‘I considered resigning over the John Smyth scandal,’ says Archbishop of Canterbury

We sat down with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

We began by asking for his reaction to a report revealing that senior members of the Church of England ‘covered up’ abuse perpetrated by one of its members for more than 40 years.

Justin Welby: I take responsibility for the consequences and for dealing with it now, since I was archbishop. When the abuse took place in the UK, I was in my late teens, early 20s. Some of it was before I had come to Christian faith. Many years before I was ordained. And it was one of a number of horrific historical legacy cases of abuse that I found when I came into being archbishop in 2013. I was told about this, I heard about this for the first time in July, August 2013, about four months after I took over and didn’t know anything before then or have any suspicions.

Cathy Newman: Well, that’s not quite true. We’ll come back to that. But you say you’re dealing with this now, but you have been archbishop for nearly a decade. And what the Makin review sets out is that senior church leaders, including yourself, missed so many opportunities to deal with this. Do you accept that?

Justin Welby: I accept that from August 2013 until your program uncovered this in a documentary in 2017, that I did not, and I take responsibility for this and it was a failure and a really shaming failure, I did not ensure that this was pursued as energetically, as remorselessly as it should have been.

Cathy Newman: You knew in the 1980s, you went to the camps and so on, you exchanged Christmas cards with John Smyth after he moved to Zimbabwe. He continued to abuse boys there, and I see you don’t know about that. But you also funded his mission out there. That suggests that this was more than a passing acquaintance with this man.

Justin Welby: Lots of people funded his mission. Funding his mission, I don’t know what its spending was, but it was a lot, I suspect. I have no idea, I never saw the accounts. I think on two separate occasions I gave £40 or £50.

Cathy Newman: Now, when we spoke in 2019, after my investigation, you said and just to quote back to you, ‘I genuinely had no idea that there was anything as horrific as this going on. If I’d known that, I’d have been very active. But I had no suspicions at all’. No suspicions at all? You’d just been informed of the seriousness of John Smyth’s abuse in 2013.

Justin Welby: I was told there was an accusation of abuse, and this is where I went wrong. Safeguarding, at that point, had one person for the national part of the Church of England half time. We’re now around 40. And those are reforms I brought in myself. At that time, I asked the necessary questions, which was, I did right, which was to say ‘have the police been informed? Have social services been informed?’ I was told they had.

Cathy Newman: Did you not think when you saw that man’s name, do you think, I shared a dormitory with him. I exchanged Christmas cards with him. I funded his mission. Did you not think ‘I must make sure and do everything I personally can to ensure that no other victims in South Africa suffer what all those poor victims suffered in the UK and then Zimbabwe’?

Justin Welby: It wasn’t until rather later, tragically, that we saw the Ruston report which detailed the…

Cathy Newman: This was the secret report in 1982?

Justin Welby: The secret report, and when you read that you just wanted to go and be sick. It was infinitely worse than the verbal report I was given.

Cathy Newman: The victims are calling for your resignation.

Justin Welby: I know, and I understand why they’re doing that. What happened, I was given advice about police inquiries and don’t interfere and this sort of thing. Now, we have a system that we put in place because of this, long before this report, that would prevent me not doing something and being given that advice. I shouldn’t have taken the advice. My heart said, ‘see them’. And I should have followed my heart on that. It’s my fault.

Cathy Newman: You’ve just avoided the question, which was the victims want you to resign. Will you resign?

Justin Welby: I’ve been giving that a lot of thought for actually quite a long time. There’s nothing over the last ten years that has been as horrible as dealing with not just this one, but innumerable other abuse cases, as you will see from the IICSA inquiry, and other things. I’ve given it 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 suspicion, that would be a resigning matter then and now. But I didn’t.

Cathy Newman: But you considered it as recently as this morning?

Justin Welby: Yes.