Justin Welby, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has said that he forgives a serial abuser at the centre of the scandal that led to his resignation as leader of the Church of England and spoke of feeling “profoundly ashamed” of comments he made afterwards.
In his first interview since resigning last November, he also said he had “not really thought it through enough, to be honest” when he initially declined to quit last year.
Welby became the first archbishop to quit after an independent review found that he should have taken more robust and speedier action over allegations of abuse by John Smyth.
About 130 boys are believed to have been victims of Smyth, a powerful lawyer who died in 2018.
Asked if he would forgive Smyth, Welby said in an interview broadcast on Sunday with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “Yes. I think if he was alive and I saw him, but it’s not me he’s abused.
“He’s abused the victims and survivors. So whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.”
Reacting to Welby’s comments, a survivor of Smyth’s abuse told Kuenssberg: “I came forward 13 years ago and what the church has put me through makes the historic abuse pale into insignificance. It has been the most extraordinary traumatic journey trying to get answers. I don’t care about Smyth.”
The independent review by Keith Makin – in which he highlighted significant failings and proposed recommendations to improve safeguarding practice in the church – concluded Smyth could have been brought to justice had the archbishop formally reported allegations to the police a decade ago.
Welby initially said he would not resign over the report and remained in post for a further five days before announcing he would quit, plunging the C of E into crisis.
In the BBC interview he said: “What changed my mind was having been caught by the report being leaked and not really thought it through enough, to be honest.
“Over that weekend, as I read it and reread it and as I reflected on the horrible suffering of the survivors, which had been, as many of them said, more than doubled by the institutional church’s failure to respond adequately, it increasingly became clear to me that I needed to resign.”
Welby also said he winces at the thought of his final speech in the House of Lords, in which he had referenced a 14th-century beheading, to laughter from fellow peers, and suggested “if you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary” who had seen weeks and months of work “disappear in a puff of a resignation announcement”. It prompted anger from abuse victims and others.
The former archbishop said he “wasn’t in a good space at the time” and should not have made the speech at all. He added: “It did cause profound upset and I am profoundly ashamed of that, and I apologised within 24 hours and I remain deeply ashamed,” he added.
Welby also used the interview to say that his failure to take effective action over a serial sadistic abuser was because he was “overwhelmed” by the scale of the abuse crisis in the church
“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. It was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks.”
The survivor of Smyth’s abuse who gave his reaction to Kuenssberg questioned why it had not been a priority for Welby, saying: “You may be swamped by other cases, but if this one wasn’t fairly close to the top of the pile, then what was?.”
