Justin Welby has resigned. What happened?

Following a week in which the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury has faced moutning pressure to resign, Most Rev Justin Welby has announced that he will step down from his position as leader of the worldwide Anglican communion.

It comes after the publication of the Makin report, a damning investigation into an abuse scandal surrounding John Smyth, and a petition calling for Justin Welby’s resignation, which garnered more than 13,000 signatures in three days. Several leading clerics called for him to step down, including the Bishop of Newcastle, who said the archbishop’s position was “untenable”.

So what happened in this fast-moving news story? Decades earlier, a much younger Justin Welby met an influential Christian lawyer called John Smyth when they both attended the conservative evangelical Iwerne youth summer camps for boys from elite public schools. Behind closed doors, Smyth was grooming young men he met through Iwerne. Once he had brought them into his inner circle, he would begin forcing them to submit to vicious semi-naked beatings with a cane in his garden shed, leaving them bloodied, bruised and traumatised.

Welby and Smyth were never especially close and the future archbishop was not one of the lawyer’s victims. But his relationship with the abuser – who was not finally publicly unmasked until a Channel 4 News investigation in 2017 – has become the focus of intense scrutiny since.

The Makin report

Last week, a long-overdue independent investigation into the Smyth scandal was finally published. Written by a safeguarding expert called Keith Makin, it revealed the concerted efforts by a small cabal of conservative evangelical vicars who led the Iwerne camps to cover up Smyth’s crimes in the early 1980s.

In 1982, one victim was so brutalised by Smyth’s treatment he attempted to kill himself to escape the incessant and sexualised beatings. This prompted a small clutch of Iwerne leaders to discover the abuse, writing up a report which detailed graphically what their prominent volunteer had been doing.

But rather than hand over what they knew to the police they quietly forced Smyth to stand down from Iwerne involvement, fearing public exposure would ruin the reputation of the ministry and stop parents sending a new generation of upper-crust teenagers to learn about Jesus. Smyth ultimately left the UK and relocated to Zimbabwe, where he set up new camps for public schoolboys, and began a fresh cycle of violent abuse there.

The Makin Report follows the confused and tepid efforts by some of these leaders to warn off other evangelicals from working with Smyth, but they failed to properly pass on their concerns until it was too late. In the early 1990s, a 16-year-old boy died in one of Smyth’s Zimbabwe camps. He was finally charged and put on trial in 1997, but the case quickly collapsed without any resolution.

By the early 2010s, Smyth had settled in South Africa, and was once again a prominent youth volunteer at his Cape Town church, forming inappropriately intense relationships with teenage boys. Meanwhile, one anonymous victim in the UK began writing to other victims (and to the charity which now ran the Iwerne camps) about Smyth’s abuse. Eventually, a report was made to the Church of England safeguarding authorities and reached Lambeth Palace. Again, there was eventually a confused and half-hearted effort to investigate and finally refer the matter to several police forces, as well as enquire with Anglican counterparts in South Africa about Smyth.

The police launched a full investigation in 2017, but before Smyth could be extradited back to Britain, he died.

Open secret

These are the facts, documented in the 253-page Makin report, which draws on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents to show how horrific Smyth’s abuse was, but also how many missed opportunities there had been to expose him and prevent further harm.

Makin is scathing about the small group of Iwerne leaders who knew what Smyth was doing from 1982. This group orchestrated a cover-up, he argues, in preventing what they knew from reaching the police.

But the Smyth revelations were also an “open secret”. Makin documents how a litany of famous evangelical names were told in various ways about the abuse (mostly in an effort to stop them from working with Smyth or to explain his sudden disappearance from the Iwerne camps). Figures including Michael Green at St Aldate’s in Oxford, Richard Bewes at All Souls in London, and George Carey, then principal of Trinity Theological College in Bristol, but soon to become Archbishop of Canterbury.

Most seriously, David Fletcher, who ran the Iwerne Camps before becoming the long-time rector of St Ebbe’s in Oxford, knew everything but believed the ministry of the camps must be put before justice for the victims. He explicitly told Makin in an interview before he died in 2022: “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.”

Fletcher’s brother Jonathan, another famous conservative evangelical vicar, was also recently exposed for carrying out spiritually and emotionally abusive discipleship practices with younger men throughout his ministry.

What did Welby know?

When the Smyth story broke in 2017, Welby was apologetic but insisted he had no real relationship with Smyth (who he wrongly said was not even an Anglican) and that he had known nothing of the abuse until after he became archbishop decades later. Many had hoped or assumed the Makin investigation might shed light on the veracity of this and the head of the CofE’s links with one of its most prolific and sadistic abusers.

