A FAMOUS GROUSE

IN what can unfortunately be described as a shameful Catholic moment for the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has announced his resignation following a damning report into a prolific child abuser associated with the Church of England. 

The report found that barrister John Smyth’s “horrific” abuse of more than 100 children and young men had been covered up within the church for years. Welby’s dramatic announcement, on Tuesday evening, came after mounting pressure that he stand down when it emerged that the church’s inaction represented a “missed opportunity” to bring Smyth to justice before his death at the age of 77 in Cape Town in 2018. 

The review, commissioned a year after Smyth's death and led by Keith Makin, a former social services director, found that Smyth was never fully exposed and was therefore able to continue with his criminal activities despite the the fact that his “appalling” actions were first identified in the 1980s. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

He was later encouraged to leave the UK and in 1984 moved to Zimbabwe without referral to the authorities. In 1997 he was arrested and charged with manslaughter after the death of a 16-year-old boy at an evangelical Christian camp he set up. The case was however dropped by authorities in Harare and in 2001 Smyth moved to South Africa where he went on to head up the Justice Alliance of SA, an organisation he ran from his home in Bergvliet, in Cape Town’s southern suburbs.

At the time, the alliance described itself as “a coalition of corporations‚ individuals and churches committed to upholding and fighting for justice and the highest moral standards in South African society … We take up the issues of and help to protect the human rights of the most vulnerable groups in our society such as women and children.”

Church officials were by now well aware of Smyth’s behaviour, the independent report noted. “From July 2013,” it said, “the Church of England knew, at the highest level, about the abuse that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. John Smyth should have been properly and effectively reported to the police in the UK and to relevant authorities in South Africa.”

One line in the Makin report, a suggestion that Smyth’s abuses could be partially explained as “examples of over-enthusiastic corporal punishment”, reminded me of my own school days and the grim treatment my classmates, my brothers and I endured at the private Catholic school in Johannesburg we attended.

Here I must digress. I was 12 or 13 when the notion of being damned for all time was first explained in class. The idea of being punished for our depravity and transgressions was one thing, but this business of forever boggled the mind. This, if memory serves, was how one of our Irish monk teachers put it:

“Imagine the biggest mountain in the world. Now imagine the smallest hummingbird in the world flying past that mountain once every thousand years and just gently brushing the side of the mountain with the tip of its wing as it did so. By the time that mountain has been ground down to dust, eternity would not even have begun…”

This makes no sense. If eternity is defined as a state of timelessness, then it cannot have a beginning, never mind an end. But why split hairs? As a means of terrifying young minds with notions of guilt and the hellfire that came with God’s boundless grace, the hummingbird lesson was a winner.

One alleged sin that weighed heavily on our minds, drummed into our heads by brutes in cassocks and dog collars, was that of “self-abuse”. There is grim irony here, considering who was abusing who.

The sadism was astonishing, even in junior school. There were purpose-made leather straps and canes. These seemed standard flogging issue, but one monk favoured beating us with a chair leg. He would fly into a rage, swinging punches and slamming 11-year-old heads into walls. These violent outbursts were usually preceded by muttered oaths: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, pray to God that [boy’s surname] gets the answer right, for I’ll break his back. Dear God, I’ll break it…” At times, amid the flailing, the smell of stale alcohol would be overwhelming.

These were almost daily occurrences, but some beatings stand out. Another monk, the junior school principal, once caned a boy so severely in front of the class that he came close to passing out from the pain. His fingers bled and he lost a finger nail when he instinctively tried to cover his backside with his hands.

The bruises were like zebra stripes. We would show our parents. Most times they’d respond that we must have done something wrong to warrant the punishment and we should leave it at that. On occasion, though, they would approach the school with concerns about the severity of our corporal punishment. These approaches would be ridiculed and mocked by teachers the next day, the lesson being that what happens during school hours stays in school, and that only a “Mammy’s boy” tells tales. So we stopped showing our parents the bruises.

