By Linen No. 50

The Catholic Church has spent millions of dollars providing pensions, housing, and private medical insurance to convicted paedophile priests despite branding them “evil” and having most defrocked.

The Melbourne archdiocese alone is still financially supporting six former priests who have been convicted for committing sex crimes against children.

Parishioners have unwittingly been partly funding the assistance through their donations into church collection plates, which they believed went towards the local church or fundraising for retired priests.

Church records show two of the paedophiles, priests Wilfred Baker and David Daniel, received hundreds of thousands of dollars alone in annual pensions and entitlements.

Their victims received one-off payments of $31,000 to $37,000 under the church’s Melbourne Response redress scheme.

The decision to continue financially supporting disgraced priests was made by senior church figures in Melbourne and the top advisory council at the Vatican, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to documents tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

A spokesman for the archdiocese of Melbourne said the church is currently providing support to six priests with criminal convictions for child sex crimes, including four who have been “laicised” or defrocked.

Nine other priests have received pensions, housing stipends or private health insurance after their convictions and until their deaths. Many of them had also been defrocked.

“We want to stress that the process as it was through the 1990s and into the 2000s has been changing significantly to a point where now the support is of extremely modest nature,” said Shane Healy, director of media and communications for the archdiocese.

The church is obligated under canon law to support all priests in retirement and old age, but the assistance provided to convicted priests was now “very low”, according to the spokesman.

Among those who received lifetime assistance was Father Wilfred “Bill” Baker, who molested at least 21 children.

The church had received complaints about him as early as 1978. He pleaded guilty to to 16 counts of indecent assault and 1 count of gross indecency in 1999.

The year before, Baker had been allowed to “retire”, a euphemism the church regularly used for priests who were stood down over sex abuse allegations.

The Priests Retirement Foundation paid Baker a pension and housing stipend worth $21,000 a year, as well as covered the costs of his car payments, registration and medical and automotive insurance. The church believes Baker was only priest to ever receive any financial assistance for car.

Adjusting for inflation, the pension and stipend payments would be worth about $33,000 a year now.

In 2010, the assistance was made conditional on Baker obeying an agreement that forbade him to leave his accommodation without permission, approach children or adolescents, celebrate mass in public, or “draw attention to himself”.

He died in 2014 ahead of facing new charges.

In contrast, Baker’s victims received an average one-off compensation payment of just $31,000 under the Melbourne Response.

Not all priests were treated the same, but the church’s commitment to them was lifelong. No financial support was ever provided while they were in prison.

Father Desmond Gannon was convicted of sex crimes on five separate occasions over the past two decades – in 1995, 1997, 2000, 2003 and 2009 – and the church cared for him up until his death.

At various times the support has included a pension, rental allowance and private health insurance.

In 2002, the archdiocese slashed his payments in recognition that the level of support being provided was “no longer appropriate” or consistent with the “Church’s response to issues relating to abuse of power and trust”.

Another convicted priest, David Daniel, was told the same year his stipend would be reduced to $12,000 a year.

But cutting them off completely was never considered an option.

In 2011, Archbishop Denis Hart petitioned to have Gannon defrocked by the Vatican because he had “perpetrated so much evil” and his continued presence in the church was a “cause of scandal to the faithful”.

“I do believe dismissal is imperative yet we will not neglect to care for him in his older age,” Archbishop Hart wrote.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith refused the request, twice, due to concerns about his “advanced age and his feebleness”.

Gannon died in April 2015 at an aged-care facility that cost up to $21,700 a year.

By comparison, the priest’s 22 known victims received an average one-off payment of just $33,000 under the Melbourne Response.

The church also continued to support Michael Glennon for nearly four decades in between prison stints from his first of five convictions in 1978, being defrocked in 1999 and his death two years ago.

The contrast in treatment between abuse victims and perpetrators has outraged Anthony Foster, the father of two of Father Kevin O’Donnell’s 49 victims.

The church offered $50,000 compensation for the trauma suffered by one of his daughters.

O’Donnell, on the other hand, was eligible for a pension and housing stipend between his “retirement” as an honoured pastor emeritus in 1992, conviction in 1995 and death in 1997.

The designation entitled a retired priest to additional remuneration and allowances because of its prestige.

