Shamed former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby admitted he “let God down” over the way he handled the abuse scandal that forced him to quit.
A report into serial Church of England abuser John Smyth concluded Mr Welby did not adequately follow up on reports about the feared Christian camp leader and barrister.
It said he might have been brought to justice had Mr Welby formally reported allegations to police in 2013.
He resigned in November and stepped down officially in January.
Yesterday, speaking for the first time about his departure, he was asked if he thought he had been “cancelled”. He said: “We won’t know that for 30 or 40 years, and I’ll be dead by that time. I don’t know. I can’t answer that question. You’d have to ask others. I know that I let God down, I let people down.”
Mr Welby, 69, said he would forgive Smyth if he was still alive today.
The former most senior bishop in the Church also repeated an apology to victims and told of the “deep sense of personal failure” he feels about the handling of allegations made against Smyth.
Mr Welby said he had “not really thought it through enough, to be honest” when he initially declined to quit over the Makin report into the scandal last year.
In his first interview since his resignation, he told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme: “What changed my mind was having been caught by the report being leaked and not really thought it through enough, to be honest.
“Over that weekend, as I read it and reread it and as I reflected on the horrible suffering of the survivors which had been, as many of them said, more than doubled by the institutional Church’s failure to respond adequately, it increasingly became clear to me that I needed to resign.”
Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men to traumatic abuse across five decades in three different countries in the UK and Africa.
Mr Welby said”: Yes, I think if he was alive and I saw him,” he said when asked if he forgives the now-dead clergyman.
“But it’s not me he has abused. He’s abused the victims and survivors. So, whether I forgive or not is, to a large extent, irrelevant.
“Just for the avoidance of doubt, I am utterly sorry and feel a deep sense of personal failure both for the victims of Smyth not being picked up sufficiently after 2017 when we knew the extent of it, and for my own personal failures.”
Earlier in the interview, Mr Welby said: “I think there is a rush to judgment. There is this immense – and this goes back half a century – immense distrust of institutions and there’s a point where you need institutions to hold society together.
“And there’s an absence – I’m not talking about safeguarding here – there is an absence of forgiveness. We don’t treat our leaders as human. We expect them to be perfect.
“If you want perfect leaders, you won’t have any leaders.”
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she finds “it very difficult to forgive terrible criminals”, when asked about Mr Welby saying he forgives Smyth.
Asked if a mandatory reporting law being in place would have led to the prosecution of Mr Welby over the Smyth case, Ms Cooper said: “It would depend on the details of a case, but if an organisation, institution or an individual is blocking the reporting of child abuse, and is effectively covering it up, then that does become a criminal offence.”
The Home Secretary said the Government is set to introduce a law, which will make failure to report child abuse or attempts to block reporting of the crime a criminal offence.
When asked how many people in the Church had known about the abuse, Mr Welby said a dozen people within the Church of England are currently going through a disciplinary process related to Smyth.
Mr Welby also said he is “profoundly ashamed” by his final speech in the House of Lords, which prompted anger from abuse victims last year as critics accused him of using a seemingly jokey tone when discussing serious safeguarding failures.
Joanne Grenfell, safeguarding bishop for the Church of England, said: “If anyone comes forward to the Church today with a concern, they will be heard and responded to carefully and compassionately by safeguarding professionals according to our clearly set out guidance.”