The Anglican Church in South Africa (ACSA) has apologized for its failure to protect the public from the risks posed by a prolific British offense that moved to South Africa in 2001.
The great lawyer John Smith, who died in South Africa in 2018 at the age of 77, worsened more than 100 children and young men in the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of them met in the Christian camps he organized.
The Archbishop of Canterberry, Justin Wilby, resigned last year after publishing an independent review on this issue.
And found that Mr. Welby and other church leaders “could be” must have “officially reported Smith in 2013 to the police in the UK and the authorities in South Africa.
Smith moved to Zimbabwe with his wife and four children from Winchester in England in 1984, two years after a report, which was not published at that time, in detail the physical assault he was subjected to.
His move to 2001 to South Africa came after investigating his activities in Zimbabwe, whose results were not widely distributed.
A new investigation commissioned by the Archbishop of Cape Town Thabu McGoba, although there were no similar cases of “registered” abuse in South Africa, there is a very great danger to its occurrence.
The independent report found that although the church did not have previous warnings of Smith's violations until 2013, “the additional communication of this warning within ACSA between 2013 and Smith's death in 2018 …
Smith died at his home in Cape Town shortly after the heart. Only one week has passed after a re -summoning request to the United Kingdom.
“We find that the preventive measures in force within the ACSA at that time lived Smith in South Africa, insufficient dangerous risks of repeating this behavior here by Smith, or others,” he found the last investigation.
He explains Smith's activities after moving to South Africa.
She says that Smith joined an Anglican community in Derban, where he was preaching sometimes and was part of a confirmation team managed by confirmation classes that he was exposed to children.
The report says that he and his wife Ann “suddenly” left this society at some point in 2003 or 2004 after the church leaders faced Smith with information about his abusive behavior.
Then the couple moved to Cape Town and joined another English society.
In August 2013, the “ACSA's first warning” was sent on SMYTH behavior to the Garth Counsell by Ely's diocese in the United Kingdom and by the end of the year, the couple left the Anglican Church of a different Christian community, the church- on Man. They will later return to a lumping church shortly before Smith.
While another bishop, Peter Lee, had “heard informally” about violations before arriving in South Africa in 1976, the report found that the cleric was not “in any duty to pass what I had reached regarding Smith.”
“But … (they) have made a mistake in their failure to inform the authorities in the church of what they learned about Smith from the message received from Eli's diocese.”
The report says that although there are no allegations of Smith's continued behavior in South Africa, “What is … is clear … is that from 2001 onwards, ACSA youth members are at risk of Smith's committing in South Africa serial abuse UK documented and Zimbabwe.
In a statement on Tuesday, bishops, McGoba, acknowledged the Church's failure to protect retirees and the “wider society” from the potential ill -treatment of SMYTH.
He also detailed many of the steps that he would take to lead the church in their next meeting to be “implemented as a matter of urgency.”
