Monthly Archives: April 2015

Comboni Missionaries | How I was ‘Called By God’ – My Vocation

Posted on by gerambo

Comboni Missionaries – The Sell

I had already decided, mainly because of Fr. Maloney and my mother’s pride, that I wanted to enter the priesthood, that I was sold on the idea of being a priest. It seemed like a great career move. It had status. I had also wanted to be a footballer and play for Scotland but this seemed equally as good.

So, when Fr. Tavano hit town when I was just 10 years of age I was an easy sell. He had been sent by the missionary order the Verona Fathers, an offshoot of the Jesuits, to find boys who would become priests.

Greenock was a fertile area for him as he grabbed five boys on the trip. Greenock was a place, in those days, where the British Army were able to grab lots of boys to join up. It sounded great – certainly compared to a life in Greenock. OK, you night go to war and have people shoot at you – but at least in the Army that was just a might.

Great Salesman for Comboni Missionaries

Fr. Tavano really sold. He would have made an excellent salesman in another profession. He sold and he sold and he sold. He made the college, where we would be living, sound like an upmarket holiday resort. Then there was the opportunity of foreign travel to exotic Africa when you became a priest.

He told us that we would have a tour of the surrounding district every Wednesday. Little did we know that this would be virtually the only time we were allowed out of the grounds. Even this was heavily supervised. The junior head boy would be at the front and the priest who was head of the junior school, Fr. Pinkman (of him, more later), would be at the back.

Liam Gribben

One of the Greenock boys, Liam Gribben, who joined at the same time as I did felt hard done by as regards the walk around the locale. He had thought that these would be bus tours. After all the local bus company in Greenock, Doigs, regularly advertised tours to places like Loch Lomond at advantageous rates. Unfortunately for us these rates were well beyond the means of our parents.

Maybe he had yearned to do something like that. Maybe he had seen the ads and begged his parents to go. Now there was an opportunity to go on a tour every week.

However, Fr, Tavano was a born salesman and a tour was how he described the weekly walk. I bet he would have sold lots of houses or second hand cars. Unfortunately for us he was not just selling us a commodity that we could sell on. He was selling us a philosophy and a way of life.

With slides of the college and Africa and a description of the lifestyle, he was on a winner. At the end he asked the 10 and 11-year-old boys who wanted to come. I remember that quite a few hands went up. Mine was one of them.

I don’t know what happened to the others. Perhaps their parents told them not to be so daft. Mine were proud of me and proud that the local priests were so proud as well. I volunteered myself they said. It wasn’t down to any of them at all.

Special Summer

It was a great summer. I was special. I was going to become a priest. I had a vocation. I was chosen by God. I was specially picked out of so many other people by God. I was to be his chosen one.

By God those were heady days for a ten / eleven year old (my birthday was in June).

Other people were desperate to know what a vocation was like. How did I know I was called by God? What did it feel like? It was like I had the secret of life, the Holy Grail.

To be perfectly frank I was as in the dark as they were but I explained it all to them – like it was explained to me. They nodded as I explained – but I could see that they still felt a bit on the outside.

My Vocation to the Priesthood

I was not on the outside. I was right bang on the inside. I was chosen and they were not. I must admit it was hard not to get a superiority complex. How could you not when God had specially picked you out? He wanted you and not the rest of them. He didn’t want them. He wanted you.

And I was only just reaching my eleventh birthday. Life was so full of hope. This was the sixties when hope abounded among the young anyway. And the rest of them weren’t even God’s chosen ones.

We had it in spades!

A Gang of Brothers

I was put in touch with the other guys who would be ‘entering the priesthood’ as we thought at the time. In total there were five boys from Greenock, including myself. It was a particularly good catch by Fr. Tavano. I don’t think that he got as many anywhere else including London.

We spent the summer together – the Chosen Few. It was a time of great optimism. We had a whale of a time together. I remember that we hit it off greatly and we laughed a lot – in fact a hell of a lot. It seemed that people chosen specially by God had quite a lot in common. We were like brothers in arms. In fact looking back perhaps that was the greatest summer of my life. Life stretched out long in front of us – and we were going to be in God’s special legion.

We really believed that we were all going to be priests – the whole five us. We felt that we had already passed the audition. We believed that we had already been selected, that all we needed now was the training.

Vocations Lost

Fr. Tavano didn’t tell us otherwise – although he must have known. It seems that only about one in twenty of the boys ‘chosen by God’ in this way actually make it through to the priesthood.

