Sexual Abuse in Churches: A Turn to Healing

When Sarah Mullally was formally installed in a historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026, a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her vocational background highlights the importance of healing, which was appropriate because her predecessor, Justin Welby, had stepped down because he had failed to address a serial sexual-abuse scandal. It had been important most of all to the victims—boys at a church camp who were sexually molested by a gay man volunteering at the camp—that Welby go. Close to the day of the ceremony, Mullally promised explicitly to attend to such victims, as is fitting and proper for a Christian cleric to do. It is what Jesus Christ would do, whereas he would not recognize the sexual predators or their enablers in the hierarchies of Christian denominations. The contrast itself bears witness to just how far some denominations had fallen from being justified in claiming to follow the principles preached by Jesus in the Gospels. That those sects had been able to do so even while representing themselves as distinctly Christian institutions shows just how power clerics have in beguiling laity.

Mullally emphasized her commitment to “do all I can to ensure that the Church becomes safer and also responds well to victims and survivors of abuse.”[1] Being safer refers to the Church proactively policing its own, whereas responding to victims is a reaction to past abuse. Regarding the latter, she said the Church was “seeking to become more trauma informed, listening to survivors and victims of abuse.”[2] As a former nurse, she could have gone further by saying that she would make her Church into a facilitator of victims getting connected to therapists so the healing process could really begin, for being listened to is just a first step in the help that victims of sexual abuse need in order to heal.

Psychology not being my field, I can only surmise that victims of sexual abuse avoid commitment and instead may engage in anti-commitment behavior, such as having sex with friends and anonymous men or women. Of course, this is not to say that every man or woman who is sexually promiscuous has been sexually abused. Using rampant sex to push commitment away is a defense mechanism that only needs a fear of emotional intimacy to be able to control a person’s life and serially thwart genuine (i.e., intimate) romantic relationships. For some victims, sex itself may just be too painful.

It is precisely because sexual abuse can scar its victims so deeply that Welby’s abject failure to properly handle the case of John Smyth, “who sexually and physically abused young men at Christian camps in the UK, Zimbabwe and South Africa over five decades,” is so damning, especially as Welby was a Christian priest (and Archbishop).[3] This is not to say that such enabling and lack of accountability on such a crime only occurs in religious institutions. Penn State University’s athletic director and football coach looked the other way as an older men molested student football-players in the showers for decades. Even so, it is more shocking when older men molest younger men under a Christian flag.

Sexual abuse by an older man can be tacit, or subtly legitimated because it is camouflaged by a relationship arrangement that gives the younger man the go-ahead to be sexually promiscuity that keeps emotional intimacy away. There is, in other words, a cost to the younger man in being what is known as a trophy. An older man having such a “trophy” younger man bears no cost, as the older man can even be living with another man romantically. That the trophy is being kept from having an emotionally intimate partner of his own is of no concern to the older man who gets to have his cake and eat it too. The trophy may even be deluded into thinking that the older man is his partner. In short, this is sadly very unfair to the younger man, and thus I contend that the arrangement is a subtle form of abuse.

A fear of emotional intimacy, such as motivates a person to push people away when they get too close (such as by using sexual promiscuity), fits well with being in a trophy role. It can be caused by sexual abuse or from having witnessed abusive relationships, or even simply a low self-esteem. Such fear is, I suspect, very difficult for therapists to heal because people who don’t think they are worthy of emotional intimacy will lash out to thwart it in its tracks. This is precisely why Christian institutions could play such an important role in connecting victims of sexual abuse with psychological clinics, rather than merely be good at listening. The damage done mentally is surely very deep. That a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury is a good indication of where Christian Churches could go in emphasizing healing in such cases. After all, Jesus heals in the Gospels.  

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Sarah Mullally Makes History as First Woman Enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury,” Euronews.com, 25 March, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Oman Al Yahyai, “Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby Resigns amid Sexual Abuse Scandal,” Euronews.com, 12 November, 2024.

