Justin Welby tells BBC abuse in Church was ‘overwhelming’

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has told the BBC he failed to follow up abuse allegations within the Church of England because the scale of the problem was “absolutely overwhelming”.

In November he became the first Archbishop in more than 1,000 years to quit, after a damning independent review found he did not follow up rigorously enough on reports of John Smyth, a serial abuser of children and young men who was associated with the Church.

In his first interview since resigning, Welby, 68, told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the sheer scale of the problem was “a reason – not an excuse” for his failure to act after taking the job in 2013.

“Every day more cases were coming across the desk that had been in the past, hadn’t been dealt with adequately, and this was just, it was another case – and yes I knew Smyth but it was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks,” he said.

“It was overwhelming, one was trying to prioritise – but I think it’s easy to sound defensive over this.

“The reality is I got it wrong. As Archbishop, there are no excuses.”

One of Smyth’s victims, known as Graham, who reported the abuse allegation in 2013, told the BBC: “The Archbishop suggests he was just too busy. No one should be too busy to deal with a safeguarding disclosure. The Archbishop has never answered why there were not enormous red flags when told about horrific abuse.”

The Makin Review – an independent probe led by safeguarding expert Keith Makin – found that Smyth’s “horrific” and violent abuse of more than 100 children and young men in England and Africa was covered up within the Church of England for decades.

Smyth, a barrister and senior member of a Christian charity, was accused of attacking dozens of boys at his home in Winchester, Hampshire and at Christian camps in the 1970s and 1980s.

He is said to have subjected his victims to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, including giving eight boys a total of 14,000 lashings with a garden cane in his shed. He then moved to Africa where his abuse continued.

By 2013 the Church of England “knew, at the highest level” about Smyth’s abuse, including Welby, who took up the Church’s top job that year, the review found. It added that Welby “could and should” have reported the case to authorities when details were presented to him in 2013, and that Smyth could have been brought to justice earlier.

Smyth died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018 before he could be brought to justice.

The review concluded that Welby, as the leader of the Church, had not been sufficiently curious about the allegations when he was made aware of them in 2013, and that it was unlikely he had not known before then.

He has always denied being aware of Smyth’s behaviour before that year.

Welby had previously resisted calls to step aside over his response to the case, and when the Makin Review was released in November he insisted he did not have to resign. But days later, he said in a statement that he “must take personal and institutional responsibility” for his response to the scandal.

He said at the time that he stepped down “in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse”.

In his interview with the BBC, Welby expressed concern about the pressure on public figures, saying there can be a “rush to judgement”.

“Having been the object of that question [over whether to resign], it’s a very difficult one to answer because you think: am I letting people down? Is it the right thing to do? It’s a complicated question.

“I think there is a rush to judgement, there is this immense – and this goes back half a century – immense distrust for institutions and there’s a point where you need institutions to hold society together.

“There’s an absence, I’m not talking about safeguarding here, there is an absence of forgiveness; we don’t treat our leaders as human.

“We expect them to be perfect. If you want perfect leaders you won’t have any leaders.”

The Church of England declined to comment before the full interview is broadcast on Sunday.

You can watch more of the exclusive interview on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday at 09:00.

And the full interview will be on iPlayer and BBC Sounds from 09:00, and BBC 2 on Sunday at 23:35.