral and legal responsibilities of diocesan bishops and archbishops in the Church of England”’.
All of this sad history was in the background when yet another independent review, the Makin Report, commissioned by the church in 2019, was finally published publicly on 7 November this year. It addressed the now notorious case of John Smyth, a barrister who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s. He committed physical, psychological, and sexual abuse against more than 100 boys and young men over a forty-year period. These camps were widely attended by figures later prominent in Evangelical circles in Britain, including Justin Welby himself and such others as John Stott, bishops David Sheppard, Timothy Dudley-Smith, and Maurice Wood, as well as the founder of Alpha Course, Nicky Gumbel of Holy Trinity Brompton. The first allegations made against Mr Smyth go all the way back to 1982 when an internal report by the Iwerne Trust, which was the body responsible for the camps, referenced ‘horrific’ beatings of boys and young men that left some of them bleeding.
The Makin report found that senior figures in the Church of England knew about the sexual abuse claims at the camps in 2013 and that Welby became aware of the accusations in the same year, just months after his elevation to Canterbury. It further held that if the claims had been reported to the police in 2013, there could have been a full investigation and that Smyth might have faced charges before he died.
In the course of the inquiry, Welby apologized for ‘failures and omissions’ but added that, he had ‘no idea or suspicion’ of the allegations before 2013. The report however concluded this was unlikely and went on to accuse him of failing in his ‘personal and moral responsibility’ to ensure a proper investigation.
On the day the report was published Welby wrote:
I am deeply sorry that this abuse happened. I am so sorry that in places where these young men, and boys, should have felt safe and where they should have experienced God’s love for them, they were subjected to physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual abuse. I am sorry that concealment by many people who were fully aware of the abuse over many years meant that John Smyth was able to abuse overseas and died before he ever faced justice. The report rightly condemns that behaviour. I had no idea or suspicion of this abuse before 2013. Nevertheless the review is clear that I personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated. Since that time the way in which the Church of England engages with victims and survivors has changed beyond recognition. Checks and balances introduced seek to ensure that the same could not happen today.
At that stage he evidently saw no occasion to resign. But a growing subsequent outcry ensued, with Bishop Hartley (who had previously suspended Lord Sentamu) saying openly that ‘Welby’s resignation would not “solve the safeguarding problem,” but would “be a very clear indication that a line has been drawn, and that we must move towards independence of safeguarding’”.
Bishop Hartly then accused both Archbishop Welby and the current Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, of writing to her (regarding the case of Sentamu) a few days before the publication of the Makin Report, a letter she experienced as ‘coercive’ – ‘their letter indicates a complete lack of awareness of how power dynamics operate in the life of the Church’.
The Makin Report left Welby facing three layers of difficulty which, in the end, caused him to resign on 12th November:
- he had been found by the Makin Report to have erred in his handling of the John Smyth abuse case when it became more widely known in 2013, as it found him to have been insufficiently zealous in making sure that the claims were reported to the Police;
- the Report threw serious doubt upon his claim to have known nothing about the abuse before 2013, a conclusion that questioned his honesty;
- there was a striking inconsistency in his so stridently condemning others who had been adjudged to have failed to process abuse claims properly and his consequent expectation of them at once to step back from public life, whereas, when faced now with parallel allegations, he was refusing to do the same.
Accordingly, looked upon now with hindsight, the final outcome of his resignation looks inevitable, despite it being a sad end to his term as Archbishop.
All of this does, however, have wider implications that merit consideration.
1. Theological Implications
One consequence will be yet more pressure to grant ever larger powers to safeguarding officials and further stress upon the view that they must be entirely independent of the church itself (exactly as bishop Hartley conspicuously urged above). This of itself invites the point made in Juvenal’s famous question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’
Naturally, all this is being proposed with the highly laudable intention of ensuring that the church is indeed a safer environment for all and that it has effective measures for ensuring this. Nonetheless, there is a need to pay attention to what this way of addressing the problem implies about the church and its structures and their relation to the state. It seems to be implicit, and even taken as a given, that episcopal oversight is inadequate, most especially regarding morality. This is no small thing: it requires urgent theological reflection.
