Retain Abuse Survivors in the Pontifical Commission  Or Risk Irrelevancy
(Brian Mark Hennessy has paraphrased this Editorial which appeared in the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) on 1st September 2017 – and provided additional comments below).
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It is distressing to learn that the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors may be restructured so that survivors of sexual abuse by clergy may have no direct voice in that body. The commission has helped the church make great strides in addressing this global issue, but it is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Signs of trouble with the commission began to surface in 2016, a year after its inception, when one of two abuse survivors on the commission, Peter Saunders, was suspended. The trouble became acute when the sole remaining survivor on the commission, Marie Collins, resigned earlier this year. Collins resigned because she felt Vatican bureaucracy was neglecting and stalling the work of the commission. The commission is understaffed, underfunded and not accepted by offices at the Vatican that should be working with it, Collins said.
In 2015, Pope Francis announced the creation of this commission. At that time, NCR said:
“It is a new phase in the abuse crisis. For the first time, there is clear evidence that the people’s cry for justice and action has reached the Pope and his closest advisers.”
We were then told that, on the recommendation of the Pope’s nine-member Council of Cardinals, a Tribunal would be established to charge bishops of “abuse of office” when they mishandled cases concerning the sexual abuse of children. At that time, NCR said:
“Never before has the language describing the mishandling of these cases by bishops, and, by extension, their diocesan officers, been so strong.”
Regrettably, that Tribunal never came to be. We have now been told, two years later, that what was announced was not an “approved plan”, but was rather the “enthusiastic encouragement” from the Pope to begin a discussion of possibilities. Is this not a further example of the same intransigence and obfuscation that drove Collins from the commission?
“Why in the world would anyone, including pontifical commission members, think that a papal announcement which said one thing actually meant another?” NCR now asks.
“Why has it taken two years for this clarification to be given?” NCR now asks.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors began well and has made huge contributions in educating Catholics across the globe about the issue of abuse of minors and vulnerable adults. It has given many people the tools to address the issue. The job entrusted to the commission is too important to the life of the church to allow the body to fade into irrelevance. To prevent irrelevancy, the commission must ensure that survivors have direct participation in its work – and the commission itself needs a strong, public endorsement by Francis.
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Comments by Brian Mark Hennessy
Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse at the hands of the Comboni Missionary Order fully endorse the National Catholic Reporter in their historic struggle to bring both those clergy who have abused children to account and, additionally, also those members of the Catholic Hierarchy who have failed in their Christian and Civil duties by protecting and shielding those same child-abusing clerics from justice.
Indeed rather than abandoning the original very clearly expressed wishes of Pope Francis to establish a Tribunal, the Comboni Survivors of child sexual abuse at the hands of the members of the Comboni Missionary Order declare emphatically that the promised Vatican Tribunals should be extended to charge all Superior Generals, Provincial Superiors and Local Superiors who have similarly covered up crimes of child sexual abuse by clerics under their governance – and have protected those perpetrators of such heinous criminality from Justice.
It is abundantly clear that the members of the Lay Catholic Church, who, as baptized Catholics, are equal in Canon Law to the Ordained Clergy of the Church, demand this. The Vatican will continue to be regarded as errant, pretentious, dysfunctional, and increasingly irrelevant whilst severe and appropriate justice for child abusers and those who protect them is outrageously ignored by Vatican, Diocesan and Religious Clerics.
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Pope Francis says Sexual Abuse by Priests is an “Absolute Monstrosity”
In the foreword to memoirs by a survivor of clerical abuse, the Pope promises action, but critics say that he has said this before, but not done nearly enough to hold clerical perpetrators to account.

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About This Article as Published in the Mirfield Memories Blog.

Pope Francis recently made his comments in the “Foreword” to a book by Daniel Pittet, who was abused by a priest when he was eight years old. “Reuters” published an article on 17th August 2017 and the German news outlet “Bild” added further comments prior to publishing a resume in their own columns. That article followed on from the publication of excerpts by “Herder”, the German publisher of the book. The UK daily “The Guardian” published a review of all the above last weekend. Brian Mark Hennessy has paraphrased these contributions below and also added a separate article below entitled “What the UK Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse Doesn’t want to Know”.

