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WHY THE CASE OF THE COMBONI MISSIONARY ORDER WILL HELP IICSA SHAPE THE FUTURE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL ABUSE

By Brian Mark Hennessy

Cardinal Pell is the Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See and is widely reported as being the third-ranking Cardinal in the Vatican. Pell disputes his Vatican ranking as false, I should note first of all. Presumably that is because it would be unbecoming that the Catholic Church, widely regarded by most international economists as the richest institution in the world, had any interest whatsoever in wealth! After all had not Saint Matthew written in his Gospel: “You cannot serve God and Mammom”. That aside, Cardinal Pell is more infamous than famous in the world today for his appearances at the Australian Royal Commission – and for the “as yet untried” outstanding allegations of child sexual abuse against him..

I should say at the outset, that I am not a big fan of Cardinal Pell – but I know nothing of the veracity or otherwise of his claims of innocence regarding a host of allegations of sexual abuse when he was a young priest – and nor his alleged cover up of the crimes of other clerics when he was a Bishop and later Archbishop of Sidney. Whilst I can make no judgements about those affairs, I confess that I do not have much admiration for his comment to the Australian Inquiry when he responded to his knowledge of alleged abuse in 1975 at the Inglewood parish in the State of Victoria with the words, “It was a sad story, but not of much interest to me at the time”. When I heard those words as I watched that broadcast on live television, I gasped incredulously at his incurious aloofness to the sexual abuse of a child.

However, when Cardinal Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic, appeared before the Australian Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse he did say something that was true – well, almost true. He stated, “The Catholic Church was (in the past) more concerned with protecting its own reputation than helping victims of clergy abuse, and had a “predisposition not to believe” children who made complaints. At that stage, the instinct was more to protect the institution, the community of the Church, from shame. The Church, in many places has made enormous mistakes and is working to remedy those, but the Church has mucked things up, has let people down. I’m not here to defend the indefensible.”

What was wrong about Cardinal Pell’s comments above was not the content, but simply the tense. Whilst the Catholic Church claims that they have done much to rectify their past criminal record of concealment of child sexual abuse, have ended their protection of paedophile clerics from civic criminal action and have ceased their victimization of the very children who had been subjected to heinous abuse – many of their clerics are not yet on board that specific vision of St Peter’s fishing boat on a becalmed Galilean Sea.

To use an expression out of the very mouth of Cardinal Pell (that, incidentally, I have not heard since my youth) there are clerics in the Catholic Church today who are still “mucking” thing up and the Church knows that very well. Indeed, one Cardinal Archbishop, who is regularly seen in the marbled colonnades of the Vatican, was overheard in a church gathering very recently to have said in a conversation about the Italian Comboni Missionary Order of Verona that they are “fools”. Such a comment is not a shocking surprise to me given that I know that a 170 page document on sexual crimes committed by members of that Italian Religious Institute against child seminarians at Mirfield in Yorkshire, England, has been in the possession of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for nearly two years. Indeed, I know also that it has been read by that same Cardinal who is purported to have pinned the label of “fools” on the “Missionari Comboniani”.

The Italian Comboni Missionary Order, in their Roman Curia, their Verona Mother House and their United Kingdom Provincial Headquarters at Sunningdale in Berkshire continues to this day to live in that past described by Cardinal Pell. Their principle concern remains to protect their own reputation more than it is to help victims of clergy abuse. They still have a “predisposition not to believe” Victims who have made complaints. They continue to demonstrate an instinct to protect their institution from shame, continue to make the mistake of failing to work to remedy the errors they have made in the past – and continue, in Cardinal Pell’s words, “to muck things up and let people down”.

Considering that the Comboni Missionary Religious Institute will be coming under significant scrutiny shortly from the United Kingdom’s ongoing Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in their Catholic Church deliberations, it is hardly surprising that members of the most senior echelons of the Curia in the Catholic Church are expressing both their frustration and exasperation.

IICSA will be using the case of the Comboni Missionary Order’s United Kingdom Province and Italian Curia to determine how “not” to manage issues of child sexual abuse in the future. The fact is that the Comboni Missionary Order is “mucking” things up to this very day. Curiously, that is precisely why IICSA has a specific interest in that Religious Institute. It is most opportune for IICSA to have a live and kicking body with the continuing symptoms today of the disease they are investigating. That will assist them in determining the remedies for the prevention of that disease, its cure and, hopefully, through monitoring, education and cultural changes, its ultimate elimination in the future!

