AA Edit | Sex abuse: All must act in time

Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England who also presided over the death of Queen Elizabeth II as well as the coronation of her son King Charles III in Britain, had to go. He resigned after an investigation found that he failed to inform police about serial physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at Christian summer camps as soon as he became aware of it a decade ago.

It is for an act of omission that the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans including in India has been forced to call it a day as criticism over his inaction built up. What it does to the reputation of the Church of England is the worrying aspect of the scandal as the edifice is already suffering from difficulties in holding together a community that has been increasingly skipping church with attendance markedly down in the last five years or so.

The crimes committed in sexual exploitation of hundreds of youths in the UK and in its former colonies like Zimbabwe and Uganda decades ago by a lawyer do not constitute an unknown phenomenon even if it took a long time for whispered complaints to surface. How formal religion acts to save the faithful from such sexual predators has often defined how serious it is about safe churches and places of worship.

The Roman Catholic Church had to intervene often in the last decade to catch predators and save its reputation in diverse countries, ranging from the US to Australia even as priestly heads rolled. The cause is often the dreadfully permissive atmosphere that religion may have allowed to build up through some of its priests and volunteers who have exploited the psychologically and physically vulnerable who come under their spiritual spell because of which they may be unable to complain or seek help.

Formal religion, which has had to grapple lately with serious issues like same-sex marriage, may not by itself be the one to blame for the sex abuse. But it is the silence of good men like the Most Reverend Welby that makes it considerably worse. It would serve the best interests of all if a fail-safe system is built by which the ill-treated can seek to complain of sex-abuse at once and seek action.