The Archbishop of Cape Town Dr Thabo Makgoba has requested “as a matter of urgency” a “detailed timeline of events regarding the activities in South Africa of serial child abuser John Smyth, reports Church Times.
The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, resigned on Tuesday after a damning report concluded that he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men by Smyth decades ago at Christian summer camps which he led.
The report on the Anglican Church’s handling of Smyth’s abuses said he might have been brought to justice had Welby, formally reported him to the police when he found out in 2013. Instead, Smyth died in South Africa in 2018, while a UK police investigation prompted by a Channel 4 documentary in 2017 was still continuing, reports The Guardian.
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Smyth had moved to Zimbabwe with his wife, Anne, in 1984 after Church of England figures discovered his abuse of boys and young men at summer camps for Christians, including beating them and forcing them to strip naked, but did not report him to police.
By 1986, Smyth was running Christian holiday camps for boys in Zimbabwe. He would beat boys with table tennis bats and force them to shower, swim and pray naked with him, according to the independent Makin review, reports The Guardian.
In December 1992, 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru drowned in a swimming pool in what the review said were “suspicious circumstances”. Smyth officiated at Nyachuru’s funeral, whose death he later described as an “unfortunate incident”.
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Smyth was charged in Zimbabwe in 1995 with culpable homicide and assaulting other boys. The trial started in 1997, but collapsed because of the prosecutor having a conflict of interest.
In 2001, Smyth and his wife moved to Durban after they were barred from re-entering Zimbabwe. By 2005, he had moved to Cape Town and was campaigning for conservative evangelical causes. That year, he advised on an unsuccessful legal case against South Africa’s new same-sex marriage law.
“There is little concrete information on John Smyth’s time in South Africa. It is highly likely that he was continuing to abuse young men and there is some evidence to this effect,” the Makin report said. “How John Smyth funded his quite opulent lifestyle, living in a large house in a quiet suburb of Cape Town, is not known.”
It was not until February 2017, after Channel 4 broadcast allegations of abuse against Smyth, that his Cape Town church, Church-on-Main, removed him and Ann Smyth as leaders.
Church Times reports that among the Makin review’s conclusions is that Smyth’s move to Zimbabwe was “a problem solved and exported to Africa”. It recommends the establishment of “international reciprocal safeguarding procedures with other Anglican Communion institutions/leaders, including protocols for informing overseas Anglican leaders and statutory authorities, where there are allegations against a person in position of trust and they relocate abroad”.
It also recommends that the Church consider further independent reviews of the abuses, and potential abuses, perpetrated in Zimbabwe and South Africa. At least 85 boys and young men were physically abused in these countries. The Makin review concludes that he perpetrated this abuse “likely up until his death in August 2018”. In the last months of his life, he was worshipping at an Anglican church, St Martin’s, in Cape Town.
The failure to prevent the abuse began in the 1980s. There is, the review says, “no evidence that any proactive attempts were made to alert authorities in Zimbabwe” by the Church of England clergy, such as the Revd David Fletcher, who had seen the 1982 “Ruston Report” documenting Smyth’s crimes. By the time attempts were made, Smyth had already begun his abuse.
“The starkest fact is that the UK abuses should have been pursued further, reported to the UK police and pursued by them,” it says. Mr Fletcher, and others, “deliberately and knowingly, stood in the way” of a police investigation.
The review also documents failures to alert authorities in Africa after 2013, when the diocesan safeguarding adviser in Ely, and other church officers, including the then Bishop of Ely, the Rt Revd Stephen Conway, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, were officially informed about Smyth’s abuse. During this period, a survivor was urgently seeking assurance that efforts were being made to prevent further abuse in South Africa but was told that no further action could be taken.
In August 2013, Bishop Conway (now Bishop of Lincoln), wrote to the then Bishop of Table Bay, the Rt Revd Garth Counsell — a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Cape Town, where Smyth was residing — alerting him to Smyth’s abuses. He received a letter of acknowledgement, stating that the Bishop was in conversation with the Rector of the parish that John Smyth belonged to, and that he would consult with the Archbishop of Cape Town, Dr Thabo Makgoba. The letter said that Bishop Conway would be “kept informed”, but the diocese of Ely has said that no further correspondence was received (News, 10 May 2019).
After receiving this acknowledgement, Bishop Conway said that he “[did] not think that much action would be taken”. He told the review that he did “all within my authority as a Bishop of the Church of England. . . I had no power to pursue that authority.”
The safeguarding adviser in the diocese of Ely, Yvonne Quirk, told the Makin review that she then made repeated attempts to establish contact with the Bishop’s safeguarding adviser in South Africa (“I think there were three emails, none of them acknowledged”). Bishop Conway told her that he had attempted “several times to make direct bishop-to bishop contact and had no response either”. Ms Quirk — who has apologised for not taking further action — told the victim that she had “no power to compel agencies in South Africa to respond to my concerns”.
The Makin review records that the letter to Bishop Counsell was discussed by the National Safeguarding Team in 2017, who agreed that the Anglican Church of South Africa should be “handed further information” through the Anglican Communion Office. It is, it says, “unclear if any follow up with South African counterparts took place because of the Core Group discussions”.
“There was a failure, by senior Church leaders, to ensure John Smyth was not able to further abuse victims,” it says. The Archbishop of Canterbury “could and should have reinforced the message to the Church in Cape Town via his friendship with Thabo Makgoba”.
This week, Bishop Conway said: “In 2013, in following the safeguarding advice, policy and practice of that time, I believed that I had done all I could and that the allegations were being responded to appropriately.” He understood, however, that that there were “further actions I could have taken”.
The Makin review states that Smyth attended His People Church in Glenwood, Durban in 2002, and then Church on Main from 2004 until his removal in 2016.
In 2019, a spokeswoman for the office of the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa said that, after receipt of Bishop Conway’s letter in 2013, they “heard nothing about Mr Smyth or his whereabouts for the ensuing four years”.
On Wednesday, Dr Makgoba’s office said that he had requested “as a matter of urgency” a “detailed timeline of events”.
“Bishop Counsell was told by St Martin’s Parish in Cape Town, either in 2013 or 2017 or both, that John Smyth had worshipped there for ‘a year or two’ after first coming to Cape Town,” a statement said. “We now believe this would have been before 2005. Bishop Counsell was told by the parish that Smyth had not counselled any young people, nor had they ever received any report that he had abused or tried to groom young people. Smyth was never licensed for any ministry, whether youth or other, in the parish.
“Upon reviewing the matter at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s request in 2021, my office learned from St Martin’s that Smyth had been permitted to worship in St Martin’s in the last months of his life, on condition that he was not to get involved in any ministry or contact any young person. He attended services from sometime after October 2017 until his death in August 2018.”
The Makin review identifies as a possible factor in the failures that took place after 2013, “the lack of procedures for safeguarding across the Anglican Communion”. In 2016, a new protocol was agreed, establishing a system whereby bishops share information about alleged and proven criminal conduct and sexual misconduct of clergy and lay leaders who move between/within provinces. It would not have applied to Smyth, who is not recorded as having applied to undertake authorised ministry in South Africa.
In 2022, the Archbishop of Canterbury told a Lambeth Conference session on safeguarding that safeguarding was “the biggest and most painful burden of this role that I have faced over the last 10 years . . . the biggest scandal I have been dealing with is around a married conservative Evangelical” (News, 5 August 2022).
Speaking to Church Times this week, a survivor of Smyth’s abuse in Zimbabwe, said that he felt the abuse had been “exported by the UK to us”.
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