The beatings continued in high school. Once, after a poor result in a maths test, slipping from an A to a C, I was asked what sort of career I would have without maths. I replied that I wanted to be a journalist. I was thrashed for this impertinence. 

As terrible as all this was, it was nowhere near as appalling as the treatment meted out by Smyth. According to a 2017 television documentary, boys who attended holiday camps in the 1970s and 1980s at Winchester College, where Smyth was a dormitory officer, were beaten so violently they had to wear diapers to staunch the bleeding.

One of these boys had been so fearful of these thrashings that he tried to take his own life in 1981. A confidential report into this incident and other beatings revealed that the “scale and severity of the practice was horrific … eight [boys] received about 14 000 [strokes of the cane]: two of them having some 8 000 strokes over three years.”

It continued in Zimbabwe, where at least 85 of Smyth’s victims have been identified. There may have been more. These boys, it’s claimed, were forced to strip naked and pray with Smyth.. 

Later, in Cape Town, Smyth became actively involved in the affairs of a church in Wynberg. His “pastorally unwise” behaviour, however, was soon noted by church elders perturbed at reports that Smyth was in the habit of showering naked with young men in the congregation and discussing sex with them. The church eventually asked him to leave. 

In a statement, church elders said that Smyth would meet “young men at a well-known Cape Town sports club” for a game of squash. This would be followed by a shower and lunch “over which we were told John would make generally unsolicited enquiries about the young men’s experience of pornography‚ masturbation and other sexual matters”.

Other than that, it appears that he kept a relatively low profile in Cape Town. “There is little concrete information on John Smyth’s time in South Africa,” the Makin report notes. “It is highly likely that he was continuing to abuse young men and there is some evidence to this effect. How John Smyth funded his quite opulent lifestyle, living in a large house in a quiet suburb of Cape Town, is not known.”

For all his apparent attraction to naked boys, Smyth apparently had some form as an anti-LGBT activist. Shortly after taking silk in 1979, he worked as a barrister for Mary Whitehouse, the morality watchdog and anti-smut campaigner. She famously launched legal actions against a publication, Gay News, and the UK’s National Theatre as part of her campaign against homosexuality. In 2005, Smyth turned up as an “advisor” with an unsuccessful legal case against South Africa’s same-sex marriage laws. 

Thus a lesson, once more, that those who adopt the mantle of moral guardian are very often anything but and, of course, the need to be wary of those in whom the urge to punish is strong.

Welby’s resignation, meanwhile, comes at a time when the church he led finds itself in some disarray. There are more than 85 million Anglicans in the world, making the church the third largest Christian communion after the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. In the UK, though, overall church attendance is falling dramatically; a 2016 faith survey found that membership had declined from 10.6 million in 1930 to 5.5 million in 2010. Membership in England is forecast to decline to 2.53 million, or just 4.3 per cent of the population, by next year.

There are ideological divisions, too. Conservative African bishops remain vehemently opposed, for example, to Welby’s recognition of same sex civil partnerships and his decision to allow the church to bless such unions. He has however ruled against the church officiating in gay weddings. 

This has been slammed as not good enough. Writing in Daily Maverick last month, Chris Ahrends, a recently retired Anglican priest and former chaplain to Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on the clergy in Southern Africa to follow their conscience in supporting the LGBT community and provide ministry to all, blessing marriages and affirming relationships, regardless of church rules.

On a happier note, I can report that my alma mater is no longer the Stygian hall of horrors of my teenage years. It is now a co-ed institution, having merged with a local convent school. The Irish monks have gone, and pupils there are no longer afraid to enter classrooms. 

I have not named the school, but I will say this: in September this year, the religious order my teachers were members of made a significant financial contribution to Northern Ireland’s Historical Institutional Abuse Redress Scheme. This after a 2017 inquiry revealed the extent of sexual, physical and emotional abuse at homes run by the state, church and charities from 1922 to 1995. 

Given that this particular religious order sent its deranged monks hither and thither across the globe, there to put the fear of God into the natives, maybe some of this money should come to their victims in Johannesburg. It’s just a thought.