When you look at a high-up cleric – someone like Justin Welby, say, dressed in all his finery, vestments trimmed with gold thread and a bejewelled clasp on his cope, as he was at the coronation of King Charles III – it’s hard to believe this has any connection with a wandering rabbi on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with his band of 12 followers.

But Welby and his fellow Church of England prelates take as their guiding light the teachings of that rabbi, Jesus. His words were not all milk and honey. Take, for example, this passage from the gospel of Matthew: “If anyone causes one of these little ones – those who believe in me – to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

In the case of Welby, who resigned as archbishop of Canterbury on Tuesday, that millstone turned out to be the Makin review, a recently published independent report that charted the brutal savagery of serial abuser John Smyth. Makin was even more disturbing in its account of how some people in the C of E knew about what Smyth was up to and covered it up.

It is not the first such organisation to make its own wellbeing rather than the survivors of abuse a priority, nor will it probably be the last. We’ve seen it before with........

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