Review that led me to resign as archbishop was partly ‘wrong', says Welby

South Wales Argus

27-06-2025

The former archbishop resigned in November last year and stepped down officially in early January after an independent review by Keith Makin concluded he had not done enough to deal with allegations of abuse by Christian camp leader Smyth.
The report said Smyth 'could and should have been formally reported to the police in the UK, and to authorities in South Africa (church authorities and potentially the police) by church officers, including a diocesan bishop and Justin Welby in 2013'.
During an interview which took place at the Cambridge Union in May, Mr Welby denied having learned the full extent of Smyth's abuse until 2017.
'Makin is wrong in that,' Mr Welby said during the event.
'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 was his 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.
'Now I had checked, and I was told the police had been informed.'
Justin Welby resigned as archbishop of Canterbury in the wake of the John Smyth sexual abuse scandal (Neil Turner/Lambeth Palace/PA)
Over five decades between the 1970s until his death, John Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.
Smyth died aged 75 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police, and was 'never brought to justice for the abuse', the Makin Review said.
Asked at the event why he did not report John Smyth in 2013 when he first heard of allegations made against him, Mr Welby said: 'First of all, I first knew of John Smyth's abuse in 2013 at the beginning of August, when one person in Cambridge disclosed to the diocesan safeguarding advisor that they had been abused.
'A few days later, I had a report through my chaplain who had been rung up from the Diocese of Ely, which Cambridge is in, saying … there was an allegation of abuse by one person.
'I didn't know the full details of the abuse until 2017 – that is clearly in the report …
'And it wasn't until about 2021, in a meeting with Keith Makin, that I discovered there were more than 100 people who had been physically abused.
'I disagree with the report on that … it's not truth.
'Secondly, I certainly didn't know about anything in Zimbabwe for the same period, and that emerged steadily as well.'
Mr Welby added that, in 2013, he only knew of one person alleging they had been abused by Smyth, and that he was in the midst of dealing with other prominent cases of sexual abuse within the Church.
Mr Welby said: 'I was dealing at the time with Peter Ball, the bishop of Gloucester, where we knew there were at least 30 victims, and he was going to prison, obviously, and one of those victims had committed suicide.
'That was among many cases that were coming out, and they were obviously getting my attention.
'I was focusing my attention on making sure it didn't happen again.
'I don't apologise for that.
'The worst of all possible things would have been to say, we're not going to change the system sufficiently to reduce the chances of such appalling events with such lifelong damage to survivors happening again.'
The former archbishop, however, acknowledged he was 'insufficiently persistent' in bringing Smyth to justice while he was still alive – which ultimately compelled him to step down from his role as archbishop of Canterbury.
Mr Welby also said he was seeing a psychotherapist with whom he has been discussing the time of his resignation, which he described as 'one of the loneliest moments I've ever had'.
Asked about what he would have done differently, Mr Welby replied: 'I have thought a great deal about that.
'One must be very careful about making it sound as though it was all about me. It's really not.
'There will be people here who've been abused, who are the victims of abuse, sexual abuse, or physical abuse, emotional abuse, and I've been very open that I'm one of them, so I'm aware of what it means.
'There were two reasons it was right to resign.
'One was, although I thought I had done at the time everything I should have done, I hadn't.
'It had been reported to the police, the first signs of the abuse … and it was reported to Cambridgeshire Police and then to Hampshire Police, where he (Smyth) lived at the time.
'But I was insufficiently persistent and curious to follow up and check and check and check that action was being taken.
'And I felt that that had re-traumatised the survivors.'
Mr Welby added: 'The other point was shame, because in my role, it wasn't only the Smyth case (in) the whole time I've been in post as archbishop for 12 years.
'There were more and more cases (that) emerged, very few from the present day, but going right back to the 60s and the 70s – 50, 60 years.
'And I'm sure we have not uncovered all of them, and I'm sure it goes further back than that.
'And there's one area the psychotherapist I have been seeing has helped me understand better, is: one develops an idealisation of an organisation, particularly the Church, and the sense of its failure made me feel that the only proper thing to do was to take responsibility as the current head of that organisation.
'It's one of the loneliest moments I've ever had, the reverberations of that I still feel.
'But I can persuade myself I could have done other things. I could have taken on the interviewers more strongly.'
The process to replace Mr Welby is under way.
It is expected there could be an announcement on a nomination for the 106th archbishop of Canterbury by autumn – a year after Mr Welby announced he was standing down.