William Temple Foundation

The William Temple Foundation is grateful to Andrew Graystone for his 2021 podcast and his 2022 Temple Tract on the tragic and large-scale abuse by John Smyth. 

It was through these sources that many of us became more fully aware of the scale of his abuse and its impact on the lives of Smyth’s victims, although some had known since the 2017 investigation by Channel 4 News. Cathy Newman’s return to the story this year has led, alongside the Makin Review, and the courage of survivors and of the Bishop of Newcastle, to the Most Rev Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury. We continue to hold the victims of John Smyth in our prayers and we pray too for Archbishop Justin and his family as they adjust to this unhappy ending of his tenure. The authorities will need to look after his well-being while they renew efforts to help victims of abuse and to prevent abuse as much as possible. 

There are lessons for all of us. For example, could our Foundation have done more to disseminate and amplify the work of Andrew Graystone?

How can we encourage the religious or secular media to recognise the insights in such work? A model of how a trustee can make a difference came with Dr Helen Reid, then the director of the Leeds Institute, hosting an event at which Andrew Graystone and two respondents, Catherine Beaumont and Susan Shooter, authors of relevant works in their own right, all spoke powerfully. 

Should we and/or others have done more to question more persistently Justin Welby’s judgement? In 2013, his first year as Archbishop of Canterbury, while not acting effectively on the Smyth case, Justin Welby rushed into a hasty condemnation of the late Bishop George Bell (who worked so closely with Archbishop William Temple), based on an accusation of abuse which had no substance. Then he said there was still a cloud hanging over Bishop Bell. Only reluctantly did Welby eventually apologise and accept that he was wrong at each prior stage of that saga. It is instructive to read Archbishop Justin’s statement when he finally admitted he was wrong – The timeline is explained well here,

It sits uneasily with his inaction in the Smyth case. Who in the Church spelled out to Justin Welby that this was no way to behave? Was he given extra training? Again, what do we do if we see such errors of judgement? 

In 2022, Justin Welby spoke out against the ecclesiastical court process in between a hearing and the judge’s decision, in the case brought by Jesus College, Cambridge about the memorial in the chapel to Tobias Rustat, their major benefactor from the seventeenth century who, it emerged, later had shares in a company which was engaged in slave-trading.  Welby was exasperated with the whole idea of a hearing, of due process and the rule of law. He did not wait for the reasoning of the judge and it was quite improper to behave in that way. Again, who in the Church told him that? Letter-writers to the Church Times did. The College lost but were opportunities lost to follow up with the Archbishop the letter-writers’ warning about respecting the integrity of the legal process?

How much should critics push when senior people in an institution are manifestly inconsistent, behaving erratically, or not up to their responsibilities? It is notoriously difficult to get managers, colleagues and those with governance responsibilities to accept that their judgement is flawed, endangering other individuals and the institutions they are meant to be leading. Whistleblowing is important as are critical secular and religious media, and institutional change to independence in safeguarding.

Yet when Archbishop Justin Welby came in his 2019 William Temple lecture to praise Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, just before Vanier was unmasked as a serial abuser, we might forgive his naivety and consider, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ (see the Full Lecture Transcript here). Some of us believed that Jimmy Savile was simply an eccentric when it is now clear that he was a serial abuser, hiding in plain sight. Conversely, some too easily accepted the fantasies of Carl Beech, the liar who falsely accused senior Conservatives of abuse, and was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Rather than judging Justin Welby, the lessons for us from the events of recent days and of several decades are about honing our own judgement. As we have been arguing all year, and in previous years, even when we might despair of institutional, community or society’s failures, there is always radical hope for change. To return to Andrew Graystone’s Temple Tract, we were grateful in 2022 not only to the author but also to the Archbishop of York for his long and challenging preface. We are open now to both these writers, of the Tract itself and of the preface, if they wish to reflect on what they highlighted then and what they think are the lessons now. We are also open to offers of insights by others. Thank you. 

Simon Lee, Chair of the Board of Trustees, William Temple Foundation 

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