Justin Welby has spoken of a “deep sense of personal failure” over how allegations of horrific sexual abuse by the late John Smyth were handled.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury also said he was "profoundly ashamed" of a farewell speech in the House of Lords in which he appeared to make light of the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation.
Welby stepped down in the wake of the Makin Review which concluded that he could have and should have done more to stop Smyth's abuse. Smyth died in South Africa in 2018 while still under investigation by UK police.
Speaking on the BBC's Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, Welby said that he should have stepped down sooner.
“What changed my mind was having been caught by the report being leaked and not really thought it through enough, to be honest,” he said.
“Over that weekend, as I read it and reread it and as I reflected on the horrible suffering of the survivors which had been, as many of them said, more than doubled by the institutional Church’s failure to respond adequately, it increasingly became clear to me that I needed to resign.”
He said he had failed to properly handle allegations of historical child sex abuse because they were on an "overwhelming scale" with more cases arriving every day.
Asked if he would forgive Smyth, Welby said, “Yes, I think if he was alive and I saw him.
“But it’s not, it’s not me he has abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.”
Asked if he wanted to be forgiven by abuse survivors, he said, "Obviously, but it’s not about me. When we talk about safeguarding, the centre of it is the victims and survivors.
“I have never, ever said to a survivor, ‘you must forgive’, because that is their sovereign, absolute individual choice. Everyone wants to be forgiven, but to demand forgiveness is to abuse again.”
He said that after taking up office as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013 he was not as "pushy" as he could have been, and that he "didn’t realise how bad it was".
“I’d been in post 11 weeks and safeguarding had been the crisis I hadn’t foreseen," he said.
“I should have pushed harder because I knew enough to know that people, very rarely, almost never abuse once.”
Welby came under fire for his farewell speech in the House of Lords given shortly after announcing his resignation in which he suggested that a head had to roll.
"And there is only, in this case, one head that rolls well enough," he said.
The speech was met with dismay not only by victims but senior clergy in the Church of England.
Looking back on his words made him "profoundly ashamed", he told Kuennssberg, adding that he "wasn't in a good space at the time".
"It's one of those moments where, when I think of it, I just wince. It was entirely wrong and entirely inexcusable," he said.
During the interview, he repeated an apology to victims: “Just for the avoidance of doubt, I am utterly sorry and feel a deep sense of personal failure both for the victims of Smyth not being picked up sufficiently after 2017 when we knew the extent of it, and for my own personal failures.”
