#Church of England to ‘very carefully’ review statues for slavery links

The Church of England will “very carefully” review statues at major places of worship to see “if they all should be there,” according to the archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC reported Friday.

The Most Rev. Justin Welby said monuments at Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey would be included.

“Some will have to come down, some names will have to change,” he told BBC Radio 4’s “Today.”

The history of those memorialized by the statues could be forgiven “only if there’s justice,” he said, adding that forgiveness could only be granted “if we change the way we behave now and say this was then and we learn from that and change how we are going to be in the future.”

Statues across the UK are under review for links to slavery in response to Black Lives Matter protests that followed the May 25 death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was killed in a confrontation with Minneapolis cops.

Welby specified that the review would include statues at the historic Canterbury Cathedral.

“We are going to be looking very carefully and putting them in context and seeing if they all should be there,” he said.

Asked if society focused too heavily on repentance over forgiveness, he said: “Yes, I think we do … repentance and justice must go together.”

“We have seen in some of the other crises we have been facing over the last few months, not just COVID, but also Black Lives Matter and the economic downturn, that there is great injustice and we need a collective turning away from that, which is what repentance means, but we also need to learn to forgive.”

Protesters have also toppled or attempted to remove statues of historical figures linked to slavery in the US — though they’ve also vandalized a statue of Civil War Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who led the North’s fight against slavery and to preserve the Union.