AN ITALIAN PRIEST DRAWS FIRE AFTER VICTIM BLAMING
A RAPE SURVIVOR

By Claire Giangrave, 15th November 2017 writing for “CRUX”

On Nov. 3, a 17-year-old girl went to the Maggiore Hospital in Bologna, in northern Italy, saying that she had been raped and robbed. She had spent the night in Piazza Verdi, a party-area of town, and had gotten drunk, when she realized her cell-phone was missing. That’s when she said she met a man from North Africa, according to media reports, who took her to a train station where he allegedly raped her. She told police that she later woke up half-naked and without her personal belongings.

This did not sit well with the local parish priest, Father Lorenzo Guidotti, who was quick to write a post on his private Facebook account saying that he has no pity for the young woman, who, in his view, was responsible for what happened to her. “I mean, honey, I am sorry, but (1) you frequent Piazza Verdi (which has become the a**hole of Bologna!! (2) You get disgustingly drunk! Why? If you participate in the (sub) culture of mayhem, it’s your f***ing business if the morning after you wake up who knows where,” he wrote in the post. Guidotti then underlined that for the past 50 years, he has woken up in his own bed. He also criticized the young woman for leaving with a North African. “After the mistake of getting drunk, who do you walk away with? A North African? Notoriously, especially in Piazza Verdi, very gentlemanly, all professionals, teachers, people of culture, good people,” he wrote. The priest also said that the young woman drank not only alcohol but also the “ideological pull of ‘let’s welcome them all’,” referring to pro-immigration policies that have been enacted under Italy’s current center-left government. “Honey, at this point waking up half-naked is the least that could happen. I’m sorry, but if you swim in the piranha tank, you can’t complain if when you get out, you’re missing an arm,” Guidotti wrote. “Should I feel pity? No.” The priest concluded his post with an appeal to young people, saying that they are being “brain-washed” and tricked by the system.

The post was first reported by local radio Città del Capo, provoking the indignation of many on social media but also the support of others who agreed with the words of the priest. Hundreds of posts expressed solidarity with Guidotti, including politicians, and many friends and faithful in his parish defended his remarks in front of the media and shielded him from cameras during Mass. “He is a good person, he does well by everyone,” one of his parishioners told local media, with one tearfully saying, “my heart breaks when I see what is happening to him, you must forgive him.”

The Archdiocese of Bologna distanced itself from the priest, releasing a statement saying that Guidotti’s words correspond to “his own personal opinions, which don’t reflect in any way the thought and assessment of the Church, which condemns every type of violence.” The statement included a letter of apology by Guidotti, who has been prohibited from speaking on the matter to the press – or the public – by the archdiocese. “I wish I could meet her,” the priest said in the statement referring to the victim’s mother. “I understand when she says that this is not Christian charity, but I did this with all the charity possible because we are getting used to news of rape. If no one helps our young people, because of complete imputability, then young people must help themselves, by staying away from mayhem. This is what I meant, but I said all the wrong words.” The Vicar General of Bologna, Father Giovanni Silvamagni, highlighted how this recent event may open a discussion about the use of social media by priests. “Social media courses? Perhaps we need responsibility in the use of an instrument that has potentials and risks,” he told local media, calling for more self-discipline.

The leader of Italy’s right-wing populist party Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini, told reporters in Milan that while “in the case of violence there is no difference between sober and drunk, there is a basis of truth in the words of the priest.” He added that people must be mindful of their actions and with whom they associate, and that the place she visited was well known for being a bad neighborhood. “If you go there underage and drunk – and I would like to know what her parents think – you are obviously not at your first rodeo,” Salvini said, concluding his statement by offering solidarity to the victim.

A recent survey by a local news site Quotidiano.it shows that while 25 percent of Italians concur with Guidotti’s statement, up to 62 percent condemn them, pointing to the fact that public opinion and what is conveyed online are two very different beasts. “Our Catholic teaching tells us that the only person who’s responsible for a sin is the sinner. Rape is a horrible crime and it’s also a sin, so the only person responsible for rape is the rapist,” said Dawn Eden Goldstein, an assistant professor of dogmatic theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, and author of books on healing from trauma and abuse, including Remembering God’s Mercy and My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, in an interview with Crux. “Catholic teaching is very strong on the fact that abuse victims are never responsible for their abuse.” Goldstein stated that “people don’t look to be abused, nobody wants to be abused,” and that the seventeen-year-old girl wouldn’t have gone out drinking in a bad neighborhood if she had known it was dangerous.

