Editor’s Notebook: Lambeth and Makin Review

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s end moments in office https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/news/news-and-statements/statement-archbishop-canterbury-0 were at last to reconcile disparate parts of the Church of England in the cry ‘resign’! Reconciliation had been a key goal of his archiepiscopate  – a direction which had met with mixed success. Nevertheless, the victims of clerical sexual abuse, the petitioners, some of the bishops, it seems, and most media outlets were united perhaps for the first time in their demand that he pay the price for a more general failure. This was reminiscent of those feeding frenzies around a scandal in government or politics. But it does not end with the taking of just one scalp.

His resignation statement reported here on our website https://www.churchnewspaper.com/archbishop-of-canterbury-forced-out-after-churchs-conspiracy-of-silence-about-john-smyth/ expressed his own frustration over being unable to impose change on the C of E, but accepted that after 12 years it was no longer possible simply to blame the historic abuses of the past but to accept the failures of the present. Nevertheless many observers, undoubtedly some CEN readers among them, will have felt some disquiet and unease at the way this came about. Firstly, why was the C of E and Lambeth Palace so tin-eared about this? They should have expected this clamour for a symbolic resignation after such a catastrophic series of revelations in the Makin Review. There is some discussion led by Roger Bolton in this excellent Religion Media Centre video and podcast https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/rmc-briefings/seismic-shock-as-archbishop-of-canterbury-justin-welby-resigns-over-abuse-scandal/.

And why, also didn’t the Archbishop get ahead of this and resign in anticipation of the report and spare the C of E this terrible scandal which has truly damaged its reputation and witness? Finally, what responsibility will those clergy and bishops who have bayed for the Archbishop’s resignation in the media and public square take for the damage that has been done? They have achieved their aims but has the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury resulted in anything of tangible benefit at all?

One of the fascinating things is that the Makin Review https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/independent-review-churchs-handling-smyth-case-published so quickly achieved the status of Holy Writ after being criticized for its lateness and finally the shambolic way the church authorities were bounced into an early release by a leak to Channel 4. The report is four years late, it is dense and incoherently presented. It is often tendentious in its reporting of events – a much better read is Andrew Graystone’s ‘Bleeding for Jesus’ Bleeding For Jesus. But it is also not well argued, and its findings are often leaps of logic rather than carefully constructed arguments from the evidence. I wouldn’t build a safeguarding future from this house of sand.

Yet, as Holy Writ, it is now impossible for those criticized to argue against it, unless they are prepared to risk as Lord Sentamu did, the punishment which retired leaders are subject to – the removal of their PTO on the sole decision of a bishop with no appeal or process. It was Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley Lord Sentamu and the Bishop of Newcastle | Thinking Anglicans who refused to give Lord Sentamu a PTO because he disagreed with a lessons-learned reviewer about actions it was said he was required to take over an abusive priest. Predictably, it was also the Bishop of Newcastle who was the one bishop who publicly called for the Archbishop of Cantebury’s resignation and as it turned out she had an axe to grind. She felt that she herself had been the victim of coercive language by the Archbishops A Statement from the Rt Revd Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle – Newcastle Diocese. Readers can make their own judgement from the letter itself letter-to-the-bishop-of-newcastle.pdf as to whether the Archbishops were being coercive or well-meaning in seeking a just resolution to an intractable dispute. Nevertheless, of all the bishop’s statements A statement from the Rt Revd Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Newcastle – Newcastle Diocese following the resignation, Bishop Helen Ann Hartley’s was the most jarring in its somewhat ungracious references to the “arrogance of a few”. 

Finally, though there is not much more to say about the Makin case, and hopefully, we can now move onto redress for survivors and the safeguarding future of the current time, there are some truths to acknowledge. This is not simply a C of E safeguarding scandal. In fact, the Iwerne Trust at that time, though staffed and supported by many C of E clergy, regarded itself as interdenominational and was fiercely independent of the C of E hierarchy in general and would have regarded many parts of the C of E as ‘unsound’. But those who were involved in the scandal were legion – this is also about a leading public school (Winchester College), a series of parachurch agencies, and in the last 11 years a series of police forces all of which failed to act in a timely manner to investigate. This whole story would have been told very differently had any single one of these bodies acted appropriately. To make Justin, who I have many disagreements with, the scapegoat for all this is very wide of the mark.