CANTERBURY (UNITED KINGDOM)
Catholic Herald [London, England]
April 2, 2025
By Gavin Ashenden
Being interviewed by a skilled journalist can be a high-risk event. This weekend just gone, Bishop Justin Welby, former Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted to a long in-depth interview at the hands of the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
It may not have been the softest of soft-ball interviews that the BBC has conducted, but it came close. Kuenssberg pitched some unusually gentle questions.
The overwhelming response to the interview has been to ask why Justin Welby chose to do it?
There was a kind of quantum element to it: contradictory streams of thought within a single conversation. At one and the same time, there was an air of self-pity and victimhood running under the surface as an implicit sub-motif; while at the same time the questions and answers on the surface displayed an ineptitude and incoherence that were more likely to result in serious criticism than sympathy.
In answer to what went wrong, he claimed he had been overwhelmed by a torrent of safeguarding issues. The implication was that it wasn’t his fault if the Church he was leading was so corrupt that the scale of the reporting of abuse took his office aback.
It seems odd for someone who was responsible for running a multi-billion-pound organisation to claim that he lacked the resources to manage the daily business that came to his office. It was not a question of lacking resources, so what was lacking?
Rebecca Chapman, a member of the Church of England’s General Synod, writing in the Spectator immediately afterwards, thought she might have the key to Welby’s early difficulties in managing his daily business. She suggested that his unhelpful and possibly overly egocentric global travel plans had dominated his daily schedule.
She wrote of her astonishment that “much of the diary juggle seemed to be his own making as he kicked off a self-imposed plan to visit every single primate of the Anglican Communion over the next 18 months”.
Similarly, despite the gentle interview treatment Kuensberg offered to the former archbishop, she herself wrote of her difficulty in making sense of his responses after the interview:
“For many of the victims of serial abuser John Smyth, and likely many of you reading this, Welby’s confessed failures are not just mystifying but deeply alarming.
“He wasn’t ‘curious’ enough to pursue allegations of child abuse in the Church of England. He says now that when he took the job in 2013 he was too overwhelmed by the scale of the problem to check what had happened with Smyth, a man he had known for years, even though he believed the allegations were probably true.”
In fact, critics have insisted that despite Welby’s protestations, he had known there were problems with Smyth long before 2013.
In the early 1980s, Welby was sharing accommodation with the Rev Mark Ruston, a vicar in Cambridge who authored the first secret report of Smyth’s abuse. Furthermore, Welby had an official position in helping run the Smyth camps. Not only is it unlikely he knew nothing of the alarm and talk behind the scenes – which led to the authoring of the report by his landlord in whose house he lived – but witnesses have claimed they overheard conversations involving Welby in which concerns over Smyth were being discussed.
But even if they are mistaken, the reports about Smyth, whom he knew well, should have provoked an immediate response, since both abuser and victims were people that Welby knew personally. It was this personal connection that played its part in moving this tragedy from a failure of the institution to a personal failure also of the Archbishop.
Like the Baskerville hound that failed to bark in the night, it was what was not said in the interview with Kuenssberg that had the most powerful effect. There was no acknowledgement of how during the ten years it took for the Makin report to be commissioned and published – which basically required being leaked – Welby had made promises to talk and listen to the victims, which he had not kept.
During the second half of the interview, Bishop Welby was asked about the state of the relationship between the state Church and society. As with all questions, the preconception that lies behind the question aims to determine the answer. Ms Kuenssberg put it to the bishop that because there was still no automatic right for a woman to be appointed as a clergy person to an Anglican parish, and because homosexual couples could not yet demand marriage by right in the C of E, to what extent was the Church actually mirroring society?
Any theologian, any bishop, any thinking lay Christian might have drawn breath, then offered a couple of poignant examples from the excesses of Western culture in the early decades of this century before asking Ms Kuenssberg if she was confident that it was a good thing for the Church to mirror society; to wonder if perhaps the Church might have a role to play in curbing excesses, challenging and redirecting appetites and addictions, questioning the value of hedonism, and reflecting on the incoherence of ill-formed notions of equality.
But these were not questions that Welby thought to address.
One of the strangest elements in the interview was the lack of any spiritual, theological or moral perspective that you might expect a senior Church leader to offer when presented with the complex relationship between post-Christian society and the Christian state Church. Welby spoke more as a frustrated managerial executive than as a retired bishop offering help to interpret the opposing values of two conflicting world views.
One can sympathise as well as criticise. The issue of when the state Church becomes so hostage to anti-Christian ideology that it raises questions about the legitimacy of its attempts to remain faithful to Christian values, tradition and philosophy is becoming an increasingly painful and fraught one. But ignoring it does not make it go away. And one could argue that a recently retired Archbishop of Canterbury is in the very best position to offer some kind of perspectival discernment on the presence of the elephant in the room.
From a Catholic perspective, there has always been a hope that the leader of the state Church in England might act as a mouthpiece for the other Christian elements in the country. Welby’s failure to do so leaves the vacuum that the Catholic bishops increasingly feel the need to fill.
Given recent weeks in which social commentators have been deeply struck by the emergence of what appears to be a new world order emerging as both Trump and the Catholic vice-president in the US have appeared to threaten sanctions on the United Kingdom government – for its refusal to guarantee freedom of speech and conscience, in particular to Christians over abortion – it was odd for Welby to appear to be so afflicted with self-pity on the one hand and with concerns over feminist and gay rights on the other, that the issue of free speech and totalitarian government passed him by.
Perhaps his disavowing of clerical dress and adoption of shirt and jacket were intended to send a signal of more than just a preference for informality in a well-lit TV studio.