However, those hoping for blockbuster revelations have been disappointed. One unnamed person told Makin they overheard snippets of a “grave” conversation Welby had with another evangelical vicar in 1978 about Smyth, but the archbishop said he has no recollection of this. He did, however, bump into Smyth and some of his victims in Paris in the early 1980s where he was then working. His vicar at the time warned him that Smyth was a bad man, without giving any details.

Throughout the 1980s Welby would exchange Christmas cards with his old Iwerne leader and donated to his ministry in Zimbabwe, which the archbishop said were acts of politeness towards an old acquaintance. He then lost touch with Smyth for decades, until reports from victims reached Lambeth Palace in 2013. It was then that Welby says he first realised Smyth was an abuser, and Makin offers no evidence to contradict this account.

He does, however, criticise the archbishop for not pushing harder post-2013 to ensure Smyth was reported to the police and victims were properly supported by the Church’s safeguarding teams. “Justin Welby held a personal and moral responsibility to pursue this further, whatever the policies at play at the time required,” Makin wrote.

Welby also made a series of incorrect claims in interviews in 2017, including that a crime had already been reported to the police (it had not, despite several botched interactions with difference forces) and that he’d never heard any suspicions around Smyth (given what Welby’s vicar in Paris had told him in the early 80s, he had). He also pledged to meet with victims, but failed to do so for four years. The Church as a whole lacked curiosity about the progress of their referrals (both to the police and to the church authorities in South Africa) and did not look after victims, the report concludes.

A second apology

When the Makin report was released, Welby again apologised, saying: “The review is clear that I personally failed to ensure that after disclosure in 2013 the awful tragedy was energetically investigated.” The CofE had learned a lot since then and improved how it responded to reports of abuse significantly, he added. “That does not reverse the terrible abuse suffered but I hope that it can be at least of some comfort to victims. I can only end by thanking them again for their courage and persistence and again by apologising profoundly, not only for my own failures and omissions but for the wickedness, concealment and abuse by the Church more widely, as set out in the report.”

However, this did not assuage those who thought he should resign over his personal failures and the Church’s collective mistakes. The trickle of priests demanding Welby resign online gradually became a stream. On Saturday, three prominent clergy and members of the church’s governing General Synod started a petition publicly calling for Welby’s resignation. “Given his role in allowing abuse to continue, we believe that his continuing as the Archbishop of Canterbury is no longer tenable,” the petition stated. “We must see change, for the sake of survivors, for the protection of the vulnerable, and for the good of the Church.”

Welby admitted in an interview last week that he had seriously considered resigning over the Makin review but had, at that point, decided against it. “If I’d known before 2013 or had grounds for suspicion, that would be a resigning matter then and now, but I didn’t,” he insisted. His defenders argued that Welby was not a prominent figure in the 1980s when Smyth was an open secret, and while he did not cover himself with glory post-2013, neither did he ignore the reports that reached Lambeth Palace. He was assured the local bishop in Cambridgeshire was on the case, that referrals had been passed to South Africa, and that the police were investigating (all three were in fact only partly true).

But this did not stop the increasing pressure on Welby. A series of newspaper columns, covering the fallout from the Makin report, concluded he should stand down. And most seriously, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, came out as the most senior Anglican figure to call for his resignation. In an interview with the BBC, Hartley said Welby’s position was “untenable” and that without him standing down the CofE could not regain its credibility or “moral voice” to speak against abuse. “I think rightly people are asking the question ‘Can we really trust the Church of England to keep us safe?’ And I think the answer at the moment is ‘no’,” she said.

Shortly afterwards, Hartley published a private letter from Welby and the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, online. This concerned a separate, long-running safeguarding issue around Cottrell’s predecessor, John Sentamu, who was suspended from retirement ministry by Hartley over his response to a different lessons learned review.

In the letter, the two archbishops suggest a way to resolve the impasse, but Hartley said in a statement that it signified the “wider and systemic dysfunction of how the hierarchy of the Church of England has dealt with safeguarding and the impact of church-related abuse on victims and survivors”. The archbishops’ language and approach was “coercive” and ignorant of “how power dynamics operate” in the Church, she added. It is almost unheard of for a sitting senior bishop to describe the archbishop’s role as untenable, let alone leak private letters that effectively label her bosses as “coercive” and “dysfunctional”.

What next?

While this is far from the first time that calls for Welby’s resignation have been made, this time, it seems that the combined pressues from voices from almost all the tribes and factions within the Church have proved too much.

In a statement issued earlier today, Welby said: “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.

“It is my duty to honour my Constitutional and church responsibilities, so exact timings will be decided once a review of necessary obligations has been completed, including those in England and in the Anglican Communion.

“I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church. As I step down I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.”

Read Justin Welby’s full letter of resignation on Premier Christian News