THE former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, has spoken of his “deep sense of personal failure” over the handling of abuse perpetrated by John Smyth, telling the BBC: “I know that I let down. I let people down.”
Speaking to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg more than four months after his resignation over the case (News, 12 November 2024), he said that, after learning of the allegations in 2013, 11 weeks after coming into post, he had not been “sufficiently pushy, in a way that I would have been a few years later”.
Safeguarding had been “the crisis I hadn’t foreseen”, he said. “I didn’t realise how bad it was.” But, he acknowledged, “I knew enough that people very rarely almost never abuse once.” He had not been “curious enough”, he said.
Asked about his actions, he mentioned the principle that dioceses investigate their own cases. He had had a message from the police saying “under no circumstances are you to get involved because you will contaminate our inquiry.” But, he said “I should have pestered them. . . I see that now.”
At the time, he said, he was “very focused” on the trial of Peter Ball, the former Bishop Gloucester who was imprisoned in 2015 for offences against teenage boys and young men (News, 7 October 2015), a case that had “seemed so much bigger”.
More cases of historic abuse were coming across his desk every day, he recalled. “It was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks. . . It’s a reason, not an excuse. . . One was trying to prioritise. . . The reality is I got it wrong. . . As Archbishop, there are no excuses.”
He had resigned, he said, “out of a sense of both personal responsibility for shortcomings during my time and my own shortcomings and out of a sense of institutional responsibility for the long-term revelations of cover-up and failure over a log period”. He maintained during the interview that he “did not have a clue” about Smyth’s abuse until 2013.
The Archbishop had, he said, met survivors online and apologised. “Certainly, as I’ve met the ones who wanted to meet me, I have said sorry very much. And just for the avoidance of doubt: I am utterly sorry and feel a deep sense of personal failure, both for the victims of Smyth not being picked up sufficiently after 2017 when we knew the extent of it, and for my own personal failures.”
Asked about his valedictory speech in the House of Lords (News, 6 December 2024), he said that he was “profoundly ashamed . . . When I think of it, I just wince. It was entirely wrong and entirely inexcusable.” Asked what he had been thinking, he said: “I wasn’t in a good space. I shouldn’t have done a valedictory speech at all.”
Much had changed in the Church’s safeguarding, he said. There were almost 60 people in the National Safeguarding Team (NST), and every parish had a safeguarding officer. He was “entirely in favour of independent safeguarding”. He had first raised the possibility in 2016.
The “overwhelming majority” of clergy, he said, were doing a “wonderful job . . . The Church has grown over the last few years.”
Asked by Ms Kuenssberg whether “we rush to judge,” he agreed. “The first question one hears on most interviews . . . is ‘Are you going to resign?’ Having been the object of that question, it’s a very difficult one to answer, because you think ‘Am I letting people down? Is it the right thing to do?’ It’s a complicated question.”
He also spoke of the “immense distrust of institutions” and “an absence — I’m not talking about safeguarding here — of forgiveness. We don’t treat our leaders as human. We expect them to be perfect. If you want perfect leaders, you won’t have any leaders.”
Asked whether he had been “cancelled” in a “modern frenzy”, he replied: “We don’t know that for 30 or 40 years, and I’ll be dead by that time . . . I know that I let God down. I let people down.”
The Archbishop was asked whether he would like the victims of Smyth to forgive him. “Obviously, but it’s not about me,” he said. “I have never, ever said to a survivor, ‘You must forgive,’ because that is their sovereign, absolute, individual choice. Everyone wants to be forgiven, but to demand forgiveness is to abuse again.”
Asked whether he forgave Smyth, he said: “Yes. I think if he was alive and I saw him. But it’s not me he’s abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.
“What matters is: are the survivors . . . sufficiently loved by the Church and cared for, and are enabled, liberated, to rebuild their lives? After that, you can start talking about forgiveness.” The Church had not done this, he said.
In response to the interview, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, who is the lead safeguarding bishop, issued a statement, in which she said that “this must always be about victims and survivors, their needs and what they are asking us to hear and learn.”
In the past ten years, she said, the Church had developed and strengthened its safeguarding policies and practices, making significant improvements in training, national safeguarding standards, and external audits, and that this work would continue.
“Every member of the Church is responsible for a culture in which victims are heard, responded to well, and put first: there is never a place for covering up abuse,” she said. “We must learn from this and build future foundations to ensure that the Church is as safe as it can be for all who come to worship or to engage with our many services and community projects.”
Speaking to the programme, one survivor, Graham, said: “What the Church has put me through makes the historic abuse pale into insignificance.” He spoke of obtaining notes from a Subject Access Request that stated “quite clearly . . . under-age boys getting beaten. If that was not a priority then what was?” The Church was “no better at dealing” with abuse cases today, he said.
Asked what he made of the Archbishop’s’ apology, he said: “If, in 2017, he had contacted us, said ‘I will come and apologise to you personally; I am sorry, I messed up,’ I would have forgiven him immediately, but he never has in those terms. . . He continues to blank us and refuses to tell us the truth. . . We are the victims and we deserve to know what happened, and we don’t yet.”
