Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has said his resignation last year was the correct decision, despite it being “one of the loneliest moments I’ve ever had”.
Welby resigned after the publication of the Makin report into abuse conducted by John Smyth at Christian camps in England and South Africa. The report said that Welby had not done enough when he became aware of the allegations.
Speaking at the Cambridge Union, Welby responded to allegations in the report which concluded that had Welby or the Church reported Smyth to the police sooner, he might have been brought to justice.
Welby claimed that Makin’s report was inaccurate in places and insisted that he had only heard allegations of Smyths abuse in 2013, with fuller details only becoming known to him in 2017. Smyth died in 2018.
Welby said, according to Church Times, “Makin is wrong ... Not deliberately, but he didn’t see a bit of evidence that subsequently came out after his report and after my resignation. ... The bit of evidence is emails from Lambeth to Ely, and from Ely, letters to South Africa where Smyth was living, and letters to the police in which the reporting was fully given to the police and the police asked the Church not to carry out its own investigations because it would interfere with theirs.”
Welby, who said he himself had been abused, indicated that he wished to respect the pain and feelings of victims of abuse.
“I am going to be very careful because it’s not really about me. There will be people here who have been abused, who are the victims of abuse, sexual abuse or physical abuse, emotional abuse. And I have been very open that I am one of them. So I am aware of what it means," he said.
While taking issue with some of the points raised in the Makin review, Welby said that his decision to resign was still the correct one. He conceded that he had not done everything that he should have done in response to the abuse allegations and added that he felt it correct that he take responsibility for the extent of abuse found in the organisation he was heading.
Despite standing by the decision to quit, Welby described it as “one of the loneliest moments I’ve ever had and the reverberations of that I still feel”.
Welby also reflected on his decision to criticise the former Tory government's Rwanda scheme for illegal migrants in 2022. He said he had to speak out in order to be “faithful to Christ”.
He also claimed that during Covid, the government pressured him and the Church of England to close church buildings, claiming that not doing so would harm ethnic minorities and Muslims: “They said, ‘Look, if you don’t shut the churches in the C of E, we won’t be able to get anyone from ethnic-minority groups and particularly Islam. They are waiting to see what you do.’”
