Church of England Leader Justin Welby Resigns Over Child Sex Abuse Scandal
The leader of the Church of England has resigned after an investigation revealed he did not inform the police quickly after he learned about decades of physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at church summer camps.
Justin Welby, 68, has stepped down in disgrace after serving as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the global Anglican Communion, also referred to as the Church of England.
Anger had been mounting within the church over the lack of accountability among the church’s top leaders. And members of the church’s national assembly had created a petition calling for Welby to step down over concerns that he had mishandled the sex abuse scandal.
But the strongest outcry had come from victims of the late John Smyth. The investigation revealed that Smyth, a prominent attorney, abused teenage boys and young men at the denomination’s summer camps since the 1970s. Evidence indicates Smyth sexually, psychologically, and physically abused about 30 boys and young men in the United Kingdom and 85 in Zimbabwe and South Africa over the course of five decades.
Church officials were first made aware of the abuse in 1982, long before Welby took the helm. However, the 251-page report of the Makin Review concluded that Welby failed to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the abuse in 2013. The investigation revealed that those who learned of the abuse “participated in an active cover-up” to prevent its findings from coming to light, turning the Church of England into “a place where abusers could hide.”
Welby announced Tuesday in a statement, “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024.”
“I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honored to serve,” he said.
The issue of sexuality has been a controversial one in the Church of England in other ways as well.
Not only is Welby accused of covering up the sexual abuse of boys by a lifelong pedophile, he has also made headlines by rejecting biblical guardrails for human sexuality.
As CBN News recently reported, Welby appeared on “The Rest is Politics,” a podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. During the show, the archbishop said, “All sexual activity should be within a committed relationship … whether it’s straight or gay.”
Critics argued that the church was abandoning biblical prohibitions against homosexuality by trying to make excuses that unbiblical expressions of sexuality would be ok as long as the participants were committed to each other.
Welby had further stated that the church would bless those couples. “We’re not giving up on the idea sex is within marriage or civil partnership or whether marriage is civil or religious and that, therefore, we’ve put forward a proposal that where people have been through a civil partnership or a same-sex marriage … they should be able to come along to a church and have a service of prayer and blessing for them in their lives together,” he said.
However, the official teaching of the Church of England states that “sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively,” classifying marriage as a lifelong union of “one man with one woman.”
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