The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is under pressure to resign over a damning report on John Smyth – believed to be the most prolific serial abuser associated with the Church of England.

A petition by members of the General Synod – the church’s parliament – requesting Mr. Welby to resign gathered over 5,700 signatures on Monday at 5:30 p.m.

The call was bolstered by a statement from the bishop that Mr Welby should stand down, describing the church as “in danger of losing complete credibility” in the safeguarding.

But who was John Smyth, the lawyer at the center of the controversy?

John Smyth was a barrister and evangelical Christian who held several leadership roles in the Iwerne Trust in the 1970s and 1980s. The Trust was a charity that ran summer camps for young Christians.

Born in Canada, Smyth became a QC in 1979 and was the lawyer for morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who took cases against Gay News and the National Theater as part of her anti-homosexuality campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s.

The lawyer moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 – two years after the allegations were first made – and set up similar evangelical camps there.

In 1997, Smyth was arrested after the death of a 16-year-old boy at a camp. The case was dropped before trial and the lawyer moved to South Africa.

He died in Cape Town in 2018, aged 75.

After a Channel 4 documentary aired in 2017, Hampshire police opened an investigation into Smyth’s abuse. At the time of his death, he was wanted for police questioning and was being considered for an extradition request to the UK.

Why was he accused?

Smyth is considered to be the most prolific serial abuser associated with the Church of England.

He is accused of sexually, psychologically and physically abusing around 30 boys and young men in the UK and 85 in Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades.

The first allegations were made against Mr Smyth in 1982 when an internal Iwerne Trust report referred to “horrific” beatings of boys and young men which left some of them bleeding.

Church officials were first made aware of the abuse at that stage when they received the results of the internal report. The most recent Makin Review found that the recipients of the report “participated in an active cover-up” to prevent its findings from coming to light.

Smyth’s abuse was not made public until the Channel 4 documentary. When confronted by the channel, he said he was “not talking about what I did at all” and said some of the claims were “nonsense”.

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The Bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, said in 2017 that he had been the victim of Smyth’s abuse and that a friend who had also been abused had previously tried to kill himself.

Winchester College, an independent boarding school in Hampshire, found in a 2022 report that at least 13 former pupils had been abused by Smyth. The school had been informed of the beatings in the 1980s. The headmaster had at the time asked Smyth to stay away from Winchester College but did not contact the police.

The Makin Review found that if Smyth had been reported to the police earlier, it could have helped uncover the truth, prevented further abuse and led to a possible criminal conviction.

How is the Archbishop of Canterbury involved?

Smyth met the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, because he attended the Iwerne camps in the 1970s.

The independent review said there was no evidence Mr Welby “maintained any meaningful contact” with the lawyer.

But the Makin Report found that Justin Welby did not tell police about the abuse as soon as he became aware of it in August 2013, shortly after he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Mr Welby said he had “no idea or suspicion” of the allegations before 2013, but the independent report concluded it was unlikely he would have been unaware of concerns about Smyth in the 1980s.

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The Archbishop apologized for “failures and omissions” in not properly investigating the claims, especially after the Channel 4 documentary.

There are now growing calls for archbishop to resign.

On Monday, Helen-Ann Hartley, one of the Church of England’s 108 bishops, said Mr Welby’s position was now untenable.

“It’s very difficult for the church … to continue to have a moral voice in any way, shape or form in our nation when we can’t get our own house in order on something that’s extremely important,” he said it.