“It’s horrific to think they offered Emma only $50,000 as way to move forward over the rest of her life, yet the church was willing to support a priest they knew was convicted and deserved nothing else than to have to go out into society and fend for himself once he was out of prison,” Mr Foster told The Sunday Age.

O’Donnell’s victims received an average one-off compensation payment of $31,000 each under the Melbourne Response.

Documents tendered to the royal commission also detail how past and current church leaders – including now Cardinal George Pell – took an active role in creating the support system.

In September 1996, then Archbishop of Melbourne Pell chaired a discussion about how three jailed priests – Desmond Gannon, Kevin O’Donnell and Michael Glennon – “can be helped” after their release.

“Possibility of a place (self-contained flat) in Box Hill. Father McMahon mentioned the need for treatment and was invited by the Archbishop to propose what is needed to assist them,” the minutes said.

The royal commission would later find that Gannon’s financial arrangements were orchestrated in such a way that the “support would not be likely to become public”.

Then Archbishop Pell also personally ordered that Wilfred Baker be provided with the top-line pension of a pastor emeritus in 1998 despite being aware of his offending.

That same year, he also sanctioned payments to suspected paedophile Peter Searson, telling him he was entitled to the same benefits as “priests in circumstances similar to yours”.

The Priests Retirement Fund, which is largely funded by contributions from parishioners, was the entity used to support disgraced priests until recently. The archdiocese of Melbourne says it now pays for their upkeep.

“Every bishop has a requirement to provide a minimum living support for all priests, regardless of who they are,” Archbishop Hart testified before the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into sexual abuse in 2013.

The church has declined to comment on the total cost of supporting the 15 priests that have been convicted of child sex crimes or 15 other priests who have been identified as abusers but were never convicted in a criminal court.

The figure is likely to be at least several million dollars in total based on known payments to a number of the priests.

A representative of the archdiocese said the level support provided to convicted priests was determined on a case by case basis but was now “minor”.

“Private medical insurance is maintained to ensure these priests are not a burden on the taxpayer, and each priest’s financial circumstance is reviewed and decisions made according to their capacity to care for themselves. In some circumstances the archdiocese would provide rental accommodation at a modest level,” Mr Healy said.

“No one who is incarcerated ever gets any assistance or benefits while in prison.”

“The Catholic Church Sins Are Ours” —- By F. Bruni

It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.

“Spotlight” — which opens in New York, Los Angeles and Boston on Friday and nationwide later this month — chronicles the painstaking manner in which editors and writers at The Boston Globe documented a pattern of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests and the concealment of these crimes by Catholic leaders.

Because of the movie’s focus on the digging and dot-connecting that go into investigative reporting, it has invited comparisons to “All the President’s Men.”

But it isn’t about journalism. Or, for that matter, Catholicism.

It’s about the damage done when we genuflect too readily before society’s temples, be they religious or governmental. It’s about the danger of faith that’s truly blind.

It takes place in 2001 and 2002, and that time frame itself is a remarkable reflection of how steadfastly most Americans resist any intrusion into religious groups, any indictment of religious officials.

Eight years earlier, James Porter was convicted of sexually abusing 28 children in the 1960s, when he was in the Catholic priesthood. He was believed to have abused about 100 boys and girls in all, most of them in Massachusetts.

Major newspapers and television networks covered the Porter story, noting a growing number of cases of abuse by priests. Porter’s sentencing in December 1993 was preceded by two books that traced the staggering dimensions of such behavior. The first was “Lead Us Not Into Temptation,” by Jason Berry. The second was “A Gospel of Shame,” with which I’m even more familiar. I’m one of its two authors.

But despite all of that attention, Americans kept being shocked whenever a fresh tally of abusive priests was done or new predators were exposed. They clung to disbelief.

“Spotlight” is admirably blunt on this point, suggesting that the Globe staff — which, in the end, did the definitive reporting on church leaders’ complicity in the abuse — long ignored an epidemic right before their eyes.