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Pope Francis has branded sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests a “monstrosity” and pledged action against perpetrators and bishops who protected them. He made the comments in the foreword of a new book entitled “Father, I Forgive You: Abused But Not Broken”, written by a Swiss man, Daniel Pittet, who was first raped by a priest when he was eight years old.
Pope Francis, whose repeated promises of zero tolerance have been criticised by victims who say the Vatican needs to do much more, called sexual abuse “an absolute monstrosity, a terrible sin that contradicts everything that the Church teaches”. He continued, “The fate of abused children weighed on his soul, especially those who had taken their own lives. We will counter those priests who betrayed their calling with the most strenuous measures. This also applies to the bishops and cardinals who protected these priests – as happened repeatedly in the past,” he wrote.
Church sexual abuse broke into the open in the United States with reports of cases in Louisiana in 1984, and exploded in 2002, when journalists in Boston found that bishops had systematically moved abusers to new posts instead of defrocking them. Thousands of cases have come to light around the world as investigations have encouraged long-silent victims to go public, shattering the Church’s reputation. More than $2bn has been paid in compensation.
In Ireland, a 10-year inquiry into child abuse within the Catholic church and church-run institutions concluded in 2009 after documenting thousands of cases of beatings, rapes, neglect and exploitation. A similar inquiry in Australia, which began in 2013, was also established following revelations of clergy being moved between parishes to cover up abuse. Thousands of survivors of child sexual abuse have testified to the inquiry, which was not limited to the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis’ efforts against sexual abuse since his election in 2013 have sputtered. Critics say he has not done enough to hold to account those bishops who mishandled cases of abuse or covered it up, and a Vatican commission formed in 2014 to advise him on rooting it out has been hit by internal dissent. Peter Saunders, an English victim of clergy abuse, took a leave of absence last year in protest over a lack of progress. Marie Collins, from Ireland, also a victim of abuse when she was a child, quit in frustration in March, citing a “shameful” lack of co-operation within the Vatican.
In his foreword, Pope Francis praised Pittet’s courage in telling his story, saying he was deeply moved by his ability to forgive his abuser 44 years after he was first molested. The Church has now defrocked the abuser. Pittet, now 58, who as a child endured four years of rapes, abuse and exposure to pornography, wrote that his act of forgiveness had nothing to do with human justice or denial. Pittet wrote in the book, according to excerpts released by the German publisher Herder:
“Forgiveness does not heal the wounds or wipe away the misery … forgiving him has allowed me to burst the chains that bound me to him and which prevented me from living.”

Pope Pledges To Go After Child Abusers And Clergy Who Hide Them – By Joshua Gill

Pope Francis promised to crack down on child sex abusers, and the bishops who protect them, in the foreword of a new book published Wednesday.

Francis wrote the foreword for “Father, I Forgive You: Abused But Not Broken,” an autobiographical book by Daniel Pittet, according to Reuters. Pittet, a 58-year-old Swiss man, wrote the book as an account of the rape he endured at the hands of a priest beginning at 8 years old and his journey toward forgiving his abuser. Francis, moved by Pittet’s story, wrote that the Church will root out abusers and the clergy who helped hide their crimes.

“We will counter those priests who betrayed their calling with the most strenuous measures. This also applies to the bishops and cardinals who protected these priests — as happened repeatedly in the past,” Francis wrote.

Francis’ call for justice came less than two weeks after investigators unveiled a massive abuse scandal in the Catholic Church of Guam that rivaled the Boston church abuse cases. Some survivors of abuse within the Church have criticized Francis over his lack of progress in stamping out abuse since he became pope in 2013.

