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This offer is UK only and subject to availability. Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectators' Religion Podcast.

I'm Damien Thompson.

It's the last day of 2024, a year in which the hierarchy of the Church of England was blown apart by its failure to

address abuse scandals. And the same thing would have happened in the Catholic Church, too,

but for the cowardice of the media. But more of that later. In November, an abuse scandal

claimed the scalp of none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury,

Justin Welby, who was forced to resign when it emerged that he had failed to take sufficient action,

anything like sufficient action, against John Smythe, a charismatic evangelical barrister,

whose so-called ministry involved the sadistic

beatings of schoolboys in England and Africa. After becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013,

Wellby did very little to ensure that Smyth was prosecuted before his death in 2018,

and he also, for a long time, declined to meet Smythe's victims.

Then, earlier this month, Welby's predecessor won as Arch Bishop of Canterbury, George Carey,

resigned his ministry as a priest in the Church of England, after a BBC investigation revealed

that he had lobbied for an alleged child abuser, the Reverend David Tudor,

to be allowed back into ministry, following allegations of assault against teenage girls.

Meanwhile, the shadow of the Tudor scandal now hangs over England's other primate,

the Archbishop of Stephen Cottrell, who was scheduled to

take over the leadership of the Church of England until Welby's successor is chosen.

Cottrell was Bishop of Chonsford, when the Reverend David Tudor, already disgraced, was made an

...