Some of them leave having ‘lost their vocation’ along the way. The majority, though, are simply ignominiously dumped. There remains the strong suspicion that some were dumped to save paedophile priests from being found out when the boys got a little older and wiser.

Can you imagine how it feels to be selected by God and then dumped by his emissaries on earth?

What would you do after that?

I remember once reading that John Lennon said that when the Beatles broke up when he was in his late twenties he wondered “what do you do after you’ve been a Beatle?”

When Your Vocation is Gone

I think that, to an even greater extent, we could ask the same question. “What do you do after you’ve been specially chosen By God – and then he no longer wants you”?

The answer sadly for many of those who were rejected is ‘not much’.

As I said, only about one-in-twenty of those ‘chosen by God’ actually make it through to the priesthood and Fr. Tavano didn’t tell us about that when we signed up. We thought we were already there.

We were called by God – and then, seemingly, he dumped us because we had become’defiled’ by one of his servants.

Comboni Missionaries | The Beginnings of My Vocation

Posted on by gerambo

Implantation

“What’s the half of two and two” asked Fr. Maloney. I knew the answer as he had asked the same question many times before. I wasn’t sure if he was forgetful or whether he just liked to hear the answer. Some of the other altar boys preferred to indulge him by giving the wrong answer so that he could gain great delight from explaining it. I swapped about, sometimes giving the right answer and sometimes the wrong one.

“Two”, I replied.

“No three” he said.

“Why is that?” I indulged him.

“What’s the half of two” he asked.

“One” I replied.

“So what’s one and two” he asked and waited for the trap to be sprung and realisation to happen.

“Three”, I said, caught again by his ruse.

That pleased him a lot.

Father Maloney

Fr. Maloney was a very holy man. He was proudly Irish, proudly Catholic and proudly priest. He wasn’t one of those holier than thou religious people. He wasn’t using his religion or position to feel better than other people or to look down on them. His holiness was genuine.

However, it was now time for his half-a-crown question.

“So what are you going to be when you grow up?” he asked.

This, of course, was another question that he asked heaps of times. He asked the other altar boys as well, but he asked me the most. He knew that my father was in hospital with tuberculosis and that my mother was struggling to get by, and there wasn’t much spending money.

Vow of Poverty

Priests, although they take a vow of Poverty and are supposed to own nothing of their own and get no pay, get bits and pieces from parishioners. If they officiate at a wedding or a funeral they tend to get a ‘bung’.

I don’t know what most of them do with it, but Fr. Maloney tended to look for ways to give it away again. He was a redistributor of wealth in his own small scale.

When he first asked his ‘career’ question, the altar boys gave all sorts of things that they wanted to do when they grew up. However, we had worked out long ago that ‘footballer’ or ‘doctor’ was not the right answer.

The Right Answer

I think that I was the first to say ‘priest’. The other altar boys were still slightly behind the times. After a while they started to say ‘priest’ in answer to teh question or if they were feeling brave ‘bishop’. However they weren’t ambitious enough.

“Pope”, I replied, whereupon he immediately fought his way through his cassock to pull out a lovely big silver half-a-crown.

“Here you are” he said delightedly. “Get something for your brothers and sisters too”.

The other altar boys usually got a sixpence if they got anything. I was never sure if it was my brave replies that got the half-a-crown or whether he was just looking for a way to give me the money anyway. I suspect it was the latter.

Family Struggles

My father was in hospital with tuberculosis and my mother had a family of seven to bring up on her own.

This was a princely sum of money and he gave it on a fairly regular basis.

Whenever he met my mother he would tell her, often in my presence, that I had told him that I wanted to be a priest. He would put his hand on my head and look delighted. My mother looked suitably delighted too that her young son had brought her such kudos from the local holy man.

Gradually it grew in my head that a priest was a good thing to be. It seemed to be a career with a lot of kudos and my mother would be in seventh heaven to have a son who was a priest.

Brainwashed?

I’m sure that I could look back and say that Fr. Maloney was not all that he seemed, that he was a conniving person who gradually brainwashed little boys, using cash rewards, into wanting to join the ranks of the priesthood.

I’m sure that, like many others in the church, he was worried about the falling numbers of boys who wanted to become priests. However, it was the profession that he had chosen, which seemed to give him personal fulfillment, and which, I’m sure he felt he could recommend to other people.

However, I suspect that if it was the local Accountant who was dispensing money for the ‘right’ answer to his question about what I was going to do when I was older, then there is a good chance that I might now be an Accountant (although I’m not sure what the equivalent of Pope is in that profession).