Why? For some of the same reasons that others did. Many journalists, parents, police officers and lawyers didn’t want to think ill of men of the cloth, or they weren’t eager to get on the bad side of the church, with its fearsome authority and supposed pipeline to God. (After the coverage of the Porter case, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston announced, “We call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”)

“Spotlight” lays out the many ways in which deference to religion protected abusers and their abettors. At one point in the movie, a man who was molested as a boy tells a Globe reporter about a visit his mother got from the bishop, who was asking her not to press charges.
“What did your mother do?” the reporter asks.

“She put out freakin’ cookies,” the man says.

When the cookies finally went away, many Catholic leaders insisted that the church was being persecuted, and the crimes of priests exaggerated, by spiteful secularists.

But if anything, the church had been coddled, benefiting from the American way of giving religion a free pass and excusing religious institutions not just from taxes but from rules that apply to other organizations.

A 2006 series in The Times, “In God’s Name,” noted that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use.” That was before the Supreme Court, in its Hobby Lobby decision, allowed some employers to claim religion as grounds to disobey certain heath insurance mandates.

A story in The Times this week described how various religions are permitted to use internal arbitration procedures to settle disputes that belong in civil court. It cited a federal judge’s ruling that a former Scientologist had to take his claim that Scientology had defrauded him of tens of thousands of dollars before a panel of current Scientologists.

To cloak sexual abuse and shield abusive priests, Catholic leaders and their lawyers routinely leaned on the church’s privileged status, invoking freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and the secrecy of the confessional. They thus delayed a reckoning.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous.

“Spotlight” – Release date in the UK – 29/01/16

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 32,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 12 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Comboni Missionaries

It has been quite along time since I have posted on the blog. I suppose like a lot of us I view the blog most weeks and read recent posts and comments with interest, always promising myself that “next week” I will post or comment myself.

Next week turns into next month …….

Mirfield Abuse

A fire needs feeding or the embers will turn to cold ash. Most of the traffic on the blog these days concerns the abuse that occurred at Mirfield all those years ago. It is a good vehicle for this purpose, but it is still a good way to reminisce and renew old friendships and create new ones.

I have heard a few comments that people need to get “over it, put it behind them and get on with their lives”. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Comments from whatever quarter are welcome,they are the catalyst for debate. To this end I will post a bit more regularly.

Abuse Suffered at School

Some months ago a family member approached me with the revelation that the daughter of a cousin on my wife’s side of the family was struggling alone to come to terms with abuse she suffered at school.

She has set up her own blog as an aid to closure. I had promised to post her details on the blog to gain some support for her so here, “better late than never”

Dave, they are http:/hummingbird02.wordpress.com/author/blueswift82/
Thanks for looking ,comments appreciated.
All the best Degs

Ps thanks for all, too many to mention , who contributed to my ,”This is your life book “for my 60’th birthday (thought I had managed to slip that one under the radar!!!!

If you are interested in this blog you may be interested in seeing the film Spotlight.

Spotlight tells the true story of a Boston Globe investigation that would rock the city and cause a crisis in one of the world’s oldest and most trusted institutions. When the newspaper’s tenacious “Spotlight” team of reporters delve into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovers a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston’s religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world.

http://spotlightthefilm.com/

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/10/spotlight-film-team-launches-investigative-journalism-fellowship

The film is released in the UK on 29 January.

How to Settle 575 Cases of Clerical Sexual Abuse and
Remain Financially Unscathed in Milwaukee.

(Adapted and abridged by Brian Hennessy from a report in the Catholic National Reporter).

