Comboni Missionaries
This was sent to us anonymously by Boy X. In pevious articles he has told us of his time at the Comboni Missionaries (then Verona Fathers) seminary at Mirfield in Yourkshire. He claims to have been tormented by Bishop Lorenzo Ceresoli, who was then Father Lorenzo Ceresoli, and chased into the hands of serial paedophile Father John Pinkman. A previous article also explains how he met Father Pinkman again in King’s Cross or Waterloo station, where he now plied his trade as a rent boy.
Here he tells us about his feeling of sadness at Christmas and the man he should have become.
Boy X’s Christmas Story
I’ve always found Christmas particularly depressing and have to force myself to pretend all is well especially for the sake of those close to me. Christmas should be a happy time and maybe that’s what brings the unbearable sadness to the front , making it almost impossible to hide.
There have been times I’ve felt like I am standing on the edge of the abyss, having asked all the questions and finding all the answers and with that realizing there is no meaning and purpose to anything.
All there is is complete emptineess and despair. But something has always held me back from taking that final step into oblivion. That damned religion still lingers there. Fear maybe,in the sense as Hamlet said ‘Conscience makes cowards of us all’. The fear in the possibility of hellfire. Also there is guilt knowing the pain caused to others, those I care about most. I don’t know.
Mirfield Has Haunted Him Forever
Consumed always with guilt. A hundred good things done, do not assuage the guilt of one bad thing done. It haults forever. Guilt about finding comfort in the caress of someone who was destroying me. Someone who I thought cared for me. Even after the sexual abuse started, rape I would call it, I would run towards that abuser to escape what i felt to be a worse fate.
The complete indifference , far more than that, the humiliation and ridicule heaped upon me by another, the complete feeling of utter sadness and fear I felt because of it, driving me further towards a more subtle abuser.
What an idiot. What worse fate could there have been than being victim to the unnatural affection of the one who destroyed me for ever out of his own need for self gratification.
With Me Forever
The way I feel right now, I don’t know if I have moved forward or not. Right now, I don’t want to see their faces anymore. I buried them most of my life but now they are here, vivid and real. I don’t want to even write their names or say their names but maybe that is silly and trivial considering their presence is forever.
Maybe I was right in what I said when I first had something posted on the blog. the acknowledment to myself that I am still there. in Mirfield, after all these years . I will always be there. It’s where something precious was stolen from me, that something being , me. The person I was before it all happened, the person I would have become.
To read about Boy X’s abuse at the hands of Comboni Missionary Paedophiles click on Boy X’s Story of Abuse
Comboni Missionaries 
Boy X wrote, about Mirfield, in the above post:
” I will always be there. It’s where something precious was stolen from me, that something being , me.”
I hope that the Comboni Fathers will do what is honest and truthful, and respond to this man and many more like him.
I posted recently, that the sexual abuse perpetrated by the Comboni Missionaries on children, was not something that was just experienced historically in the past on children, but it is what many adult men, who experienced sexual abuse as children, still struggle with and try to make sense of today.
For Boy X it is present in a way that I cannot begin to understand. For him it is in the ‘here and now’ – he still lives that Mirfield sexual abuse every day of his life.
Comboni Missionaries – stand up, be accountable, live your life according to The Gospels, live your life according to what you stand up and preach at your mission appeals, live your life truthfully and be honest with yourselves.
Have the courage to change. Not only change yourselves and your institution, but, also, the lives of many men, whose lives are still blighted by the abuse that they suffered by You as children.
Do not dare comment amongst yourselves that it is all in the past, ‘they’ should move on, it is all about money, it was a different time in those days.
Look – really look – at Boy X. Try and put your Gospels into play when you think of him.
Can you do that.
Mark Murray – Mirfield: 1969 – 1974
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I can understand the feeling of being still at Mirfield.
I still have a regularly occurring nightmare. This started around 1980, long after I left the college. I was working for a couple of weeks in Yorkshire was passing quite close to Mirfield on my way home. I decided to make the slight detour, drove up Far Common Road and stopped outside the main gate. I sat there in the car for some time, wondering whether to go in to see if there was anyone I knew. But the thought of possibly meeting a certain member of staff terrified me so much that I did not. I drove up to the back gate, the one behind the chapel, turned there, drove back down to the mail road and drove on home.
This “visit” was a big mistake, because it was then that the nightmares started.
In the dream, I am driving to or from work and unexpectedly pass Roe Head. I see my former colleagues at Mirfield playing in the grounds (unlikely, I know since they would all now be middle aged men, but dreams are not logical.I go in to see them, and start chatting to them. The bell rings, they all get into line, and I start to leave. I hear Ceresoli’s voice behind me snarling “Get into line.” I try to explain that I have left years ago, that I have a wife and family and a job and am just visiting, but he says “Don’t argue, you have come back.” and I find myself being forced inside, knowing there is no escape. I always wake at this point, but the dream is so vivid that it takes me some time to realise that it was just a dream and not real.
That drive past Mirfield was well over thirty years ago now, but the nightmare it triggered still occurs.
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