Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury has thrown the Church of England in to one of the greatest crises in its 490-year history.
His departure is not a surprise. There is nobody in 21st century Britain who has the equivalent moral authority of an abuse survivor when speaking about their terrible traumas.
So, when several began calling for Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to resign over the damning Makin Report into the Church’s handling of the John Smyth abuse scandal, it was only a matter of time before he would have to quit.
Welby’s first response to the report, published at the end of last week, was to apologise and then say that he had considered resigning but would not do so. The clamours for him did not abate. Instead, three of his own Church of England priests set up a petition calling on him to go, which attracted thousands of signatures, while the Bishop of Newcastle then joined in the chorus of accusations.
Smyth, a Christian evangelical who ran boys camps and also worked at Winchester College, was one of the worst abusers to ever feature in the history of the Church of England. He is known to have savagely beaten at least 120 boys. The Makin Report charted not only his crimes – for which he was never brought to court – but also the failings of the Church of England to act against him, and its cover-ups, which went on for years.
‘A distinct lack of curiosity’
Then, in 2013, soon after his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, Welby was informed of the Smyth case and told that complaints had been reported to the police. But no formal referral had actually been made. Instead, the Makin Report says, Welby and other senior church figures showed “a distinct lack of curiosity” and “a tendency towards minimisation of the matter”. Perhaps if they had done do, not only could Smyth have been brought to justice before his death in 2018, but other child victims could have been spared his brutality.
Welby’s resignation statement was penitent in tone. But this goes beyond the personal – it is an existential crisis for the institution of the Church of England. If he had stayed on until the New Year, he would have then announced, as is the custom, that he intended to resign in a year’s time, on his 70th birthday. Twelve months would have given the Church of England time to deliberate on not only who should succeed him but also whether the job needs to be rethought.
An Archbishop of Canterbury leads the Church of England but also the wider Anglican Communion across the globe. Battles over issues such as women bishops and same-sex marriage have become toxic, with Welby often trying to find a middle course that appeals to Western liberal Christians while also keeping those, particularly in Africa who maintain more traditional beliefs, on side. It was a balancing act that often led to him falling off the trapeze, pleasing no one. Now there is likely to be more of a rush to find a replacement for Welby and less consideration of potential reform.
But the Welby crisis goes even deeper than that. It risks becoming a tipping point for the the Church of England’s place in public life. For years, it has suffered declining congregations. Only 650,000 people attend Sunday church services. The Roman Catholic Church – the church it was originally founded by Henry VIII to replace in 1534 – has around a million. A similar number of people are mosque-going Muslims.
Secularism was already overshadowing the church
But what overshadows the Church of England, more than Catholicism or Islam, is the secularism that now shapes Britain. While the Church of England has spent hour after hour agonising over same-sex marriage, the majority of people have had no problem with it since it became legal in Britain 10 years ago. People once turned to the Church of England for hatching, matching and despatching, but numbers of its weddings, funerals and baptisms have all slumped. The latest figures show that just 80,000 a year are baptised Anglican. The days when people automatically wrote C of E on a hospital form when asked for their religion are over.
That they once did so was due to the Church of England being the established church. You were Anglican by default – unless you chose another Christian denomination or another faith. But the combination of this decline in a sense of belonging to it – and this particular crisis over Justin Welby – will surely lead to questions over its status. That is why this crisis could even be more serious than the abuse scandals were for the Catholic Church in this country, which is not part of the make-up of our public life in the same way.
We may well see the consequences of this in the next few weeks. A bill on assisted dying is about to go through Parliament. Will anybody, after this scandal, want to hear what the bishops have to say about it? Their moral authority is surely tarnished. And if that is the case, what else do they bring to the House of Lords, where, as the representatives of the established church, they have 26 seats?
Nobody seems able to recall when an Archbishop of Canterbury last resigned. Some were deprived of their office. Plenty were put to death. This resignation, though, may well be a nail in the coffin of the established, corporate Church of England.
Catherine Pepinster is a historian, commentator, specialist writer on religion and a former editor of ‘The Tablet’, the Catholic international weekly newspaper
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