Crisis in the English Church: leader of the Anglican church resigns after scandal

A report published this week concluded that the British church covered up child sexual abuse. Catholics feel “deep shame and sadness.”

Over five decades, in three different countries, the lawyer John Smyth will have submitted around 130 boys and young people in the United Kingdom and Africa to various physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, which permanently marked their lives, says . It is known as the largest in the history of the church.

The report concluded that Smyth could have been brought to justice sooner (it was only investigated in 2017) if Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the Catholic Church, had reported him to the police shortly after taking office as archbishop, 11 years ago, as he was aware of the scandal.

Smyth died aged 75 in Cape Town in 2018, while he was still being investigated by Hampshire police.

“The Makin Review exposed the long-held conspiracy of silence about John Smyth’s heinous abuse. When I was informed in 2013 and I was told the police had been notifiedI mistakenly believed that an adequate resolution would follow,” the Archbishop wrote in the resignation letter.

“It is very clear that I have to take personal responsibility and institutional for the long and traumatic period between 2013 and 2024,” he concluded. The King, supreme governor of the Church of England, accepted Welby’s resignation this Tuesday.

Joanne Grenfell, the Bishop of Stepney, told Sky News he felt “deep shame and sadness” at the Church of England’s record of abuse: “It is very clear that we failed in allowing abuse to happen and in allowing it to be covered up.” Finish: “we have and change”.

Welby knew Smyth: they worked together at Christian camps that the archbishop ran in the 1970s. Now, the report writes that there was no evidence that they had “maintained any significant contact” after that. The Archbishop said he had not “any idea or suspicion of abuse” before 2013.

Welby even ended up admitting that he had sent money to Smyth’s missions in Zimbabwe: “many people financed his mission”, he said, “on two separate occasions I donated 50 or 60 euros”, he told .

Britons like the Daily Mail already refer to the case as “the Church in Crisis”.

Welby had not planned to resign, and last week had even refused to do so, but a petition signed by 1,500 members of the clergy expelled him from power.