On a rainy Tuesday afternoon in November, a single social-media post sent shock waves through the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. It was a photograph of a letter printed on official stationery and placed on a polished wooden surface. In its few brief lines, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, announced his unprecedented decision to resign.
Over the centuries, archbishops of Canterbury have been excommunicated, murdered, executed, or occasionally canonized. These days, they tend to retire at around seventy and head to the House of Lords. That may not happen this time.
“Having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty The King, I have decided to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury,” Welby wrote. “The Makin Review has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth. When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow. It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.”
The long-awaited 251-page Makin Review was an independent report commissioned in 2019 by the Archbishops’ Council into allegations around a lawyer and married father of four named John Smyth. It found Smyth was “a charismatic personality” who had subjected up to 130 boys and young men to “physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual” abuse. It also found that Welby and other senior figures had shown “a distinct lack of curiosity” about the allegations “and a tendency towards minimization of the matter.” In addition, it called into question Welby’s insistence that he had no knowledge of concerns regarding Smyth in the 1980s.
Smyth administered severe beatings to boys he had met through the Christian Forum of the prestigious boarding school Winchester College and through Iwerne Christian holiday camps, where Welby was also a volunteer leader. Though Smyth was not ordained, he had been made a lay reader—that is, someone authorized by the local bishop to carry out certain teaching and pastoral functions—in the Diocese of Winchester. In 1984, Smyth hurriedly moved to southern Africa, where he continued to abuse. He was even charged with culpable homicide over the death in mysterious circumstances of a boy, Guide Nyachuru, but the charges were later dropped.
Initial commentary last month asked whether Welby had been right to resign. After the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, publicly called for him to go, and an online petition calling for his resignation—created by three senior members of clergy—gathered more than ten thousand signatures in two days, it was increasingly difficult for him to stay. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe, issued a statement saying he was praying for “the people of the Church of England, for our siblings in the Anglican Communion, and for all victims and survivors.” Rowe also reiterated the Episcopal Church’s “commitment to this critical task [of addressing safeguarding] in our own contexts and in the Anglican Communion.”
Shortly after Welby’s resignation, Dr. Alec Ryrie, professor of Christian history at Durham University, told a BBC religious-affairs program that the archbishop’s decision was actually a testament to the progress Welby had made in creating new protections. “The fact that he has changed the culture sufficiently that it’s reached the point that he himself could be forced to step down is, in a bitterly ironic way, a kind of achievement,” he said. Some people close to Welby still feel he should not have gone, and in late November the Anglican newspaper Church Times reported that three retired senior police officers disputed the report’s claim that Welby and other church officials had inadequately referred allegations to the police.
While the report and its fallout have shaken the Church of England and damaged its credibility, worse could yet follow. Some people have called for a clean sweep of clergy who knew of the abuse but failed to adequately respond. So far one serving bishop, Jo Bailey Wells, the bishop for Episcopal ministry and a former chaplain to Welby, and one retired bishop, Paul Butler, the former bishop of Durham, have been asked to “step back” from ministry. Four priests, including Hugh Palmer, a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, have had their licenses suspended. However, two others named in the report, Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York, and Stephen Conway, the bishop of Lincoln, have said they will not be resigning. The report suggests that another six bishops and around twenty-five other clergy also knew about Smyth’s abuse and failed to stop it. If nothing more happens, public opinion will remain firmly with the victims.
When Welby was enthroned in 2013, his unusual path to Canterbury—he had worked in the oil industry—enabled him to speak out on moral issues in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Finding common cause with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, Welby contributed to Nichols’s work on business ethics while Nichols himself backed Welby’s evangelization initiative, “Thy Kingdom Come.” Welby and Pope Francis began their respective roles eight days apart, and a warm relationship started quickly. This was especially visible in May 2024 when Francis addressed regional leaders of the Anglican Communion in Rome, telling them of Welby: “We have had many occasions to meet, to pray together and to testify to our faith in the Lord,” commenting on their trip to Sudan and referring to Welby as “brother Justin.”
Domestically, Archbishop Welby won praise for his pitch-perfect sermons at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 and the coronation of King Charles III. During his tenure, the Church’s National Safeguarding Team grew from one to more than fifty employees. However, Welby has been criticized for failing to reverse the decline in church attendance (though it has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels) and taking resources away from parishes in favor of new forms of evangelization.
It is unlikely that Welby’s departure alone will do much to repair the serious problems Makin made visible. The Church remains deeply split over sexuality, specifically the recognition of gay relationships. Two questions confront the Church: How will they put right other past safeguarding failures? And what compromises are they prepared to make to secure their own institutional future?
The report stresses that other people knew more about Smyth’s abuse than Welby, and his resignation alone cannot dismantle the culture and structures that enabled the cover-up. The review and Welby’s statement mentioned “the long-maintained conspiracy of silence” around Smyth, which drew in a tight circle of friends that included some clergy. They were bound by social class and a common theology—conservative Evangelicalism, which places great emphasis on personal holiness, especially around sexuality. (Conservative Evangelicalism became predominant at many English boarding schools from the 1960s onwards.)
When I was reporting on the Catholic abuse crisis about a decade ago, I naïvely assumed that Protestant or Evangelical Churches would not harbor such predatory men, both because their clergy are allowed to marry and because they do not have an elevated theology of priesthood. Mea culpa. Even in this lower-church theology, charismatic men sometimes manage to climb to positions where others are expected to look up to them unquestioningly. Despite different ecclesiologies, striking similarities are prevalent among those who have covered up the crimes of such men. Their silence often springs from good intentions: an instinct to protect the Church and the personalities that have nurtured faith, a belief that the Church is under attack and needs defending, and a dislike of gossip.
