The Church of England was pressured on Wednesday to ensure people are held to account for the systematic cover-up of abuse allegations, a day after the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned over a church abuse scandal.
Justin Welby resigned as spiritual leader of the global Anglican Church on Tuesday. He said he failed to properly investigate allegations of abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps decades ago.
Welby resigned after coming under pressure over a report that found failings in the handling of the case of John Smyth, a lawyer who had abused at least 115 children and young men before his death.
The report has increased pressure on others to be held accountable for securing failures.
“We know that some people have covered this up quite systematically and those people need to be held to account,” Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, the second most senior bishop in the Church of England, told BBC Radio.
Cottrell said there are lessons to be learned from the review, but he was not referring to bishops.
“The church is a very, very large organization and a very distributed organization. We are a place where… thousands and thousands of people, anyone, can be part of our church, so protecting an organization like that is a challenge. “
BISHOP FACES CALLS TO RESIGN
The Bishop of Lincoln, Stephen Conway, who was informed of the abuse allegations against Smyth in 2013 – the same year as Welby – is facing calls to resign. The BBC quoted an unnamed victim of Smyth as saying Conway did not do enough when he was told of the abuse.
Conway apologized on Tuesday for not rigorously confronting Welby's office, Lambeth Palace, about the issue, saying he had done everything within his authority as bishop.
The review said Welby had been misinformed about the actions taken in Conway's then diocese of Ely, adding that he had been wrongly informed that a referral to police had been made.
“I understand that this matter was reported to police in Cambridgeshire (in the east of England) and then passed on to police in Hampshire where the abuse had occurred,” Conway said.
Asked about Welby's omissions, Cottrell said: “Great strides were made in protecting the church under his care, but in this case he may have relied too much on others.”
Welby spent years trying to prevent the global Anglican Communion from falling apart, often struggling to appease liberals and conservatives as they fought for gay rights and female clergy.
But Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba, who as head of the Ugandan Anglican Church was reprimanded by Welby for supporting a tough anti-homosexuality law in Uganda, said on Wednesday that Welby had divided the Anglican community worldwide.
(This story has not been edited by Our staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