Intentionally or not, Guidotti is in the eye of the hurricane in the debate surrounding sexual assault and victim blaming in Italy. The parish priest of the church of San Domenico Savio had a very active media presence. His Facebook profile (which has been closed following the scandal) shows a picture of a Lego dressed as a crusader and has posts expressing reactionary positions. “I will go visit the parish priest and tell him of my idea of Christian behavior, very different from his,” said the mother of the young woman who was raped. “My daughter was the victim and she must be defended, not only by a priest. The fault lies in the rapist, not on the victim.” The mother told reporters that the “pack of jackals” that descended on her family following the event only worsened an already very challenging moment. “We are a family with strong values, but we read a lot of inaccuracies and accusations surrounding our tragedy that hurt us, when no one, except us, knows what happened,” she concluded.

More than 4,000 cases of sexual assault took place in Italy in 2015, of which 80 percent were against women, according to data from the country’s Ministry of the Interior. Goldstein highlighted that according to the Bible, authority figures in the community also have a responsibility to young people in educating them and showing them the right path. “It’s very easy for this priest, or anyone after the fact, to blame the victim, but when they do that they are really just deflecting blame away from themselves because young people are formed by adults,” she said. As a teacher in a seminary, Goldstein said that men who are being trained for the priesthood should have some guidance regarding social media, and added that there should be a seminar with do’s and don’ts when using this platform. “Social media can become weaponized in the hands of representatives of the Church who are not thinking about their witness,” Goldstein said. “If we are treating someone in an uncharitable, hostile, egotistical way then people will not see the beauty of Christ when they look at our lives.”

(The views expressed in the article above by Claire Giangrave and the responsibility for accuracy are those of herself, the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of this Blog entitled – “Comboni Missionaries – A Childhood in their Hands”.
Nevertheless, this Blog supports the view that those who suffer from sexual crimes perpetrated by others are “Victims” whatever the circumstances and that those who attempt to impugn a Victim are contemptible and, by extension, are complicit in the crime.)

Without an iota of the Christian virtue that they purport to preach the Verona Fathers in England, like their expensively retained maritime lawyer, ( Google Verona Fathers accounts) fight any sexual abuse claimant from their junior seminary with lies and subterfuge on a scale some in Wall St. would be proud of; dragging cases on for years and years exploiting every loop hole; and abusing the plaintiff all over again in his adult life with appalling bullying.

Claimants often receive short shrift too from their own solicitors, who often don’t fully understand the complexities of the cases they have taken on board; for this reason all have settled in the past without liability being acknowledged, and the old-boys get no redress or apology.

At the moment those few boys still attempting to navigate the difficult and stressful Legal System in the courts of Britain against the Organisation appear to be getting as much pain from their own lawyers  as from the Verona Fathers’. Some old boys brought to the brink of total despair and financial ruin for doing absolutely nothing wrong,,nothing,,but attempt to address and redress an Awful Sexual Abuse.

 

This apparently billion pound ‘Missionary Order’  ( with a world-wide property portfolio valued at probably over £500m)   funded partly by the good Catholics of England, Wales, Scotland and, Ireland has hidden the secret of Verona Father child sexual abuse in their Mirfield, West Yorkshire school for decades, denying all the abused boys any kind of redress or apology.

 

Ignoring all new rules on child protection from the Diocese or the state, – like not reporting cases that have been brought to their attention via the courts; Verona Fathers have gone on blindly burying their child abuse cases and fighting tooth and nail any ex seminarian who dares complain. It’s no wonder Cardinal Vincent Nichols was overheard calling the Verona Fathers “fools” when they came up in conversation at a reception in the Jesuit Farm Street Church recently.

