Dozens Say Christian Leader Made British Boys ‘Bleed for Jesus’
The most recent account was from the bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, who said in a statement
that he, too, had received a beating in the infamous garden shed that was "violent, excruciating and shocking." Mr. Stibbe said, "The sin that seemed to preoccupy him more than anything was masturbation, and he managed to persuade me that I needed to purge my body of that sin." Mr. Smyth would explain to the boys why they needed to be punished so severely.
In Britain, the claims against Mr. Smyth have struck at the heart of the Church of England after Archbishop Welby acknowledged
that he had worked at the elite Christian holiday camps run by the Iwerne Trust where Mr. Smyth groomed the boys.
Zimbabwe said that He would strip us naked and hit us with wooden bats to purge us of sin,
None of the victims said they had been sexually assaulted,
but one of them said Mr. Smyth had occasionally stripped naked and groaned in "spiritual ecstasy" during the lashings.
The scale and severity of the abuses Mr. Smyth is accused of first surfaced in 1982, after the suicide attempt, which prompted
an internal investigation by the Iwerne Trust, a Christian charity headed by Mr. Smyth that ran summer camps.
Instead, Mr. Smyth was removed from the trust in 1984
and sent to Zimbabwe, where he set up similar Christian summer camps for privately educated boys, the South African news media have reported.