Archbishop of Canterbury faces calls to resign amid Church abuse scandal

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Archbishop of Canterbury faces calls to resign amid ******* ****** scandal

The head of the ******* of England, spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion, is under pressure to resign after an investigation found that he ******* to inform police about serial physical and ******* ****** by a volunteer at ********** summer camps as soon as he became aware of it.

Some members of the General Synod, the *******’s national assembly, have started a petition calling on Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to step down, saying he had “lost the confidence of his clergy.” The petition had garnered more than 1,800 signatures on Change.org by late morning London time on Monday.

Compounding the pressure, a senior cleric added her voice to those who believe he should resign. Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, told the BBC that Welby’s position is “untenable.”

Calls for Welby’s resignation have grown since Thursday, when the ******* released the results of an independent review into John Smyth, who *********, psychologically and physically abused about 30 boys and young men in the ******* Kingdom and 85 in ******* over five decades.

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The 251-page report concluded that Welby ******* to report Smyth to authorities when he was informed of the ****** in August 2013, soon after he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Welby last week took responsibility for not ensuring that the allegations were pursued as “energetically” as they should have been after he learned of the ******, but said he had decided not to resign.

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On Monday, his office issued a statement reiterating Welby’s “horror at the scale of John Smyth’s egregious ******.”

“As he has said, he had no awareness or suspicion of the allegations before he was told in 2013 — and therefore, having reflected, he does not intend to resign,” the statement said. “He hopes the Makin Review supports the ongoing work of building a safer ******* here and around the world.”

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******* officials were first made aware of the ****** in 1982, when they received the results of an internal investigation into Smyth. The recipients of that report “participated in an active cover-up” to prevent its findings from coming to light, the Makin Review found.

Between 1984 and 2001, Smyth moved to Zimbabwe and subsequently relocated to South *******. He continued to ****** boys and young men in Zimbabwe and there is evidence that the ****** continued in South ******* until he ***** in August 2018.

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Smyth’s ****** wasn’t made public until a 2017 investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 television, which led Hampshire Police to start an investigation. Police were planning to question Smyth at the time of his ****** and had been preparing to extradite him.

The Makin Review found that if Smyth had been reported to police in 2013, it could have helped to uncover the truth, prevented further ****** and led to a possible ********* conviction.

“In effect, three and a half years was lost, a time within which John Smyth could have been brought to justice and any ****** he was committing in South ******* discovered and stopped,” the review found.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the head of the ******* of England and is seen as the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, which has more than 85 million members in 165 countries. He is considered first among equals with respect to the communion’s other primates.

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