THE “SELL BY” DATE OF THE “ETERNAL” CATHOLIC CHURCH

By Brian Mark Hennessy

Many years ago now, when I used to live on my boat, “Tokina”, in St Katherine’s Haven beside Tower Bridge I used to recline on the deck on clear nights and dream of what lay beyond the stars. The puzzle was, of course, all about the “Creation”. I was already a believer in the “Many Worlds Theory” at that time, but not having the brain nor cosmological learning of the great theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, (a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences – I should note), I dreamed of my “many worlds” more like a three dimensional honeycomb – and I deduced that these many worlds were much like multifaceted geometric forms which had sufficient elasticity to withstand the changing forces exerted by other worlds that were expanding or contacting around them. I never got much further with my theory than an infinity constructed in the form of a gargantuan, three-dimensional, honeycomb made of plasticised bubbles full of gaseous substances and mineral compounds hurtling around in wide, elliptical orbits!

The great Stephen Hawking, himself, did a U-turn on his own “Creation Theory” in his book, “The Grand Design”. Previously, back in 2008 he had said to Pope Benedict XVI that the “laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws”. However, later in his book “The Grand Design”, Hawking said that when, in 1992, a planet was found to be orbiting a star that was not our sun, he first began to realise that there was something else at play and that the evidence that the earth was designed just to “please us human beings” was both less compelling and remarkable than it had been considered to be hitherto. Hawking eventually deduced – and by what process I have to admit I do not have the wits to understand – that, “because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe, and we within it, can create itself from nothing.” He continued, “The reason why there is something rather than nothing is spontaneous Creation – and, therefore, there was no need to invoke God to light the blue touch-paper to set the universe going”. I remain unsure whether that deduction debunks my bubble theory, but I hope not!

However, if I have understood Stephen Hawking correctly, he has not denied the existence of God, but only denied the necessity of God to ignite the Big Bang that produced the Cosmos as we know it. Nevertheless, the existence of God remotely watching the “Big Bang” some 13.8 billion years ago does not help me very much in bridging the void of time between then and the foundation of the so-called One and Only True, Universal, Eternal Catholic Church. That institution was founded formally with a codified creed of beliefs as recently in cosmological history as the year 325 AD when Constantine convened the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea. Why did it take God so long to get that going? Why even did God leave mankind groping around in the dark and devoid of Catholic enlightenment from the time of the Australopithecines some nine million years ago? Maybe the obvious answer is that God was not in a hurry, had all the time in the world so to speak and, as with Creation itself, he was happy to just sit by, let things take their course and see how it all panned out. Of course, being Omnipotent, God would have known what the end result would have been anyway. That makes me feel a little sorry for God when I stop to think about it because He never has the excitement of surprises.

The thought that God was casually sitting by in infinite nothingness with a less than “hands on” role whilst Creation just spontaneously “happened” of its own accord all around Him is a little disappointing to say the very least. Hopefully there was still thunder and lightning all around for the important special effects to mark the moment. Moreover, I have to admit that I am a bit lost without the comfort of my Catechism Creation theory – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. That “kind of” made comforting sense to me not only at the age of five years, but also later in the context of my “multi-world bubble” theorisations whilst gazing at the stars. Nevertheless and however the Creation occurred, since that “awakening” – which in Biblical terms was featured as the “Creation” of Adam and Eve on the Sixth Day – human beings have always given some form of recognition to the existence of the great mystery of Creation – whenever that came about precisely in geological time.

We have been able to deduce through archaeological discoveries that there is a suggestion, if not actual evidence, that some of the most primitive of hominids have had concepts of “religion” in the form of ancestral traditions and rites of the dead that grew and blossomed within some diverse communities and cultures. Have we humans not always acknowledged also the bountiful provision of all the benefits that the Creation has provided to sustain our daily lives? Has not each person in every age sought to give praise, to make offerings of thanks, to express their hopes, and to seek protection and consolation from the Creator – whether we understood his image to be the sun, moon, stars or a larger-than-life human image surrounded by flashing lights is irrelevant.

