The Anglican Church of South Africa (ACSA) apologized for not protecting the public from the risk set by a fertile British abuser of children who moved to South Africa in 2001.
Older lawyer John Smyth, who died in South Africa in 2018 at the age of 77, abused over 100 children and young men in the UK and Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 1980s. He met many of them in the Christian camps he organized.
Archbishop Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned last year after the announcement of an independent review in that issue.
Mr. Welby and other church leaders “were found to” have been able to “officially report SMYth 2013 to the police in the UK and the authorities in South Africa.
Smyth moved to Zimbabwe with his wife and four children from Winchester in England in 1984, two years after the report, which was not published at the time, described in detail the physical abuse he had presented.
His transition to South Africa in 2001 followed after the investigation of his activities in Zimbabwe, whose findings were widely wider.
The new investigation, which was ordered by Archbishop Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba last year, revealed that, although not similar cases of abuse, “in South Africa” were not “established”, there was a very high risk that they could have happened. “
An independent report found that although the Church was not prior warnings of smyth abuse until 2013, his “further communication of that warning within ACSA between 2013 and SMyth’s death in 2018 … fell”.
Smyth died at his home in Cape Town, shortly after the heart proceedings. It was just a week after the request was made to call him back to the UK.
“We discover that the protective measures in ACSA -in that time Smyth lived in South Africa inadequate in the serious risk of repeating Smyth or others here,” revealed the latest investigation.
Details of Smyth’s activities after moving to South Africa.
He says Smyth joined the Anglican Community in Durban, where he occasionally preached and was part of a team leading the affirmative hours that exposed him to young children.
He and his wife Anne “abruptly” left the community at some point in 2003 or 2004 after the church leaders faced Smyth with information about his abuse, the report said.
The couple then moved to Cape Town and joined another Anglican community.
In August 2013, “The First ACSA-I-I” warning “about Smyth’s behavior was sent to Bishop Garth Counsell from the Diocese of Ely in the UK and until the end of the year, the couple left the Anglican Church for the second Christian community, the church-Main. He would later return to the Anglican Church just before Smyth’s death.
And while another bishop, Peter Lee, also “informally heard” about abuse before arriving in South Africa in 1976, a report found that no priest was “rejected in any obliged duty to convey what he had reached Smythom. “
“But… [they] made a mistake that he did not inform the authorities in Church-on-Main about what they learned about Smyth from a letter received from the Diocese of Ely. “
The report says that although there was no statement that Smyth continued its violent behavior in South Africa “which is … Obviously … is that since 2001 young members of ACSA have been exposed to the real risk of smyth southern Africa series abuse documented in the UK and Zimbabwe. “
In a statement on Tuesday, Archbishop Makgoba admitted that the Church was a failure to protect its congresses and a “wider community” from the potential abuse of Smyth.
He also described in detail a few steps that would submit to the leadership of the Church at their next meeting to “run as an emergency”.
