Church of England head Justin Welby resigns over handling of sex abuse scandal

LONDON (AP) — Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, resigned Tuesday after an investigation found that he failed to tell police about serial physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps as soon as he became aware of it.

Pressure on Welby had been building since Thursday, when the archbishop’s refusal to accept responsibility for his failure to report the abuse in England and in Africa in 2013 kindled anger about a lack of accountability at the highest reaches of the church. By Tuesday afternoon, Welby acknowledged that mistake.

“It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024,” Welby said in the statement announcing his resignation. “I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honored to serve.”

Welby’s resignation will send ripples around the world. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the symbolic head of the Anglican Communion, which has more than 85 million members in 165 countries, including the Episcopal Church in the United States. While each national church has its own leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury is considered first among equals.

Welby, a former oil executive who left the industry in 1989 to study for the priesthood, was a controversial figure even before the scandal. A skilled mediator who has worked to resolve conflicts in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, he struggled to unite the Anglican Communion, which has been riven by sharply divergent views on issues such as gay rights and the place of women in the church.

The Church of England on Thursday released the results of an independent investigation into the late John Smyth, a prominent attorney who the report said sexually, psychologically and physically abused about 30 boys and young men in the United Kingdom and 85 in Africa from the 1970s until his death in 2018.

The 251-page report of the Makin Review concluded that Welby failed to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the abuse in August 2013, soon after he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Had he done so, Smyth could have been stopped sooner and many victims could have been spared the abuse, the inquiry found.

Welby said he didn’t inform law enforcement agencies about the abuse because he was wrongly told that police were already investigating. Even so, he took responsibility for not ensuring that the allegations were pursued as “energetically” as they should have been.

As late as Monday, Welby’s office said he had decided not to resign, even as he expressed his “horror at the scale of John Smyth’s egregious abuse.”

Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, said Welby’s position had become “untenable” after some members of the General Synod, the Church of England’s national assembly, started a petition calling on him to step down because he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.”

But the strongest outcry came from Smyth’s victims. Andrew Morse, who was repeatedly beaten by Smyth over five years, said resigning was a chance for Welby to start repairing the damage caused by the church’s broader handling of historical abuse cases.

“I believe that now is an opportunity for him to resign,’’ Morse told the BBC before Welby stepped down.

Welby’s resignation comes against the backdrop of widespread historical sexual abuse in the Church of England. A 2022 report by the Independent Inquiry Child Sexual Abuse found that deference to the authority of priests, taboos surrounding the discussion of sexuality and a culture that gave more support to alleged perpetrators than their victims helped make the Church of England “a place where abusers could hide.”

Welby’s supporters had argued that he should remain on the job because of his role in changing the culture of the church.

Church officials were first made aware of Smyth’s abuse in 1982, when they received the results of an internal investigation into complaints about his behavior at Christian summer camps in England. The recipients of that report “participated in an active cover-up” to prevent its findings from coming to light, the Makin Review found.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 and later relocated to South Africa. He abused boys and young men in Zimbabwe, and there is evidence that the abuse continued in South Africa until he died in August 2018, the investigation found.

Smyth’s actions weren't made public until a 2017 investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 television station, which led police in Hampshire to start an investigation. Police were planning to question Smyth at the time of his death and had been preparing to extradite him.

Stephen Cherry, dean of the chapel at King’s College Cambridge, said Welby could no longer represent the people.

“There are circumstances in which something happens whereby a person in a position of prominent leadership essentially loses the trust and the confidence and the capacity to do that really wonderful thing that someone like an archbishop does, which is represent everyone at a certain moment publicly,’’ Cherry told the BBC before Welby resigned.

“And the pain in the victim community and the history of not listening to people and not responding to people who are profoundly hurt by those in positions of power means that this is no longer a person who can carry the representative role of that office.”

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Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless contributed.