Nevertheless mankind’s expressions of their acknowledgements of a deity – or deities – from their crudest infancy were also, at the very least, the demonstrable beginnings of the evidence of a well developed formation of social culture as we know it today. We also know that those precepts by which culture developed were as much the result of the necessity to define sustainable behavior in order that mankind would co-operate effectively and efficiently in a quest for survival. They became codified in time by systems of laws such as the Ten Commandments in order to promote peaceful co-existence for the common good. Such primitive legal systems existed in the cultural history of mankind long before any tablets of stone found their way into the hands of Moses on Mount Sinai of course – and those codes of conduct relating to specifically civil matters in the Near Eastern cultures, including that of the wandering Israelites, had largely been based on the Babylonian legal code of Hammurabi and even much earlier Middle Eastern codes of law that long predated the Egyptian Exodus of the Jewish tribes.

In terms of cultural development, however, history also teaches us that when institutional failures cease to provide the security and rights for the continued peaceful development of human societies then, in time, those institutions will self destruct, become redundant or be destroyed by external factors. There are numerous examples in history to be found. The demise of the temples and priesthoods of the Sumerians, Hittites, Assyrians, Minoans, Pharonic Egyptians, Incas and the Aztecs are very far short of an exhaustive list. None of their historic priestly classes and practices have survived at all in anything other than vague, isolated, ritual traditions of curious, if not culturally colourful, adherents in remote communities. They each reached their zenith and usefulness to the course and march of human history centuries ago and largely are now confined to the deep, archaeological layers of pre-history. It would not be a huge leap of faith to suggest that the Catholic Church itself will become a redundant institution in time and might be catapulted by events, either internal or external, into extinction. No human institution in this world is permanent. Two thousand years of Christianity is aeons compared to our individual lifetimes, but is unworthy even of the word “blip” in terms of “eternity”.

Catholicism itself is a belief system, but its presence in this world is that of a highly structured institution. Its active membership is expanding in the Southern hemisphere’s Third World countries, particularly Africa, but the numbers are becoming stable in the Northern hemisphere’s so-called Western cultures. The Pontifical Year Book 2017, which, in fact, publishes only the statistics relating to 2015, states that the number of baptized Catholics continued to grow globally, from 1,272 million in 2014 to 1,285 million in 2015. That is a relative increase of just 1 %. In Africa there is an increase of 19.4%, with the total number of Catholics increasing from 186 to 222 million in that continent. In Europe, however, there is instead a situation of “so called” stability which disguises the fact that there were over 800 thousand fewer Catholics baptised in Europe in 2015, and 1.3 million fewer overall compared to 2014. That decline is likely to increase rapidly because the European population is expected also to decline sharply in the coming decades. There is a similar situation to that of Europe in American and Asian numbers of Catholics – and stagnation in Oceania. In comparison the number of baptized Catholics in Africa has increased from 15.5% to 17.3% of global baptized faithful, whilst in Europe a sharp decline in baptisms was evident between the years 2010 and 2015. Overall there is an increasing number of lay Catholics per priest. In many countries that ratio has risen to over 5000 per priest and that is a clear indication than there are fewer and fewer priests in relation to the number of Catholics they serve.

All these statistics relate to “baptized” Catholics of course – and not “practicing” Catholics. What the statistics are unable, or possibly are unwilling to address with any clarity whatsoever is that there is a uniform, overall generational decrease in “practicing” Catholics in the “Old” world. We do know, however, that the numbers of children baptized today are decreasing year on year in the developed countries overall. Moreover, those who are baptized at the behest of their practicing Catholic parents appear to be less likely to remain practicing Catholics in adulthood. As populations become more interconnected with a Western orientated culture that cultivates rights to self determination in every facet of life, there is evidence to suggest that fewer young baptized Catholics will remain practicing Catholics once they are removed from parental control – and, therefore, are also less likely to baptize their offspring.

In addition, there are other factors in play. Exhaustive academic research into the effects of North American incidents of the sexual abuse of children by clerics of the Catholic Church has caused very significant financial losses of over $300 billion, the closure of hundreds of Catholic Schools, the sale of other Church properties, reductions of civilian staff and the permanent transfer of many former practicing Catholics to the Church congregations of other denominations. Trends often gather pace and no institution is immune from extinction when they continue to demonstrate that they are either incapable or unwilling to rectify gross wrongs and injustices. The hesitant Catholic Church Hierarchy has merely stuck a few podgy fingers in that dike so far, but unless they take extensive, radical and ruthless action on this one issue of child sexual abuse alone, then the whole edifice may suddenly be washed away by a tsunami of distrust and disgust. When a product becomes rotten through and through nobody buys it – and it is rapidly removed from the shelves – despite, in the case of the Catholic Church, the pre-determined “eternal” sell by date.