In less than two hours a US federal judge approved a plan that allowed the Milwaukee Archdiocese to emerge from bankruptcy after nearly five years of legal battles. Archbishop Jerome Listecki spoke briefly on 9th November 2015 in a courtroom packed with sexual abuse survivors and more than 20 lawyers. Listecki praised the abuse victims for coming forward, saying they had raised the consciousness of the archdiocese and elsewhere. He said, “There is no resolution that will bring back what they have lost,” and he added that he hoped the confirmation of the plan will turn the corner for the archdiocese, allowing it to focus on charitable, educational and spiritual work. “When we have a strong church, we have a strong community”, he said. What he did not say was that the diocese, in filing for bankruptcy, had got off almost scot-free!
Yet, of the 575 abuse survivors, about 120 received only $2,000 each; 336 shared what remained and the remaining 119 got nothing. The archdiocese had reviewed the claims themselves and had assigned the claimants to the various categories. It was a process criticized in court by survivor Steven Schmidt. The survivors were then required to vote on the plan. Some 93 percent of those in the group who were to receive the larger settlements voted to approve the plan – but only 61 percent of the group due to receive the smaller amount approved it. One survivor was placed initially in the category of those who would receive nothing because he could not identify his abuser by name. After he filed a formal objection with the court, the archdiocese identified his abuser. He then questioned how thoroughly the archdiocese had looked for unnamed offenders, thus denying some victims payment. “They knew who these offenders were and covered up their crimes,” he told the National Catholic Reporter. “If you cover up the crime, you shouldn’t be allowed to investigate it.” A dozen other survivors gathered on the steps of the courthouse and vowed to continue their fight for justice. Peter Isely, the Midwest director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and one of the first Milwaukee victims to come forward more than 25 years ago, charged that about 100 priests named in the claims filed by victims remain unnamed by the archdiocese.

Peter Isely also called for an investigation into financial fraud, particularly pertaining to the transfer of some $57 million into a trust fund for the perpetual care of the archdiocese’s cemeteries. As for the allegations, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2011, but Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who was named head of the New York archdiocese in 2009 and a cardinal in 2012, had been talking about the possibility of filing for bankruptcy as early as 2004. However, in 2007, before filing for bankruptcy Archbishop Dolan removed $57 million from the diocesan general fund into a Catholic Cemetary trust fund shortly after the Wisconsin Supreme Court opened the door to lawsuits. At the time, Archbishop Dolan’s letter to the Vatican and the latter’s rapid approval of the plan for the Cemetary trust fund made international headlines. In an editorial, The New York Times called the revelations “shocking.” Peter Isely asserted that the trust fund was created by the Archbishop, in part, to prevent courts from compensating victims of clergy sex abuse and that there seemed to be sufficient evidence and justification, to warrant an investigation.
A lawyer, David Asbach, confirmed that he met with Isely and others from the group but said he could not comment on the case or on whether he made a referral to the U.S. Attorneys Office for prosecution. Jack Ruhl, a professor of accountancy at Western Michigan University who has extensively studied Catholic diocesan finances said that the transfer of the money was unusual. He told the National Catholic Reporter that he had never seen a “reclassification” of funds like this one, albeit one California bishop had been scolded by a bankruptcy judge for not being forthcoming with financial data, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul archdiocese had renamed a fund, making it the property of parishes, before filing for bankruptcy. “It probably has been done in the past in other dioceses, but it’s hard to detect,” Ruhl said. “They don’t have to release any financial data and what is released is not useful.” Ruhl also said the lack of information on how the Milwaukee archdiocese arrived at the amount of money needed for the perpetual care of the cemeteries was not transparent. “I found no explanation in the court documents for how they arrived at that number,” he said.
The losers in the bankruptcy case were not only the Victims who each received meagre payouts – or nothing at all because the diocese would not or could not identify the abusers, but also the State court lawyers who worked for years without pay and will receive up to 40 percent of each of their clients’ settlement. While those lawyers will receive something, they have battled in state courts for 20 years without compensation. The Messmer High School, an independent Catholic school that serves Milwaukee’s African-American community, lost $3.4 million in support that the archdiocese had pledged when the school took over two feeder schools from the archdiocese in 2007. “We Energies”, the provider of electrical power, lost revenue of $129,437 – a sum to be picked up by the other ratepayers in the area. The Milwaukee Water Works lost revenue of $25,589, a sum that will be paid by other users. The Green Bay diocese’s tribunal lost $15,000. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lost $9,621. A number of contractors, office suppliers and other vendors lost between $773 and $9,888. In fact, all creditors were to be paid up to $5,000 of their bills, but lost the rest.
The winners of the legal settlement are, as always, the bankruptcy lawyers representing both the archdiocese and the creditors – who will receive about $20 million. Another $4.5 million will go to the lawyers involved in the cemetery trust litigation that the archdiocese says should not be included in the cost of the bankruptcy. Each of the parishes contributed $2,000 to a therapy fund for abuse victims and, as a consequence, those parishes bought immunity from future lawsuits. The Milwaukee archdiocese gained a fresh start without debt; it sold no property to reach the settlement. It emerged from the bankruptcy settlement largely intact. The diocesan cemetary fund is $57 million better off!