Greed and Christian Ethics in Profit-Seeking

In his 2011 Easter sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued an outspoken attack on the greed consuming the world’s civilized nations. Speaking against the rush for oil, power and territory, the Rt. Rev. Rowan Williams argued that the comforts and luxuries that people take for granted can not be sustained forever. He forecast that civilization itself would one day collapse from the over-production and consumption.  

                             The Archbishop of Canterbury (The Telegraph)

Williams laid the root of the excessive acquisitiveness at the doorstep of the fear of death. “Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die. . . . Whether it is the individual grabbing the things of this world in just the repetitive, frustrating sameness that we have seen to be already in fact the mark of an inner deadness, or the greed of societies that assume there will always be enough to meet their desires - enough oil, enough power, enough territory - the same fantasy is at work. We shan’t really die.” Relentless activity in the world of business is our way of forestalling the thought of our own coming non-existence.  It follows that “(w)e as individuals can’t contemplate an end to our acquiring, and we as a culture can’t imagine that this civilization, like all others, will collapse.”  Therefore, we take our comforts and luxuries for granted and ignore the warning signs that they cannot be sustained indefinitely.

In short, the West defines itself in terms of ceaseless activity geared to acquisition without limit—as though a fatted calf stuffing itself for dear life—in order to keep the inevitability of an end at bay. Hence, we identify ourselves by our functions, as in “I am a banker,” rather than by our respective natures, which exist in idleness as much as activity. In fact, it may only be in the silence of a holy night that one can come face to face in the darkness with oneself, unfettered by one’s vocation.

Whereas the Archbishop’s sermon focused on greed inherent in excessive acquisitiveness, the Easter message of the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt. Rev Nazir-Ali, discussed the immorality of the financial markets in terms of financial inequality. As reported in The Telegraph, “The bishop said that high-earners such as City traders and company directors must swap their desire to ‘make a quick buck’ for a commitment to share their wealth. Bishop Nazir-Ali blamed the turmoil in the world’s financial markets on amoral forces and warned that one of the ‘great disparities’ of our age was the gap between rich and poor.” Even though capitalism necessarily makes use of people unequally according to particular efforts, talents, and resources, the greed of the “haves” need not be utilized in ways that exacerbate the inequalities such that the “have nots” are left without the means of sustenance. Writing in a Sunday newspaper, the bishop charged, "The turmoil in the markets is almost certainly the result of such forces.” Indeed, the greed of irrational exuberance pushes the gap to such an extent that volatility can destroy the market from within.

Accordingly, the bishop urged: “Those with power need to ensure that the poor are not disproportionately affected. What is required is a change of heart, of disposition, of attitude. . . . From possessiveness we need to move to gratitude for what we have, from 'cutting corners’ to make a quick buck to that integrity for which business in this country was celebrated, and from mere accumulation of wealth to a generosity of spirit. . . . When that happens, hedge fund managers and directors of companies can indeed go into the kingdom of heaven ahead of the chief priests and elders." This statement is a departure from the rich man getting into the kingdom of God being like a camel getting through the eye of a needle—a view that was dominant in early Christian thought. The bishop’s thesis that generosity can deliver even a rich person harkens back to the salience of the virtues of liberality and magnificence that were dominant in the Christian thought on wealth in the late Renaissance. Such is the distance within the history of Christian thought on wealth in relationship to greed (on this shift, please see my book, God's Gold available at Amazon).

Because generosity requires wealth in the first place, the bishop was assuming that the link between earning wealth and greed is mitigated or even eliminated by charity (the root of which is caritas, which means sublimated human love) of part of one’s wealth. Although involving virtue, this approach is less idealistic than the earlier stance in which even pursuing wealth was assumed to be tantamount to being greedy. In other words, the bishop’s stance is more worldly because it allows for some profit-seeking and wealth-holding (as long as they are accompanied by the virtue of generosity rather than the vice of selfish acquisitiveness sans limit). Even so, the stance is quite idealistic compared with the greed that nearly brought the financial markets to collapse in 2008. The question is perhaps whether generosity amid profit-seeking and wealth-holding is sufficient to restrain the ceaseless productive activity for still more.

Source:

Jonathan Petre, “Archbishop of Canterbury Attacks Western ‘greed’ in Easter sermon,” The Telegraph, April 24, 2011.