London, Feb 2: The Archbishop of Canterbury has issued an “unreserved and unequivocal” apology on behalf of the Church of England for not reporting a child abuser in the 1970s, a media report said.
Archbishop Reverend Justin Welby on Wednesday said the Church had “failed terribly” by not reporting John Smyth QC to the police.
He apologised after admitting that he had worked at the holiday camps where teenage boys were groomed for abuse, the Telegraph reported.
Smyth, the head of a Christian charity that ran the summer camps, was accused of carrying out a string of “horrific” sado-masochistic attacks in the late 1970s.
The report also said that the Channel 4 News will on Thursday broadcast allegations of Smyth’s use of the camps.
The boys from some of Britain’s leading public schools attended these camps. Smyth used them to gain access to teenagers, whom he forced to strip naked before subjecting them to savage beatings.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Archbishop said that he had been friends with Smyth, a barrister, during that period, when he worked as a dormitory officer at the camps, run by the Iwerne Trust. Welby had kept in “occasional” contact with the barrister since, the report said.
The Archbishop though says that he was made aware of the allegations against Smyth in 2013 when police eventually became involved.
Smyth a Queen’s Counsel (QC), who acted for Mary Whitehouse, the public morals campaigner, in some of her most-high profile court cases, is accused of recruiting 22 young men into a cult.
The cult agreed to let Smyth administer tens of thousands of lashes with a garden cane, supposedly to purge them of minor sins such as masturbation and pride. The beatings, which took place in a shed in the garden of Smyth’s Winchester home, were so intense that the victims were left with lasting scars.
Details of the alleged abuse did not come to light until 1982, when one boy attempted suicide after being ordered to submit himself to another beating.
The Iwerne Trust commissioned a report which concluded: “The scale and severity of the practice was horrific.” But Smyth was never reported to cops, the Sun said in its report.
He was instead allowed to move to South Africa after agreeing never to work with children again.
The Archbishop’s statement said: “John Smyth was one of the main leaders at the camp and although the Archbishop worked with him, he was not part of the inner circle of friends; no one discussed allegations of abuse by John Smyth with him.” “The Archbishop left England to work in Paris for an oil company in 1978, where he remained for five years. The Archbishop knew Smyth had moved overseas but, apart from the occasional card, did not maintain contact with him,” it said.
“We recognise that many institutions fail catastrophically, but the Church is meant to hold itself to a far, far higher standard and we have failed terribly,” Welby’s statement said.