Where does the Church of England go from here? Welby has not set a great example. In his valedictory speech as one of the bishops with a seat in the House of Lords (his last day in post is January 6) he struck a light and at times jovial tone and was criticised—by Bishop Hartley, by the Church’s three Lead Bishops for Safeguarding and by some survivors—for doing so. He has “wholeheartedly” apologised. Most urgently, officials need to assess the actions of clergy named in the review, then swiftly enact cultural and structural reforms to ensure that claims of abuse receive the serious attention they deserve. (Efforts are already in place at a parish level to minimize the risk of a future Smyth gaining such dangerously unchecked access to young people: even bell-ringers and flower-arrangers are expected to undertake safeguarding training.)
The Church’s National Safeguarding Team says it is looking into thirty clergy named in the review, to assess whether they should face disciplinary action. It has outlined a four-stage assessment process of establishing any “immediate safeguarding risks,” with the intention of reporting back to the Church’s parliament, the General Synod, in February. This has been dismissed by one veteran campaigner for abuse survivors as too slow, kicking the report “into the long grass.” Richard Scorer, a lawyer who acts for many survivors of abuse in the Church of England, fears that proceduralism will blunt the possibility of meaningful reform: “Once again the Church of England is responding on the hoof to try to give the appearance of activity.” Scorer has long called for oversight of the Church’s safeguarding to be outsourced to an independent body, and for the government to introduce mandatory reporting of abuse allegations to the police. It is in the Church’s interests to ensure this procedure is sufficiently credible so that it is able to withstand future cases coming to light. At least three cases of abuse in the Anglican Church will become public next year, according to Andrew Graystone, author of Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne camps.
Already Archbishop Cottrell, who is taking over Welby’s duties until a replacement is appointed, has faced new calls to resign over accusations that while he was bishop of Chelmsford he allowed a priest against whom complaints had been made to remain in his post. Cottrell said he lacked the legal power to sack the priest until a fresh complaint was made, and when one was, he acted immediately. Graystone has called for “an end to deference, secrecy, tribalism, and bullying in the House of Bishops.” Culture is difficult to change, but concrete structures to improve and clarify bishops’ accountability could help. At a pastoral level, space to process the shock and anger would be beneficial. There is a lot that Anglicans can inquire of their Catholic cousins: How to remain in, and forgive, an institution that has caused so much harm and shame? How to understand faith experiences that involved people who, it later transpires, are so fallen or have turned a blind eye to such destructive behavior?
Reading about Smyth prompted me to locate a Tablet report of a remarkable service of lament and reconciliation titled “I am furious, God.” First proposed by the lay group We Are Church and held in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna in 2010, the service featured Cardinal Christoph Schönborn pronouncing an admission of the Church’s guilt. His remarks included memorable lines like “We confess that some of us exploited the trust of children and destroyed it…. We confess that for some of us the semblance of the Church’s impeccability mattered more than anything else.” Catholics in England are also looking at Welby’s departure with interest. A letter to the Tablet in November 2024 suggested “perhaps it is time for the Catholic Church to look at itself,” given past criticisms of Cardinal Nichols’s handling of abuse cases.
As for the Church of England, speculation has begun about who might come next, along with jokes that no one in their right mind would want four jobs in one. The position involves holding the Anglican Communion together, holding the Church of England together, heading the thirty-diocese province of Canterbury, and leading the diocese of Canterbury itself. Observers agree that any incumbent must have at least ten years before retirement at seventy, and that appointing a woman to be spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion may not sit well with international provinces that do not recognize female leadership. That would exclude the highly capable Iranian-born Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani, a former refugee whose father, as bishop of Tehran, survived an assassination attempt during the Iranian Revolution. And many in the Church of England may struggle to accept a Primate of All England who was not English or even British. (Rowan Williams, Welby’s Welsh predecessor, was the first bishop from outside the Church of England since the Reformation.) The main Anglican newspaper, Church Times, has opted not to speculate on possible successors, arguing the priority should be reflecting on the lessons of the report and “on exactly what sort of leadership a Church in crisis needs.”
The task of restoring trust in the Church will not end after the new archbishop is enthroned. (Perhaps language like “enthroned” is also due for reexamination.) The factions that briefly laid down their arms to agree on Welby’s exit will need to work for a longer-term peace.
This is not a given: some conservative Evangelical parishes are so angry with the House of Bishops’ decision last year to approve blessings for same-sex couples that they have set up a mechanism for their financial contributions to go not to the shared pot but only to other parishes they consider “orthodox.” Yet the Smyth cover-up has had something of a leveling effect: abusers and those who failed to adequately respond to their actions have now been found to come from conservative Evangelical, charismatic, and Anglo-Catholic contexts. No one is holier than anyone else. Taking sexual sin seriously starts with taking abuse victims seriously.
Anglicans are wondering what the future holds for their Church. One could answer, it is the Church of Christ, not the Church of England or the Church of any one archbishop. But the question remains: What might Jesus want to do with such a mix of the devout, the “cultural Christians,” the scandal-hit Evangelicals, and the pro-LGBT progressives? Time will tell if this crisis finally gets them to agree on something.