Leading pianist backs new bid to encourage victims of paedophiles to break their silence.

“Being heard, being met with belief, understanding and compassion, feeling safe from judgment, criticism and blame – these things are the keys to rebuilding trust and starting the healing process,” he writes.

… an article in today’s Sunday Observer — well worth reading.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/dec/13/abused-pianist-says-threats-keep-victims-silent

Today for the first time in many years l have seen the name of Domenico Vallmagia who abused me when he was in charge of the infirmary. My reaction to this was to beg my parents not to make me return after the summer holidays. My father was adamant that I return. I couldn’t tell him my reason for not going back. I was duly bundled off to the station and sent back. I’m not really clear as to how things happened thereafter. I know that I started wetting the bed, a very humiliating occurrence in a shared dormitory. I was a very confident boy, this did not help. I think a small cohort of us got a bit rebellious. I might have got a little aggressive with one or two who thought of themselves as the chosen ones. I don’t remember the date but I was ignominiously booted out ( I can verify the date ). ” Sent home in DISGRACE!” My father picked me up at the station and didn’t speak to me for ten years! My home life from there on was a misery. This lead from me being a promising student to pretty much failing a every level. This has greatly affected my life choices. It was not until my mid forties that I established any sort of relationship with my father. It was not until his death that this all came flooding back. Although I still never broached the subject with him.

The Cost to the Catholic Church of Clerical Sexual Abuse

A recently published academic paper, “Losing my Religion: The Effects of Religious Scandals on Religious Participation and Charitable Giving”, was published in the September issue of the United States “Journal of Public Economics” by the authors, Nicholas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Truglia. The latter, previously an economist working with Microsoft, was recently interviewed by the “Catholic Reporter”.

On the face of it, this paper by two Chilean economists on the economic effects of Catholic Church scandals in the United States is a bit “heavy” for the average “O” level mathematician! However, the conclusions of the research into 3,000 sexual abuse scandals in US Catholic Church parishes is nothing less than staggering. This is not on account of the costs of the legal fees and settlements alone – which in the last four decades has totalled approximately US$ 3 billion – but the surprise revelation of the report is the ongoing annual decline in charitable donations to Church parishes and Church activities that were directly affected by the abuse.

The analysis revealed that incidents of clerical sexual abuse have had a direct and “permanent” impact on not only charitable giving, but also on “religious affiliation” in those parishes where clerical sexual abuse had been revealed. During the 40 years studied the average “annual” decline (year on year) in charitable giving has been calculated to have been US$ 2.36 billion. That is a total of US$ 94.4 billion! Many Catholics (10%}abandoned the Catholic Church altogether and children were withdrawn from Catholic schools. As a result of the latter, it is estimated that in the period 2002-2010, 23% of the 1,130 Catholic school closures in the United States were directly attributable to abuse scandals.

A re-examination of Catholic affilition in parishes affected by abuse scandals after a 10 year period has revealed that there has been no recovery of the losses in affiliation subsequent to the decline. Furthermore, the research found that those that had abandoned the Catholic Church had not lost their “faith”, but they had simply abandoned the Catholic Church as an “institution”. Many were found by the researchers to be attending services at churches of other denominations.

The abandonment of the Catholic Church as an institution, I deduce, must be attributable to the manner in which abuses cases were handled by the Bishops and Religious Leaders as much as to the incidents of clerical abuse itself. The scenario is now well known: failure to investigate, oaths of secrecy, denial, obfuscation, destruction of documents, failure to report to civil authorities, and the shunting around of paedophile clerics to new parishes where they remained unmonitored and re-offended. The list goes on.

