The Telegraph is full of stories today about yesterday’s resignation of the Most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury. He is the latest in a long line of senior clergy of one or another Christian denomination who have been brought to account for covering up horrific crimes committed by churchmen, in this case, the jaw-dropping decades of abuse by the Church of England’s most prolific abuser, John Smyth, a Church of England camp counselor and Queen’s Counselor (a highfalutin’ lawyer) in the 1970s and 1980s.
I know that sounds like a very long time ago (because it is), and if the accusations had only just come out, I’d wonder too. But they were first raised in a 1982 report by the Iwerne Trust, which ran the camps and which reported that Smyth identified and groomed particular boys and young men and then subjected them to brutal sadomasochistic beatings, each consisting of hundreds, sometimes thousands of lashes. The details are so grotesque that I regret reading some of the reports, because they can’t be unseen. I’ll just say that Smyth had built a soundproofed shed at the bottom of his garden where he carried out his “Christian corrections.”
The Church did nothing in response to the 1982 Iwerne Trust report. Reports of the abuse continued to circulate, and the Church continued to do nothing.
At first, Justin Welby claimed to have only found out about all this in 2013. (That’s eleven years ago, I think, even though math was never my strong suit. It’s also the year that Justin Welby became the Archbishop of Canterbury.) But still, in a scenario similar to the years’ long Post Office Scandal, which only really captured the attention of Westminster and Whitehall after an ITV special ran for four nights this past January, things remained very much sub rosa until 2017, when Channel 4 ran a documentary revealing the appalling truth and in which several of the victims identified themselves and spoke out.
Hampshire Constabulary began an investigation, but Smyth had decamped to South Africa, where he died in 2018, without ever facing justice.
Welby first insisted that he knew nothing of the abuse until it was brought to his attention in 2013, although Smyth was a friend, and although Smyth ran the Iwerne Trust from 1974 until 1981. The Archbishop claimed he’d been in Paris in 1978, around the time the abuse began, and therefore, he couldn’t have been aware of it.
Then it turned out he’d actually spent the summer at one of the camps while the abuse was being carried out. From the Telegraph:
Despite the Archbishop’s claims he moved to Paris in 1978 and had had “no contact” with the Iwerne Trust until his return to Britain in 1983, he later told Channel 4 News he had returned to the summer camp in 1979 and had not been in Paris as he originally claimed.
Apparently, Welby worked as a “dormitory officer” at the camp. Also from the Telegraph:
Despite having previously insisted he was not aware of the abuse, the Archbishop later admitted he was warned about the Church of England’s most prolific child abuser 40 years ago.
So Welby’s gone. King Charles hardest hit.
As it sits right now, there are 30 Church officials still alive and in influential positions facing the sack due to their involvement in covering up this horrific mess. One of them sits in what I believe another Christian denomination would call the secretive “conclave” charged with selecting the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
As I slogged through these several reports with an occasional foray into some light reading to catch up on Allison Pearson’s ordeal with the police on Remembrance Sunday** I was struck again and again by the several writers’ depiction of Welby as an able administrator, a globe trotter who was fond of getting off planes in exotic locations and being greeted by hundreds of the adoring faithful singing his praises and showering him with gifts. And of the huge and lumbering bureaucracy he ran. Of his political astuteness. Of how an organization that couldn’t find the money to fix the roofs of its twelfth century parish churches, or to populate villages with actual vicars who aren’t on some sort of circuit where they race from church to church of a Sunday, but who actually live among their parishioners, could suddenly cough up £100 million to help “redress the wrongs of historic slavery.” And by the comment in one article that nothing Justin Welby did seemed devoted to the spiritual.
Good grief. Even the monarch manages to distribute money to the poor on Maundy Thursday, although without actually washing the feet of beggars anymore. But it doesn’t sound as if Justin Welby would be caught dead among the homeless or the leprous in a poor parish, humbly doing the Lord’s work among the truly needy. But if I were the next Archbishop of Canterbury, that’s exactly where I’d send him. But before that, I’d have found the next Archbishop of Canterbury in just such a place. A parish priest.
(My Random Access Memory is darting off to John Profumo, the disgraced politician who resigned from Harold Macmillan’s conservative government in 1963 after a sex scandal of considerable proportions, who left public life altogether and spent the rest of his own life working as a volunteer at Toynbee Hall. He was awarded the CBE in 1975, and in 1995 he sat next to the Queen at Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday party. Not sure Justin Welby’s got that sort of humility and decency in him.)
So, I know you’re dying to know what all this has to do with the “Rise of a Soldier” part of this post’s title.
Well. I checked my news feed at some point and saw that Donald Trump has nominated Pete Hegseth as the next Secretary of Defense. This was startling news. I have seen Pete on TV, and I’ve read one of his books, and I think he’s smart and sincere and he’s done a lot for veterans. But it was a bit jarring.
And then I thought about it some more. And I thought about everything I’d just read about Justin Welby and his love of the trappings of his office. And I thought about “The Generals.” And about current Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (he’s a General), who disappeared for days, when not even the President knew where he was (in the hospital for prostate surgery). And about the “Stand Down Day” initiative (from the Generals, and similar in other service branches) ordering troops to take the time to study–through indoctrination and because there is one–the “problem” of extremism and racism in the military. And about Mark Milley (he’s a General) taking it upon himself to call his opposite number in China to assure him that–should Trump be about to unleash the bomb, he–Milley–would be sure to give the Chinese a heads up. And about Jim Mattis (another General. And a previous Secretary of Defense) calling Trump an “idiot.” Or maybe that was John Kelly (yet another General). Either way, that’s what Bob Woodward reported, so it must be true.
And I thought, “if I can imagine a humble parish priest as the best choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps I can imagine that the best choice for the Secretary of Defense is an actual soldier.”
I don’t know how he’ll do in the hearings. He’s got some personal baggage which may or may not matter, but anyway, I wish him well.
**They showed up at her front door to let her know that she was being charged with a “Non-Criminal-Hate-Incident for a Tweet she sent a year ago. When she asked what the Tweet said, they weren’t allowed to tell her. When she asked who the accuser was, they said, “she’s not the accuser, she’s the victim.” Big mistake, London cops. Huge: Musk leads growing backlash against police for investigating Allison Pearson. My God. The man is everywhere.
