The Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned after a report found the Church of England covered up sexual abuse by a barrister.
Justin Welby said: “Having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty The King, I have decided to resign.”
It comes after the independent Makin review into John Smyth QC’s abuse of children and young men was published last week.
Across five decades in three different countries and involving as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa, John Smyth QC is said to have subjected his victims to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.
The report concluded he might have been brought to justice had Mr Welby formally reported it to police a decade ago.
Smyth died aged 75 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police, and so was “never brought to justice for the abuse”, the review said.
In his resignation statement, Justin Welby says the report “exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth”�He says when he was told in 2013 that Smyth had been reported to police, “I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow”�”It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024,” he says�Smyth might have been brought to justice before his death in 2018 had his decades of abuse been reported to authorities, the report found
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