Parish Priests

To my mother, and many of the people of the parish, priests were the local equivalent of pop stars or movie stars.

Maybe not too many people aspired to become priests, but those who did received a tremendous amount of admiration and respect for doing it.

So that was how the idea formed in my head that I wanted to be a priest!

Comboni Missionaries |The Rise and Fall of My Vocation

Posted on by gerambo

Comboni Missionaries

This website was set up, originally, so that people could post their memories of the Comboni Missionaries (ex-Verona Fathers) and especially of their seminary in Mirfield from the early sixties to the mid eighties.

It has been dominated, recently, by bad memories of the appalling sexual abuse perpetrated by Comboni Missionary priests on young boys as young as 11 in their care. The cover up by the Comboni Missionaries continues to this day.

I had set down my memories of Mirfield and the seminary of St Peter Claver at Mirfield, Yorkshire a few years ago. I haven’t done anyting with them. They have just been lying in my Word folder, although I have sent them to a few of the ex-Boys.

Good and Bad Memories

What I’ve decided to do is to serialise them here. There are good memories and bad memories. I hope they entertain you.

It, also, shows the methods that Father Pinkman and Father Valmaggia used to lure, and groom, young boys. At the time I thought I was the only one. Now, it seems, that it was rife.

I have learned, that someone that I considered my best friend at Mirfield, Frank McGinnis, was being abused by Father Pinkman. I learned this around fifty years after the events took place – although he said some things to me, at the time, about it which I wodered at and didn’t understand at the time – but it seems obvious what he was talking about now.

I’ll publish the first episode shortly.

Paedophile Priests / Great Friendships

Incidentally, if anyone has any good memories of Mirfield, please send them in to us and we’ll publish them.

To me, it was a place with some bad memories but also lots of good memories. I made lots of friendships there – as well as being chased by paedophile priests.

Let’s hear your memories, good and bad.

Comboni Missionaries | Were You Abused by Them?

Posted on by gerambo

Comboni Missionaries

For the past few years we have been compiling a list of those that were abused by the Comboni MIssionaries at their seminaries in the UK and especially at St Peter Claver’s College, Roe Head Mirfield from the early Sixties to the mid- Eighties.

Some of us have sued the Comboni Missionaries and they have settled with us outside court rather than go to court. However, two things that they have refused to do – admit that abuse took place and apologise.

So, the fight continues.

Publicity

We have had some success in publicising what happend all those years ago and the extent of the cover up then and now.

There have been articles in the Sunday Observer, Daily Mail Online, Liverpool Echo, Greenock Telegraph (front page), Mifield Reporter and on BBC Yorkshire amongst others.

West Yorkshire Police have investigated and are confident that ‘a crime has been committed’ and that if Father Pinkman and Father Valmaggia were alive then ‘arrests would be made’.

Comboni Missionaries Cover Up

They also want to interview Father Nardo Romano who is accused of abusing Mark Murray and other boys on multiple occasions. However, the very top of the Order has refused that request saying that he the paedophile priest is not mentally fit to answer questions. That is very convenient.

This is despite the Order telling Mark Murray, when he made the accusations, that Father Romano was being brought back from teh missions in Uganda immediately and would never be allowed to be near children again. If they did that, they must have had at least a slight suspicon that it was true. He is now ‘holed up’ at their house in Verona.

The Comboni Missionaries never reported any of the this to the police as they are required to do.  In the UK, the Government is plannning to make it a crime with up to five years in prison for not reporting suspicions of child abuse to the police.

Home Office Panel on Child Sexual Abuse

In the UK they have set up a Home Office Panel to investigate Institutional Child Sexual Abuse. The Comboni Missionaries actions come under that remit, the Home Office panel has decided. Comboni Missiories will be asked to attend and be legally bound to comply.

We are putting together evidence to put to the Panel.

Already, we have uncovered, and documented, hundreds of incidents of child abuse at Mirfield by Comboni Missionary priests.

However, we think that this is still the tip of the iceberg.

It is most important that we get all the evidence that we can. This is a one-off and there will never be another opportunity.

Your Evidence Needed

If you were abused at Mirfield, or elsewhere, by the Comboni Missionaries, this would be the time to let us know. If you know of anyone that was abused by them please let us know. If you have any knowledge or suspicons of any sexual abuse incidents please let us know.

Your evidence will be kept in whatever confidence that you want.

Anyone who was abused is entitled to anonymity in any investigation and newspapers are not legally allowed to use their names.

Don’t let the Comboni Missionaris get away with it.

We need your help – and we need your help now!