Peter Saunders, a sexual abuse survivor and member of a Vatican council formed in 2014 to help Francis combat child abuse, protested a lack of cooperation from the Vatican in 2016 by taking a leave of absence. Marie Collins, also a survivor of church sex abuse, quit the council in March for the same reason.

“Forgiveness does not heal the wounds or wipe away the misery … forgiving him has allowed me to burst the chains that bound me to him and prevented me from living,” Pittet wrote in his book.

The Church defrocked the priest that abused Pittet.

Francis has yet to announce any new, concrete plans, in conjunction with his renewed promise, for putting an end to child abuse within the Church.

The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness review – a tale of betrayal by the church  – by Peter Stanford

In the link below, the article by Peter Stanford rings so true to many that were abused as children by Catholic clergy.

In sections on this blog you can read many accounts from  the Comboni Survivor Group that are similar to the experiences, feelings and struggles that Graham Caveney faced.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/07/the-boy-with-the-perpetual-nervousness-review-graham-caveney-betrayal-by-the-church

THE DESPAIR WROUGHT BY THE DECISION OF THE IICSA CHAIR

Below is a link to the Solicitors Howe and Company ‘News Story’ section of their website.

It contains a brief introduction by Howe and Company, followed by Brain Hennessey’s personal reflection on the Chair’s decision regarding the Comboni Survivor Group and the Inquiry.

http://www.howe.co.uk/news/the-despair-wrought-by-the-decision-of-the-iicsa-chair

