IT is very sad that Justin Welby’s career has been ended by him being forced out through a child sex abuse scandal, miring his reputation, but it is inconceivable that he could carry on.
He failed to act, he failed to spare perhaps scores of boys being abused, when a report implicating a friend of his landed on his desk in 2013. He did nothing until 2017 when Channel 4 exposed the appalling behaviour of John Smyth who, by then, had slipped out of the country to carry on his beatings at camps in Zimbabwe.
Even more damning is that the independent Makin inquiry said it was “unlikely” he knew nothing of Smyth’s antics before 2013 – he was with him in camps in the 1980s – and that he failed to show sufficient curiosity when he was told.
Amid such serious accusations in a church with such a chequered history, inaction was unacceptable.
Yet his time as Archbishop of Canterbury started so differently. After a breezy year in Durham, in which his open approachability reconnected the church with the people (he was even guest editor of The Northern Echo for a day), he moved to Canterbury to take over a church struggling to move into the 21st Century as it grappled with issues like gay marriage and female bishops.
He helped it fudge its way into the future – to some he was too wishy-washy – and he established it as a vaguely liberal institution that worried about the poor and the roofless. He impeccably conducted two great state occasions – the Queen’s funeral and the King’s coronation – but he was unable to stem the drop in local congregations or the closure of churches. Perhaps no one could.
The debates about his successes, though, are overshadowed because the church, on his watch, has let down victims of abuse and, once again, its reputation is going through the wringer. It needs a clean face and a fresh start, and so Mr Welby’s position was untenable.
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