Why did he go? What did he do? The MSM is reporting that he had to resign because he covered up the sadistic beating of boys by fellow Cambridge man, Canadian-born John Smyth, QC. And the alleged beatings certainly appear to have been sadistic, and possibly sexually motived, with alleged victims saying: “I could feel the blood splattering on my legs”, “I was bleeding for three-and-a-half weeks”, “I fainted sometimes after a severe beating”. Beatings of 100 strokes for masturbation, 400 for pride, and one of 800 strokes for some undisclosed “fall” are recorded.’ Real Old Testament stuff.
All this, never proven in a court of law by the way, was brought ‘formally’ to Welby’s attention in 2013, when he became Archbishop. From what can be gathered in the MSM, smacker Smyth had hung up his chastising rod by 1997 and possibly as early as 1992, following the mysterious death of a young man in South Africa. Welby only became a priest in 1992, so it is not readily apparent exactly what Welby could have done to have any material effect.
It is suggested that Welby must have known all this, but I am unable to find any evidence that he did. The Makin Report, by ‘ex-social services chief’ Keith Makin and which is full of ‘evidence’ of the ‘A’ said to ‘B’ in 1987 type that would not hold up in court, merely said that it was “unlikely” he knew nothing of what went on. The extent of his knowledge may never be known, but Welby denies that he knew anything until 2013. And that seems to be what they are after him for, doing nothing about something that seems to have stopped long before he became archbishop in 2013, when Smyth was 72 and had only five years to live. As nothing could be done to redress past wrongs, perhaps Welby thought that the Christian thing was to forgive and forget, and that no good would come of a witch hunt over claims of assault at least 16 years in the past?
After all, the CoE has seriously screwed up in the past after enthusiastically joining in a witch hunt against one of its own, accused and condemned on the basis of pathetically little evidence of unprovable ‘historic abuse’. Remember the case of Bishop Bell, who died in 1958 but was accused in 2015 of sexually abusing a young girl in the 1950s, subsequently compensated and receiving an apology from the Church?
Welby was in on the witch hunt, saying that there was a “significant cloud” over the name of George Bell – who was later cleared when an independent review concluded that the Church had “rushed to judgement” in its condemnation, and was highly critical of the decision to name him in a case of serious abuse without concrete evidence.
To be honest, I am always somewhat sceptical of these ‘historic abuse’ claims. We should all be, as far too often they are malicious, politically motived attempts to smear and destroy the careers of political opponents. We need to oppose this shabby tactic when it’s applied to Woke Wallies like Welby as much as when it is applied to those on the Right. The concept of innocent until proven guilty must apply equally.
And to be honest again, I can think of far worse things that have happened in the last couple of decades with nobody being held accountable, the contaminated blood scandal, the Brexit treachery, the covid scam, lockdowns and the potentially lethal mRNA ‘vaccines’ come to mind. There are, no doubt, many more. So what’s going on? Is this a Welby witch hunt?
The Most Rev Justin Welby does seem to be a queer fish mind. A sort of jobsworth-minded, mystic accountant, who has been able to ‘speak in tongues’ since the age of 19. ‘It just happens’ you see. Welby is Establishment through and through, Eton, Cambridge arts graduate, reliably left wing and woke, though his faith, odd and twisted it may be, seems genuine enough.
He has let on that he had a difficult, unhappy childhood and in 2016 he discovered the man he got his name from wasn’t his father. His mother had a fling with Churchill’s private secretary, and he was the result. Worse, his rea1 dad was ‘linked’ to ‘historic slave owning in Jamaica’. The horror of it! But he later salved his conscience by pledging £100m of other people’s money to "address past wrongs", after one of the Church’s investment funds was found to have ‘historic links to slavery’.
Welby’s God is probably a sort of divine bureaucrat, obsessed with conformity and structure, more interested on the currently fashionable obsessions of the diversity daft social-justice jokers than that boring old Bible. At least, everything Welby has done tends to turn God’s church into a reflection of that: an elitist top-down bureaucracy with little understanding or care for the lower orders, there to do as they are told, not too dissimilar to Starmer’s Labour government, and just as woke.
And like champagne socialists, Welby was much more comfortable meeting with the elite during his many foreign visits and making flatulent speeches in front of chosen worshippers and dignitaries. It’s hard to imagine him trying to comfort the distraught relatives of murdered girls in a little church in somewhere like Southport.
Within a few months of taking on the top job, which even he agreed it was absurd to appoint him to, he had forced through the women bishop changes, causing bitterness and a much divided church. He soon gained a reputation for indifference to the day-to-day bread-and-butter issues of the parishes.
Welby is on record saying that Paula Vennells, the disgraced Post Office chief executive had “shaped my thinking over the years”. That might explain some of the queer thinking we have seen from the spiritual head of the Church of England. For example, when asked about Anglican priests defecting to the Roman Catholic Church, he replied by saying "Who cares?" He has also spoken against Brexit and the usual ‘phobias, homo and Islamo, and is generally in favour of all the things Angela Raynor or David Lammy might support.
But worst of all was his crazed support for the totalitarian covid measures, the lockdowns and the potentially lethal experimental vaccines, which he called an ‘answer to prayer’, that most condemns Welby – who shut church doors to the faithful for the first time in a thousand years.
The consequence of Welby’s time as Archbishop of Canterbury is readily visible in the form of empty pews. The Church has little respect and is now considered pretty much an irrelevance, and has seen a historic decline in the number of congregants, falling by 25,000 a year. Since Welby took office, church attendance has fallen from 788,000 to just 557,000 The largest year-on-year decline since figures were first produced in the early 1970s. Attendance is still only about 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. For the first time in a thousand years, the country is no longer a majority Christian nation.
Between 2016 and 2021 alone, 278 of the country’s 14,000 parishes disappeared, with Welby reportedly having little concern or communication with parish priests. At the same time however, other Christian groups are growing, with the Pentecostal and Orthodox well up, as are many new churches.
Perhaps Welby’s exit will present an opportunity to reverse the decline, but as his replacement is chosen by a small group of bishops, the Starmer gang and the King, the prospects of the Church staying clear of woke politics and giving people spiritual guidance in accordance with the Bible would appear, sadly, to be slim.
It's too early to know who the bookies are betting on, but already the selection process seems to be centred around stances on gender and sexuality. Pundits have put forward a list of likely lads and, of course, lasses, for the job, like the Bishop of Leicester, who works with the Church of England committee to tackle racism.
And then there is the Bishop of Norwich, who is ‘pro-LGBT rights, and has in the past apologised for the harm the Church has inflicted upon gay couples’. Possibly a good bet is the Bishop of Chelmsford, who grew up in Iran before her family was forced to flee and is the lead Bishop for Housing. She is ‘generally in favour of including LGBT couples’. The only ‘traditionalist’ on the list is the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham in 2015, who is said to have ‘impeccable’ conservative evangelical credentials who affirms the ‘orthodox’ teachings on sexuality.
So, what’s the Welby witch hunt all about? Is he a victim of a culture war, a sizzling schism between the woke and the traditionalists? Will his going change anything? I don’t know enough about the CoE these days to know, but I very much doubt it.
