Justin Welby shouldn’t have resigned

There is no proper reason for the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. No iniquity was proved against him. It has never been clear why, in the horrendous case of John Smyth, people thought the buck should stop with him. Smyth was never an Anglican priest (indeed, he was refused ordination), nor paid by the Church. When in England, he worked for the Iwerne Trust, an independent evangelical body. Most of the abuse Smyth perpetrated was when he took boys out from Winchester College to lunch with his family in the country nearby. In a hut in his garden, he beat the boys savagely, in the interests, he told them, of purifying them for God. The duty of care there was surely Winchester’s, not the C of E’s. That was all in the 1970s and 1980s. When an internal inquiry found out what Smyth was up to, he fled to Zimbabwe, where he perpetrated more abuse, and ended up in South Africa.