At the end of the 17th century an Archbishop of Canterbury resigned because he was unwilling to swear allegiance to the Dutch King William III and his English wife Queen Mary II. On November 12, Archbishop Welby became the first to do so since then. The circumstances were very different. He departed in response to heavy criticism of his handling of the most serious abuse case in church history. The following letter, published in The Daily Telegraph in slightly edited form on 13 November, noted other examples of Welby’s poor judgement.
SIR – As Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby was guilty of sins of omission and commission. He diid nothing when the London diocese hounded a priest, a close friend of mine at Cambridge, over untrue allegations of sex abuse, driving him to take his own life in 2020.
On the other hand, he was happy to sacrifice the reputation of the great Bishop George Bell in 2015, many years after his death. on the basis of a single uncorroborated complaint of sex abuse, alleged to have occurred in the 1940s. He failed to get the complaint properly investigated, and, despite two independent inquiries, stubbornly insisted for several years that Bell remained under a “significant cloud” until finally withdrawing the hideous slur in 2021 after a long hard-fought campaign in Bell’s defence.
Welby’s departure ends an unhappy chapter in the history of the once glorious Church of England.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