THE DESPAIR WROUGHT BY THE DECISION OF THE IICSA CHAIR – by Brian Mark Hennessy

Late this afternoon I received news that I had long both expected and dreaded. It was that the Chair, Professor Alexis Jay of the United Kingdom Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, had announced that the Survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic Priests of the Comboni Missionary Order (formerly known as the Verona Fathers) had been denied their application for that Order to be declared a Case Study. I was “gutted”. I put on my coat and I went for a walk by the River Frome and along the bridleways of the Dorchester wetlands. I was the only soul venturing out in the greyness. It was pouring with rain, but I hardly noticed how drenched I was for I was so deep in thought. The sudden awareness that the weather was most inclement for such a countryside expedition did not deter me from stepping further forward in the direction that I had initially embarked upon.
For a while, I thought back on the days when I first knew that I was not alone in having been abused. I had looked up my old school on the internet – a Catholic Seminary named St Peter Claver College at Mirfield in Yorkshire – to see if it still existed. It was an idle moment in which I was filling out a few “about” facts on Facebook. What I discovered was a chat-site for old boys and in it there were contributions by past seminarians that once I had known. I was taken aback by the ongoing discussion – which was which boy had been sexually abused by which priest. “My God!”, I thought, “I was not the only one!”
I made the briefest contribution to the online conversation which was something akin to thinking that I had always thought that I was the only one who had been abused. I soon learned, however, that a group of ex-seminarians from Mirfield had joined forces to take concerted joint action for the abuse that they had suffered. I was reluctant initially to join them. However, on reading further into the story, I learned that many of the seminarians who had been abused had reported the abuse at the time of the abuse. I also discovered that the Order’s resultant reaction was simply to move the priests on to third world mission countries where those errant priests would be able to continue to abuse untold numbers of children without fear of recriminations. I was suddenly convinced that I had a moral duty – for the sake of those children – to join the group.
A few years before these incidences, I had already contacted the Provincial Superior of the United Kingdom Province of the Order to discover if the priest, Father Domenico Valmaggia, who had sexually abused me twice a day for two weeks in the Seminary Infirmary, was still alive. To some it might seem strange, but the reason why I wanted to know was so that I could meet him. It may seem extraordinary, but I wanted to hear from this priest why he had selected me for abuse. I wanted to hear from his own lips if he now regretted seeking me out for his sexual gratification. I wanted to know if he was sorry for having given in to his former base urges. I needed to understand. For some reason, I also needed to forgive him. In my heart, I knew that a sincere apology from him and my forgiveness of him would have provided me with a sense of “closure” – a feeling of “peace of mind” – a form of “reconciliation”.
The Provincial, whom I had known when he was a newly ordained priest, responded that Father Valmaggia was probably dead by that time as he would have been very old. Nevertheless, I requested that he undertook a check of the records pertaining to both the living and the deceased members of the Order. He said that he would do so. On contacting the Provincial again, he informed me that Father Valmaggia was not recorded anywhere in the records of the Order. I, therefore, assumed that Valmaggia was indeed dead. Unbeknown to me at the time, however, the Provincial had a secret archive in which records of members of the Order who had been accused of sexual abuse were retained. Indeed, if the documents had not been retained in that archive as the Order’s own Rules required, there was yet another secret archive held by the Vicar General of the Order in Rome which contained the same information. The Provincial of the Order would have known this – for he had worked in the Order’s Rome Curia for a number of years beforehand. At that moment and in my ignorance of the internal processes of the Order, however, I began to accept the fact that Father Valmaggia had, indeed, passed away. Yet I was wrong in that assumption.
Had the Provincial been concerned enough and proactive enough in response to my enquiries, he would have discovered that Father Valmaggia was indeed still living when I first contacted him. He would also have become aware that Father Valmaggia had been “incardinated” (transferred) to the Diocese of Como in Northern Italy in 1976. There, in the parish of Bedero Valcuvia, he would have had unfettered access to children, presumably. Father Valmaggia retired in 2006 and died in 2011 – and his death was recorded in an official publication of the Comboni Missionary Order. My search, some years earlier, for solace and peace of mind was denied me – perhaps by the lack of concern of the Provincial – but, quite possibly, intentionally. The fact is that either by negligence or design, the Comboni Missionary Order failed me grievously and denied me the closure to the torments and self-doubts in my mind.
There is good reason to believe that the failure to determine or to impart to me that Father Valmaggia was still alive at that time when I made my enquiry and the failure to divulge that he was located in the Como Parish of Bedero Valcuvia could have been more than a simple lack of concern. A recent incident was fraught with outright hostility when Mark Murray, another sexually abused seminarian from Mirfield, made a visit to the Order’s Mother House at Verona to seek understanding and a reconciliation with Father Romano Nardo who had repeatedly and callously abused when he was a most vulnerable child. He was met with outright hostility when he was discovered to be on the premises and was virtually thrown out to the accompanying jeer that he and the other ex-seminarians who claimed to have been abused by members of the Comboni Missionary Order were all “money-grabbers”. Indeed, they went further than that with their retribution – and in the Criminal Court of Verona alleged against Mark Murray charges of trespass, stalking and interfering in the private life of Father Romano Nardo – the very priest who had abused him as a child. To their shame the Judge of the Criminal Court threw out the charges as having no substance. The Comboni Order was not deterred however and appealed – but that appeal was also thrown out by the Judge as being based on the same falsehoods that had been previously presented as evidence to the Criminal Court.