I suggest that the United States experience is not an isolated one. Indeed the United Kingdom group of abused seminarians, known as the “Mirfield 12”, are fully aware that the London Province of the Comboni Missionary Order is suffering. In 2014 I looked at their accounts lodged with the Charities Commission. I was able to deduce that the average income from donations in the period 2008 to 2012 had been in the region of Pounds Sterling1,250,000. In 2013, when the abuses at Mirfield started to break in public awareness, the donations had slumped to Pounds Sterling 877,740. In 2014, the period of maximum public exposure of the sexual abuse that had been perpetrated at the seminary, there was a further decline in donations to Pounds Sterling 624,507. If the United States findings are mirrored in the United Kingdom, the Comboni Missionary Order can expect a further – and even a continual – decline in the level of donations. Ongoing legal actions and the possibility of futher legal cases will maintain the Order in continually hightened Catholic visibility. Given the Order’s high administrative costs and additional “extraordinary expenditure”, this may give rise to the future scenario that the Order’s continued presence within the British Isles is financially no longer viable.

It is interesting to note, as in the case of the United States experience, that a loss of religious affiliation goes hand in hand with a decline in charitable giving. This is clearly not attributable only to the original sexual abuse itself, but also to the manner in which the appropriate authorities have dealt with it. Of course, apart from Battersea and Sunningdale, the Comboni Missionary Order does not operate in specific parishes. Nevertheles, the Catholic public throughout the United Kingdom will already be well aware from press revelations (and no less from this website) that the Comboni Missionary Order, contrary to statements made by Pope Francis and the policies of the British Catholic Hierarchy, have not managed the allegations of abuse well. Indeed, they have flouted Canon Laws, Civil laws, Safeguarding Policies and their own Code of Conduct – in addition to maintaining the public stance that the Victims are “money-grabbing liars”. Things could have been different. The Victims wanted understanding, a hearing and an apology. They got silence – broken only by denials and malignant jibes. The Comboni Missionary Order will reap what they have sewn – and it is already clear that their crop is lessening year by year.

Hi. I read your concerns with great interest as your story mirrors that of so many of us – and your reflections on the hold of religion on innocents from birth through to the grave is universal. I also noted your hesitation. You know what you should do, but you refrain from doing it -because the power exerted by religion -every religion – is both colossal and insidiously polluting to the innocent mind. Priests were all god-like. They could do no wrong… and even when they have committed heinous crimes against you – you remain ambivalent about the logical solution. I was the same as you. If it had been left to me – I would have continued to suffer in my mental turmoil – find excuses for the priest who made me captive and abused me at will – and juggled, forgetting absurdly that I was child at the time, with guilt as to whether I was complicit, or enjoyed the abuse or egged him on. The fact is that I was so bloody naive and trusted my abuser so implicitly that I would not have noticed if I had journeyed to Hell and back during his self-gratifying and sordid abuse. He was a priest. He was God’s right hand man on this earth – and I wanted to be like him. So what turned me into a Victim with a cause? Just one thing. It was not what “he” did to me so much as what the Comboni Missionary Order did to him. Nothing! That is: nothing negative! The continual abuse of minors by this priest was not the subject of any inquiry. He was not reported to the Constabulary for a crime in accordance with UK law. He thus was never charged in a criminal court for his crimes. He was not reported to the Vatican. He was thus not defrocked. He was temporarily considered for a mission appointment where he could continue to abuse children at will- but ill-health prevented that. Eventually he was “incardinated” to a parish in his home province of Como so that he could be near his family -and he was given a nice pension to enjoy his semi-retirement for the rest of his days. When I tried to make contact with him through the Order in later life, they told me, in effect, that he was dead – but he was not dead and the Order knew that very well. Of all these failures of the Comboni Missionary Order that prompted me into action -was the fact that the Order habitually disposed of criminal child abusers to the missions -or in the case of the priest who abused me -to a parish -where there was the opportunity for a criminal paedophile cleric to continue his self-gratifying debauchery. That is not God’s work. It is the work of all-powerful, perfidious, pernicious, unaccountable religion. They were more concerned with their own image than the crimes committed against children. Put differently – being a money-making enterprise -they were concerned with a reduction to the flow of donations. In a strange twist of logic, they refer to Victims as “money-grabbing liars” – apparently absurdly oblivious to the fact that they are precisely that. I think your only realistic option in conscience – would be to show them your Ace cards – and call their bluff. Its time for action my dear friend Boy X -whose true name I know not -but whose suffering I have felt for so long. It will help you to stand proud again – to be unashamed – to be whole and to be purged of the stink of the defilement of your innocence – as opposed to your inaction -which helps them.