Justin Welby resigns as Archbishop of Canterbury over child abuse scandal

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By Andrew MacAskill and Muvija M

LONDON (Reuters) -Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of Anglicans worldwide, resigned “in sorrow” on Tuesday, saying he had failed to ensure a proper investigation into allegations of abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps decades ago.

Welby, also the most senior cleric of the Church of England, had faced calls to resign after a report last week found he had taken insufficient action to stop one of the Church’s most prolific serial abusers.

Church commentators and historians said it was the first time an Anglican archbishop had resigned over an abuse scandal. 

In his resignation letter, Welby said he must take “personal and institutional responsibility” for a lack of action on the “heinous abuses”.

“The last few days have renewed my long felt and profound sense of shame at the historic safeguarding failures of the Church of England,” Welby said. “As I step down I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.”

Welby’s tenure covered a decade of major upheaval in which he was forced to navigate splits over homosexual rights and women clerics between liberal churches, mostly in North America and Britain, and their conservative counterparts, especially in Africa.

The Anglican churches in African countries such as Uganda and Nigeria are likely to welcome his resignation, after saying last year they no longer had confidence in him.

His successor’s main challenges will include holding together the increasingly fractious worldwide Anglican community and attempting to reverse a decline in church attendance, which is down a fifth in Britain since 2019.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he respected the archbishop’s decision to resign.

Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, the Church’s second-ranking cleric, called Welby’s resignation “the right and honourable thing to do”.

‘HORRIFIC’ ABUSE IN CHRISTIAN CAMPS

Welby, 68, one of the most political archbishops of modern times who criticised some policies of the former government, resigned five days after the independent Makin Report singled him out for criticism over his handling of abuse allegations dating back to the 1970s. 

The report said John Smyth, a British lawyer, had subjected more than 100 boys and young men to “brutal and horrific” physical and sexual abuse over a 40-year period.

Smyth beat some victims with up to 800 strokes of a cane and supplied nappies to absorb the bleeding, the report said. He would then drape himself over his victims, sometimes kissing them on the neck or back.

He ran Christian camps in Dorset in England, where Welby also worked before he was ordained.

Smyth moved to Africa in 1984 and continued to carry out the abuse until close to his death in 2018, the report said.   

It found that the Church of England had known at the highest level about the sexual abuse claims in 2013 and Welby became aware, at the latest, about the accusations in the same year, after he became archbishop.

An investigation by the police in 2013 could have led to Smyth facing charges before he died, said the report, commissioned in 2019.

Welby had said he had “no idea or suspicion” of the allegations before 2013, but the report concluded this was unlikely, accusing him of failing in his “personal and moral responsibility” to ensure a proper investigation.

Richard Rex, a history professor at Cambridge, said by 2013, any bishop should have realised that such allegations should be “treated with the utmost seriousness and care”.

Under the church’s rules, the job of managing the choice of Welby’s successor falls to a body of clerics. It submits the name of a preferred and an alternative candidate to the prime minister, who then advises the monarch on the appointment.

Martyn Snow, the bishop of Leicester, Graham Usher, the Bishop of Norwich, and Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Bishop of Chelmsford, have all been tipped to succeed Welby and become the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Snow abstained in a church assembly vote on blessing for gay couples, while Usher is in favour of gay rights.

Francis-Dehqani was born in Iran and has spoken about how her brother was murdered in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. She would be the first woman to occupy the post.

(Reporting by Andrew MacAskill, Muvija M and Sachin Ravikuma; editing by Sarah Young, Elizabeth Piper, Kevin Liffey, Alexandra Hudson)