Archbish urged to get out.

The archbishop of Canterbury has been urged to stand in solidarity with abuse victims by resigning after a report into a cover-up in the Church of England. A petition started by three members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – calling for Justin Welby to quit has reached more than 10,000 signatures.

An independent review published last week concluded John Smyth [might] have been brought to justice had Welby formally reported the abuse to police a decade ago.

But he didn’t, so Smyth went elsewhere to torture more boys. It seems Welby’s god hates children and loves their torturers. Beware of people who think they have a pipeline to Mister God.

Over five decades between the 1970s until his death, Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

But improving their souls?

No, of course not.

More on Smyth from the Guardian last week:

John Smyth, a powerful and charismatic barrister, sadistically abused private schoolboys who attended evangelical Christian holiday camps in the late 1970s and early 80s. When the abuse was discovered, Smyth was allowed to move abroad with the full knowledge of church officials, where he continued to act with impunity.

And “abroad” as we just saw meant Africa. “Tut tut John, you can’t do that sort of thing here; off you go to Africa, where children need to be tortured.”

Smyth, who died in 2018, was chair of the Iwerne Trust, which funded the Christian camps in Dorset. A secret review carried out by the trust in 1982 described “horrific” beatings of teenage boys, mostly carried out in Smyth’s shed at his Winchester home.

So that’s more than 36 years (more because the abuse has to have started well before the secret review) that Smyth was allowed to torture children. Isn’t religion wonderful?

Winchester college, one of the UK’s leading private schools, whose pupils were among the alleged victims, was informed of the allegations but neither the college nor the trust reported Smyth to the police. Instead, the headteacher asked Smyth never again to enter the college or contact its pupils.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe, where in 1992 he faced charges of killing a 16-year-old boy who was found dead in a swimming pool at a holiday camp in 1992. The case was dismissed and he later moved to Cape Town.

Nice for him, not so nice for the children of Cape Town.

From July 2013, “the Church of England knew at the highest level about the abuse that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Smyth should have been properly and effectively reported to the police in the UK and to relevant authorities in South Africa,” the report said.

It identified several “thematic concerns”, including abuse of positions of trust and power, excessive deference to senior clergy, failures of leadership and a cover-up over an extended period.

Because that’s how religion works. It’s hierarchical, with an imaginary god at the top and the fictional god’s putative representatives at the next level, above other humans. Of course they abuse such trust and power; who wouldn’t?

In a statement, Joanne Grenfell, the C of E’s lead safeguarding bishop, and Alexander Kubeyinje, its national director of safeguarding, said: “We are deeply sorry for the horrific abuse inflicted by the late John Smyth and its lifelong effects, already spanning more than 40 years.

Now that it’s been exposed. What were you doing before that?