The resignation last week of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican communion, on foot of a report showing he and many in the church hierarchy had failed to stop, and covered up for, the church’s most prolific child abuser, has resonances that will be all too familiar to Irish observers of our own church scandals.
According to the Makin report released last week, John Smyth, a lay religion teacher, brutally abused at least 26 boys in England and another 85 in Zimbabwe over decades, predominantly in schools and Christian summer camps. In 1992, a 16-year-old boy, Guide Nyachuru, was found drowned in a pool, his body bruised from one of Smyth’s beatings.
Smyth’s abuse, the report says, had been known to church leaders from 1982 and continued remorselessly until 2017. Their efforts to stop it were “wholly ineffective and amounted to a cover-up” .This was rationalised, as Catholic church leaders had done in Ireland, on the basis of Smyth’s “Christian usefulness” and the need for secrecy. The motivation for keeping it private– according to the reasoning given to Makin – was that it would be better for the victims and their families, as well as the evangelical ministries they believed would be harmed by scandal. It is a twisted logic which hides the real motivation, which is protecting the institution no matter what.
Welby didn’t learn of detailed allegations until 2013 and the review said he “could and should” have reported these to the police. The police response to information that was passed to it was slow and deeply inadequate. Now victims’ advocates insist that one resignation is not enough to transform a culture at the top of that hierarchy that has not taken child protection seriously.
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In Ireland similar reports, notably Ferns and Murphy, powerfully indicted the institutional cover-ups by the church of abusing priests and their moving of abusers from parish to parish. An outraged public reaction led to four resignations of bishops and huge damage to a church which, as in England, should have done so much more.