While Anglicans have always tended to modesty where the status and authority of bishops is concerned, that they each have a particular responsibility to teach concerning faith and morals, as well as serve as a focus for unity is not in doubt. While always nuanced, Richard Hooker in Book VII, of Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity writes firmly that,
A thousand five hundred years and upward the Church of Christ hath now continued under the sacred Regiment of Bishops. Neither for so long hath Christianity been ever planted in any Kingdom throughout the world but with this kind of government alone; which to have been ordained of God, I am for mine own part even as resolutely perswaded, as that any other kind of Government in the world whatsoever is of God. (Laws, VII.I.4; 3:147.11-21)
Hooker recognizes that custom (or tradition) plays an important role in justifying the continuation of the episcopacy, yet it is extremely important to understand too here, the way in which custom, for Hooker, is related to divine approbation. While there is a further point of present relevance, in that Hooker plainly acknowledges that reason plays a role in determining what parts of the church have been corrupted, and such reason is no special preserve of the church and its episcopate. It follows – to treat of the present crisis– that obtaining outside counsel upon such matters as church safeguarding need not be problematic, especially when engaged by episcopal invitation.
But what is at risk is recognition of the salience of specifically religious moral insight.
In this regard, a presentation the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made in 1984 to the Fourth Bishops’ Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center is of relevance here.
On that occasion, he specifically set out to examine the relationship between bishops and theologians in seeking to forge a balance between external perceptions of progress and morality and he argued that the Church must be a moral power by setting standards and awakening both the will and the power of the people to respond to the moral standards it articulates.
This led Ratzinger to wrestle with certain key tensions of our time, in recognition that the worlds of religion and morality are related to the world of the subjective. More specifically, there is a challenge to be faced when it is held that each individual decides what this subjective reality is since the moral answers required for objective concerns are then impossible.
Ratzinger sought to explore the way in which morality, as an area of the subjective, has been linked with the Christian tradition of the teaching on the conscience. This last he considers to be ‘a personal primitive knowledge of good and evil which appears in the individual … as a source of his ability to make moral judgments’. But for the Christian, the idea of conscience cannot be separated from the idea of the responsibility of man before God. He even went so far as to assert that conscience expresses thought that comprises a kind of co-knowledge of man with God. And that it is by virtue of this that conscience can assert its superiority over any and all authorities, for conscience signifies the voice of God within us and has thus a right to assert its subjectivity. Nonetheless, by virtue of this subjectivity, this is not an absolute right, since in some cases that right is sacrificed for an objective common good.
Under natural law, according to Ratzinger, morality means the conformity of man to the will of God, at the same time as being the correct perception of things as they are. Within such a deontological perspective, the whole question of how God makes His desires known and how we acquire knowledge of divine commandments becomes central to Christian claims. If this is based on revelation, then how we know what is authentic revelation becomes a key question.
Ratzinger’s response suggests that morality does not belong to the area of individual subjectivity, but rather, is guaranteed by and has reference to the community, where the mores or habits, customs, and lifestyle of a people express the wisdom of generations. Nonetheless, what is thus captured are merely signposts for human behavior, not sources of morality of themselves. It is in the mores ecclesiae that the Christian finds the customs that are the source of moral knowledge for a new society which is yet explained through revelation of the divine transcending and subordinating all local societies. Some echoes with Richard Hooker here are manifest, since it will be recalled that in Hooker also custom and tradition have an important role while nonetheless also requiring what he called divine approbation.
For Ratzinger, the Church’s magisterium is responsible for the correct formation of this conscience and thus provides that needed divine approbation. This gives rise to a tensive polarity or dialectic since the magisterium cannot simply make statements in opposition to conscience, and it is the magisterium that appeals to the inner dimensions in the process of the maturing conscience. This has the consequence that it is within this struggle that the conscience can be trained and come to be rightly formed – and the church along with the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in doing so.
In short, taken together, objectivity, conscience, and tradition point to the divine ordinances which are the basis of the Church’s teachings. Together these form a reality perceived by the rightly informed conscience that is the true revelation of the divine will and, in this way, a path to moral knowledge.
The role of the bishop, in unity with all the clergy, is then to be a witness to the habits and customary teachings of the church (in Hooker’s language) which together comprise the mores ecclesiae catholicae. Bishops must remain in discussion with experts who seek the correct applications of faith to the circumstances of a particular time. It is for moral theologians to join them in articulating the reasonableness of faith, the church’s moral teachings and a critical evaluation of the prevailing wider society and its culture – a continuous dialogue striving to render the church’s teaching and message of salvation plausible anew for every particular time.
Read it all at The Anglican Way