Following my failure to get traction in the case of Father Valmaggia, I engaged my energies, along with the Comboni Survivors Group that I had joined, to seeking broad recognition of the past abuse by priests of the Comboni Missionary Order. We were met with a wall of silence – which, in a deafeningly loud way – was tantamount to outrageous, outright denial. In statements to the United Kingdom national press the Comboni Missionary Order suggested time and again that the alleged abuse took place so long ago that that the “truth” could not now be determined. In doing so they were suggesting that I and the others who were abused were either incapable of recalling the truth or were lying. For my part – I know that the abuse was a fact – because it happened to me! For years the Comboni Order have not responded in any way to allegations of the abuse. This is not just in stark contrast with the stance of the Vatican and the United Kingdom Hierarchy on the matter, but also a negation of their very own Code of Conduct on the procedures to be followed when sexual abuse is reported to them.
Their denials, of course, do not wash away the actual true facts of the sexual abuse that haunt my mind. The image of the priest looking piercingly into my eyes as he masturbated me – imploring me with those eyes to submit complicitly to his desires – remains clearly fixed in my store of mental images. Other ex-seminarians from Mirfield have similar recollections of images that have blighted their lives and haunt them still today. One, in the intimate moments with his partner fifty years later is still blighted by recollected images of a priest’s naked torso bearing over him as he was repeatedly raped as a child. Another has nightmares still of the image of a crucifix carved by a sharp instrument into the torso of the priest revealing himself naked before him.
On behalf of and assisted by the Comboni Survivor Group, I was not idle in the pursuit of some form of justice. I researched relentlessly for information. I corresponded unceasingly with other seminarians and carefully collated information on the abuse inflicted upon them. Reaching beyond the core group itself, I collated information of alleged instances of abuse from ex-seminarians who were so damaged that they felt unable to reveal themselves both then and even today. Some of them, with whom I have made contact through a third party are only known to me as “Boy X”, “Y” or “Z”. To my astonishment, I came across ex-seminarians who were still so traumatized after fifty years lapse of time that they were unable to even begin to think about coming to terms with the facts of the abuse that they had suffered. Ultimately, following careful collation of their stories, I deduced that the minimum number of individual acts of sexual abuse at the Comboni Missionary Order’s seminaries in the United Kingdom from the late 1950’s to the early 1980’s, each incident a crime in its own right, was in excess of 1000 incidents. That figure frightened me – as I believed that my calculation would be widely ridiculed. I went over and over the figures again and again. The fact remained that a number of those seminarians reported that abuse occurred incessantly night after night in term times (except, I should add for absolute correctness, on weekends – when a number of priests were obliged to visit parish churches to make appeals for money for the “missions”). Some boys were even abused by one priest in the same room and at the same time as others were being abused. Some recall that as they left an abusing priest’s room, another unsuspecting seminarian victim had been summoned – and was waiting outside the room.
Eventually, I published my report, lengthily entitled,
“The Comboni Missionary Order of Verona, Italy, and their Response to Child Sexual Abuse – A Text Book For Institutions On How Not To Manage Allegations Of Child Sexual Abuse – And Why The Comboni Missionary Order Will Deny Allegations Of 1000 Crimes Committed Against Boy Seminarians In Their Care at Mirfield, Yorkshire, England”.
I sent a copy of the Report to every Bishop in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. I sent copies to every Comboni Missionary Priest throughout the world (over 1000 of them) – including to every member of their hierarchy. I sent a copy to every Bishops’ Conference throughout the world. I sent a copy to every Cardinal in the Roman Curia. Cardinal Nichols of Westminster, took a copy by hand to the Vatican and handed it to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
I had one response only to those efforts. It was from an old Italian priest, who gave me his name, but asked to remain anonymous. He said to me that he did not understand English very well, but that he had sat down and read the report – and it took three hours for him to do so – and when he had finished – he said that he “felt ashamed”.
The United Kingdom Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was the last hope left to myself and the other sexually abused seminarians to make the Comboni Missionary Order account for their silent indifference to our need for “closure”. We had always hoped that through that process the miracle of the Comboni Order’s acquiescence to the “truth” would bring forth the future opportunity for dialogue, reconciliation and peace.
As I continued to walk in the rain this evening, I sought to brace myself for the new and sudden realisation that the long quest for the prize of “truth” is over. I will have to live the remaining years of my life with one certain fact. That is, that in practical terms, the failure to bring the Comboni Missionary Order to account by the last bastion of truth and justice available to me, the United Kingdom’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse under the direction of the Chair, Professor Alexis Jay, is as much the enemy of the truth, reconciliation and atonement that I and my colleagues have long strived for as the entrenched obfuscation and prevarication of the Comboni Missionary Order of Verona itself.

