Critics of Justin Welby, the 105th and outgoing archbishop of Canterbury, give him poor marks for empathy. As a member of The Episcopal Church, which Welby restored to full standing in the Anglican Communion, I rise to register an honorable mention.
As a moderately conservative evangelical, Archbishop Justin felt enough of the pain of advocates for the dignity of every human being, notwithstanding their orientation or identification, that he decided to reseat us at the Anglican family’s top table. If progressive provinces and dioceses feel less ostracized in the circles of global Anglicanism, it is in large part because Welby had a large enough heart to lead where ABCs number one through 104 never dared to go.
The empathy issue aside, it’s hard to fault Welby’s piety. I took this photo at a reception a year ago in London, where he was about to announce the winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize for theological writing. I was one of the judges. As he stood near Kathy and me listening to the other speakers, in his clasped hands he was worrying a comfort cross, probably made of olive wood from the Holy Land. That morning, as his and Caroline Welby’s guest, I’d attended morning prayer in his private chapel at Lambeth Palace. He knelt throughout the service on a plain wooden prie-dieu.
He twinned diligence in prayer with a great Bible teacher’s infectious passion. At the Lambeth conference in the summer of 2022, attended by bishops from all over the world, he spent the bulk of his speaking time on an extended study of I Peter. “How do we be holy?” he asked in one of his reflections. “How are we holy in the face of the challenges we face?”
He faced his greatest challenge last month by becoming the first ABC to resign as the result of a scandal. A government report said he hadn’t done enough to bring to justice a notorious sadist, an undergraduate-turned-barrister named John Smyth, who for years beginning in the seventies savagely beat boys and young men attending England’s conservative evangelical camps. Smyth’s Dickensian perversion was brutalizing campers as punishment for their alleged personal misconduct.
Years before his priestly ordination, as a camp volunteer, Welby crossed paths with Smyth, though he says he didn’t know about the beatings. Investigators said they couldn’t believe he hadn’t had his suspicions. Either way, as ABC in 2013, he said he finally learned the whole story. As many as 130 were victims, making Smyth the worst serial abuser in COE history. The church had known but covered it up, though Welby isn’t implicated in that. Smyth’s predations continued in South Africa, where he fled in 1984. He died of a heart attack six years ago in Cape Town.
When he learned what Smyth had done, Welby’s staff told the police, who didn’t pursue it. Their hands were full with misconduct cases involving ministers who, unlike Smyth, were ordained and still in England. After the investigators’ report came out in November, Welby, who admits he could’ve tried to goad the police to act, gave in to pressure to resign a year ahead of his planned retirement in January 2026, at age 70. Critics of his empathy gap also blame him for expressing too little compassion for Smyth’s victims when offering his au revoir speech to the House of Lords last week, a shortcoming he addressed in a statement afterward.
All in all, if you’re an Anglican, you probably have an opinion about Welby’s resignation. Mine is that it was fitting for a priest of the risen Christ to take up his cross by taking the shame of generations of unaccounted for church misconduct onto his shoulders. Yet I pray that when church historians write his story, they look beyond the chapter about John Smyth.
I know Archbishop Justin a little. We chatted briefly at Lambeth. When Kathy and I were in London last December, he invited me for an hour-long meeting in his office in Lambeth Palace. I had presided at Princess Lilibet’s baptism in Montecito in March 2023 on his and former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s behalf, so we talked about the royal family as well as U.S. politics. He was especially interested in our diocese’s plans to build affordable housing on 25% of our mission and parish campuses. He said he had similar hopes and asked me to send him something to read, which I did, with the assistance of the Rev. Michael S. Bell, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles housing missioner.
Critics of his Lords speech posted the three minutes when he spoke too jovially about his resignation. But after that, according to press reports, he talked about his passion for housing. The ABC also stood tall in the House of Lords on immigration justice. As we met last year, right-wing British media were attacking him for opposing the Tory government’s Trumpy scheme to deport asylees to Rwanda. The criticism didn’t seem to bother him. He told me he enjoyed his parliamentary work and was proud to help lead the loyal opposition.
So Welby’s empathy didn’t fall short when it came to asylum seekers and those with nowhere to lay their heads. And at Lambeth in 2022, when conservative bishops wanted to reaffirm the 1998 conference’s harsh condemnation of homosexuality, Welby deftly maneuvered the conference, in which conservative bishops predominated, toward accepting more balanced language. Just as important, he said these nearly magic words: “I neither have nor do I seek the authority to discipline or exclude a church of the Anglican Communion. I will not do so” — balm for progressives whom the communion had effectively demoted.
On that day in Lambeth, I wrote, “[T]he Anglican world has shifted on its axis tonight. Welby’s profound empathy, his resolve to see and hear everyone, were indispensable factors. He has a vision of our global church as chaplain to a world in agony, and he knows it can’t happen if we’re fighting with one another.” It was a risky step for one who prizes unity in our far-flung and fractious communion. Not long after, he supported the Church of England’s long-awaited decisive step toward full marriage equity. As a result, the most conservative global bishops no longer recognize Welby’s authority.
Welby’s steely reserve served him well at Lambeth and in Parliament but less so during the Smyth scandal. One can be good without being especially sentimental, including about abuse victims one doesn’t know and even one’s own legacy. During our meeting, long before the scandal, he predicted that six months after leaving office, he’d be forgotten. That’s just the way things are, he said. Yet people will always remember that he buried a monarch and anointed her successor. And Episcopalians should remember who restored them in the Anglican world.
When it all finally caught up with him, church politics may have been a factor. Over Smyth, for instance, Welby drew criticism from conservatives who thought he’d gone too far on issues such as human sexuality and the Rwanda bill as well as from progressives who felt he’d been unsympathetic to queer people in the Church of England, who have been scorned and marginalized for generations. The middle can be a dangerous place. These days in the U.S., it almost always is. But it’s also where good people such as Justin Welby can still get things done.