After Monday and Tuesday on the Church of England front, I’m pretty worn out. I’ll paste in some observations I posted on social media below. I ran yesterday with my knee support, and this morning with just bare muscle, ligament, and bone. Well, enclosed by skin. Gentle run yesterday, more straight-ahead today.
Before:
I have a fair number of friends here who don’t usually know or care much about the inside of Church of England, who may be wondering what I think about the Archbishop of Canterbury.
What I think is that covering up (even ‘soft-pedalling’ or ‘kicking into the long grass’) minor safeguarding failures is a sacking offence in many quarters. Lying about the timeline and extent of knowledge (if committed) is an aggravating circumstance.
There’s no excuse, no mitigation. The Church must handle his case as it would a minor cleric’s, and since no one can fire him, he must resign.
Fergus Butler-Gallie wrote the letter, and Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle spoke out (and brought the receipts when she was strong-armed). Integrity, clarity, and unwavering commitment to the pastoral care of all show who the leaders of the Church really are.
After:
So Archbishop Welby has resigned (eventually): am I happy now?
(a) I wasn’t in it for my personal satisfaction. I insisted that he follow the rules he set down, by which any church employee would have had to resign or be fired.
(b) So I’m not happy, because hundreds of young people have been abused and some apparently died, dozens or more clergy and other church staff have been complicit in covering up Smyth’s abuse, and many others have been sullied by association, partial knowledge, and popular assumptions.
(c) I’m not happy because nothing in this sorry saga has given anyone cause for joy, but only grief and a painful reminder of ways any of us could feel trapped into pathways that would shame us if discovered.
(d) I notoriously don’t have a theory of mind by which to intuit Justin Welby’s spiritual state, but reading his letter provides strong clues of ambivalence about how others have responded to a path he evidently thought was best. I would guess that he feels hard done by, mixed with some regret. I guess that I would, if I were in that situation.
(e) I’m not his confessor nor his judge.I have prayed for him as Archbishop every day and will continue so to do.
(f) Nothing — nothing — on earth balances scales for people who’ve had to live with abuse, or with the toxic knowledge of abuse. It’s our obligation to uncover, treat, disinfect wherever we can.
(g) I doubt many people would have believed that we’re really trying so long as he was Archbishop, however much good he did toward advancing toward that goal in every other case.
(h) I hope we can find an [arch]bishop with integrity and humility who will not shy away from this hard work.
I wish Justin Welby no ill. He has, and will for a long time have, a stain on his reputation, the basis for which only he (on earth) knows, and I can’t imagine how that feels. I also can’t imagine how it feels to be a Smyth survivor, an Iwerne survivor, or a Smyth-adjacent church leader who might have ring the alarm bell forty-plus years ago.
I tell my confirmation class (with regard to entering the church), and my marriage preparation class (with regard to joining two lives into one), that we can’t imagined how tightly our lives are interlocked with others, how many people our actions affect. This must be a hell of a way to find out. But survivors found out first, and no one was willing to pull the emergency brake. Sympathy isn’t ‘rivalrous’ entity that can only be parcelled out in small bits lest one run out; one can in principle have sympathy for all concerned. My sympathy goes first, and always, with the survivors (and, heaven help us, any who didn’t survive) — and on good days filled with grace, extends beyond them to the church that turned its back on them.
