After the publication of a damning report into a decades-long child abuse scandal, Justin Welby has bowed to pressure to resign as archbishop of Canterbury. Harriet Sherwood reports. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
This is the Guardian.
Today, the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned because the Church failed to stop abuse.
What happens next?
Before we start, I want to let you know that we discuss child abuse in this episode and at the end I'll give you the details of organisations that can help if you've been affected over the past 11 years.
Justin Welby has headed an organisation that is finally slowly starting to reckon with the abusers it has allowed to operate in the name of Christianity.
One such abuser was John Smythe.
For more than four decades, he sadistically beat and psychologically tortured at least 130 boys and young men.
Now, a major review has found that the Church of England knew about Smyth's behavior and didn't do enough to bring him to justice.
Welby has known this was coming for a long time.
This report was commissioned more than five years ago and it's taken a very long time to be completed.
It was actually rushed out last Thursday.
It wasn't supposed to be published until this week, but it was leaked and so the Church of England rushed it out.
In what was a very busy newstime.
The Make In Review specifically criticizes Justin Welby for failing to properly report Smythe or to support the people that he'd abused.
Welby issued a statement saying he was deeply sorry about the abuse, but that he had no idea or suspicion of this abuse before 2013.
The report's author, Keith Makin, said that it was unlikely that he didn't know about it.
Justin Welby was under pressure to resign.
At first he refused.
Some of it was before I was even come to Christian faith, many years before I was ordained.
Pressure began to build.