The Anglican Church of Southern Africa (Acsa) has apologised for failing to protect the public from the risk posed by a prolific British child abuser who had moved to South African in 2001.
Senior barrister 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 at Christian camps that he organised.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned last year following the publication of an independent review into the matter.
It found that Mr Welby and other church leaders “could and should” have formally reported Smyth in 2013 to police in the UK and authorities in South Africa.
Smyth moved to Zimbabwe with his wife and four children from Winchester in England in 1984, two years after a report, which was not made public at the time, detailed the physical abuse he meted out.
His 2001 move to South Africa came after an investigation into his activities in Zimbabwe, the findings of which were not widely circulated.
A fresh enquiry commissioned last year by Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba found that while no similar cases of abuse were “ascertainable on record” in South Africa, “there was a very high risk that they could have happened”.
The independent report found that while the Church had no prior warnings of Smyth’s abuses until 2013, its “further communication of that warning within Acsa between 2013 and Smyth’s death in 2018… fell short”.
Smyth died at his home in Cape Town shortly after a heart procedure. It was just a week after a request that he be summoned back to the UK was submitted.
“We find that the protective measures in place within Acsa at the time Smyth lived in South Africa inadequately mitigated the serious risk of such conduct being repeated here by Smyth, or others,” the latest investigation found.
It details Smyth’s activities following his move to South Africa.
It says that Smyth joined an Anglican community in Durban, where he occasionally preached and was part of a team running confirmation classes that exposed him to young children.
He and his wife Anne “abruptly” left that community at some point in 2003 or 2004 after the church’s leaders confronted Smyth with information about his abusive behaviour, the report says.
The couple then moved to Cape Town and joined another Anglican community.
In August 2013, the “first warning to Acsa” on Smyth’s behaviour was sent to Bishop Garth Counsell by the Diocese of Ely in the UK and by the end of the year, the couple left the Anglican Church for a different Christian community, Church-on-Main. They would later return to an Anglican church just shortly before Smyth’s death.
And while another bishop, Peter Lee, had also “heard informally” about the abuses prior to his arrival in South Africa in 1976, the report found that neither clergyman were “remiss in any duty to pass on what had reached them regarding Smyth”.
“But… [they] erred in failing to inform the authorities at Church-on-Main of what they had learned about Smyth from the letter received from the Diocese of Ely.”
The report says that though there were no allegations of Smyth continuing his abusive behaviour in South Africa “what… is evident… is that from 2001 on, young members of Acsa were exposed to the real risk of Smyth perpetrating in South Africa the serial abuse documented in the UK and Zimbabwe”.
In a statement on Tuesday, Archbishop Makgoba acknowledged the Church’s failure to protect its congregants and “wider community” from Smyth’s potential abuse.
He also detailed several steps he would submit to the church’s leadership at their next meeting to be “implemented as a matter of urgency”.