Brian Mark Hennessy
28th July 2017.

(Note: Prior to the publication of this article on the Mirfield Memories site, approval was sought from the German Jesuit, Father Hans Zollner.  Father Hans  is the President  of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors created by Pope Francis in 2014, is academic vice-rector of the Jesuit-run Gregorian University in Rome and head of its Institute of Psychology.)

The Vatican Radio interview with Father Hans  was published by Zenit.  Zenit  is a non-profit news agency that reports on the Catholic Church and issues important to it from the perspective of Church doctrine. Zenit’s motto is, “The world seen from Rome.”

“We Must Look at Reality in the Face,”  Says Father Hans Zollner

The President of the Center for the Protection of Minors, of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Comments on the “Regensburger Domspatzen” Report

“We must look at reality in the face and we must address all the injustices, sins, crimes that were committed by priests and also other employees of the Church,” stressed Jesuit Fr. Hans Zollner, president of the Center for the Protection of Minors of the Pontifical Gregorian University, in an interview with Vatican Radio, in which he commented on the publication of the Report on abuses (sexual and non-sexual) in the school of the prestigious choir of “Regensburger Domspatzen” (Sparrows of the Regensburg Cathedral).

“It was the courage of the bishop to throw light on a truly very profound darkness,” stressed Father Zollner. “He gave the task to a lawyer to whom he offered all the possibilities, not only giving access to the files, but also in contacting the victims and speaking with other people involved,” continued the German Jesuit and psychologist, who spoke of “a very well done Report and unobjectionable in its vastness, in its profundity and also in its scientific merit.”

According to Father Zollner, who moreover is a native of Regensburg, the Report constitutes “a very important step, also for the sensitization of the whole society and for all institutions be of the Church, be it outside of the Church.”

The report on the abuses perpetrated on pupils of the school of one of the oldest and most famous choirs of children’s voices in the world was presented yesterday, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, by Ulrich Weber, the outside lawyer and investigator charged by the German diocese in 2015.

From the document, published under the motto ‘Hinsehen, Zuhoren, Antworten” (Look, Listen, Respond) it emerges that from 1945 to the first years of the ‘90s, at least 547 pupils (but the real figure could be even higher) in the choir school of the Cathedral of Regensburg, suffered physical, corporal and psychological violence, and 67 of them were also victims of sexual abuses.

The voluminous report does not even spare the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, who for three decades (from 1964 to 1993) directed the choir, or the former Bishop of Regensburg and former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller, for not having grasped the malaise of the young choristers or for not having reacted appropriately.

My name is John Paul Foran. I am in Gerry ‘s
Picture of the junior football team. I am
The tallest boy nearest the camera .
My two Easter ‘s spent at Mifriend were the trip to London (Zulu the movie ).The second Easter was Tenby South Wales. If anyone
remembers the ice cream parlour owned by an
Italian gentleman of course. Do you remember
the picture he gave to the young seminarians
on our last day of holiday. Of course Fritz claimed it was given to just him.

The cover ups of sexual abuse  by the Catholic Church and religious orders, and the distress this causes the victims of sexual abuse is a common theme running  through this blog. However, I believe it is worth noting again.

The following paragraphs are taken from an article by Catherine Pepinster

The Catholic abuse scandal is a worldwide one, and has led to disturbing cases being exposed not only in Australia, but also the US, Ireland, Germany and Britain. There are common denominators when it comes to how the church has dealt with cases: the victims are often traduced, the focus is put on the distress of the accused rather than on the victims, and the church strives to cover up the scandal, concerned above all about its own position and standing.

This came through strongly in the Boston sex abuse scandal, highlighted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, which rocked the strongly Irish-American Catholic city. Then the scandal was exposed by Boston Globe journalists, who discovered a systemic cover-up involving the Catholic church and lawyers. Cardinal Bernard Law was accused of actively participating in the concealing of assaults by paedophile priests. He resigned in 2002 and it has taken the church years in Boston to repair the damage done there, not only by the assaults but by the cover-ups.

As Fr Klaus Mertes, a German Jesuit who has studied the church’s handling of abuse cases, has said, this lack of concern for abuse “is generally just as painful for the victims as is sexualised violence by an individual offender”.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=THE+SHCKING+TRUTH+WHY+POPE+BENEDICT+RESIGNED