The “Eternal” Catholic Church, like every other institution, is destined to be less than the smallest calculable “blip” in Eternal, Universal human history. I am sure that Stephen Hawking would be able to tell the members of the Vatican Pontifical Academy of Science that that unit is defined as (tp=5.4×10^-44s) – but he would also, no doubt, be able to clarify why that is not truly the smallest unit – just the smallest “meaningful” unit . That being so, a self-inflicted Apocalypse by suicidal inaction on child sexual abuse may well overtake Catholicism sooner than their aged Hierarchy can muster the energy to blink!

THE LEGACY OF THE WALKING DEAD  –  by Brian Mark Hennessy

I know victims of child sexual abuse who live from day to day an existence that ricochets from the past to the present with a mixture of alarming, mental images that are flashing in wild juxtaposition like a slide show which is being presented by an uncontrollable, whirling carousel. For them past and present are often indistinguishable. Things of beauty, comfort and consolation that they may now have within their grasp are whirled away by the sinister, destructive and incomprehensible legacy of past abuse. In the moments of their torment and when they reach out with a cry for help, we try to remind them to grasp hold of the things that they hold dear. Yet, so very often, the past crushes and blinds them to the warmth and comfort that is all around them. In the depth of their bewilderment they react to no external stimulus. They are unable, so very often, to comprehend nor respond. They have inherited the lifelessness of the walking dead.

These are also perplexing moments for the listener – the one that these prisoners of past nightmares turn to. They hesitate in a struggle to find the words that they can use to soothe the acute distress with which they are confronted – to obliterate the torments and to calm the teller’s incomprehension and anger. So very often, however, words are both worthless and futile. Frequently, they just need to listen and bear witness to the callous, sordid crimes that mature, self-absorbed, reckless and destructive adults have perpetrated against the victim’s innocent uncomprehending, childhood vulnerability.

These victims struggle on with their daily lives bearing a legacy of torments. They strive with the naivety of their childhood gullibility. They cannot reconcile their emotional attachment to the beguiling predator who had comforted and cherished them. With their adult understanding of right and wrong they make false judgements about their childhood acquiescence to their predators’ unconscionable and unscrupulous crimes of self-gratification. They continue to bear the guilt of crimes not committed by them, but against them.

The findings of the United Kingdom Government’s Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) must struggle to fully understand and reflect the suffering of those countless, victimised children who often have led mute, conflicted and listless lives that were doomed not to reach their birthright potential. Those findings must also fully reflect and counter the callousness of institutions, both religious and secular, that abrogated their moral responsibilities in the past and which seek now to evade public recriminations. Such reckless inhumanity must be confounded now by legally binding obligations. Those institutions that failed in the past must be subjected to a process of critical and rigorous monitoring into the future.

The lessons derived from the victims’ past legacy of pain and confusion must be transformed into an enlightened reality for future generations. The UK Government, IICSA and the multitudinous teams of lawyers and barristers representing victims must subsume their own concerns, agenda and objectives to the voices of the victims that they are representing. They must not seek to impose politically correct, economically viable or expedient solutions on a national populace whose own personal experiences will invariably make them insensitive to the reality of injustices suffered by others. The voices of martyred, childhood lives must now be heard from the mouths of their adult inheritors and it is the victims’ legacy that must shape the future. If Professor Jay, her team at IICSA and lawyers representing victims do not get it right now, then many, many more victims of the past, present and future will remain unseen and will lead lives that are lifeless, damaged,  struggling and devoid of hope.

HELP GERARD GET THE CARE AND EQUIPMENT HE NEEDS

“At this moment we don’t know what the future will hold. The sadness comes in waves. We want to provide him with the best possible medical and technological help,” Martin Murphy (Father of Gerard)

Thank you.
Martin Murphy

Mirfield 1964-69
Dumfries 1969-70
Sunningdale 1970-71

Below is a link to the article from the Independent about Gerard.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gerard-murphy-young-man-paralysis-physical-disability-sweden-swimming-accident-rehab-life-changing-a8030271.html

UNITED KINGDOM NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY ARTICLE
Abuse Inquiry to Investigate Benedictine Institutions

Comments by Brian Mark Hennessy

An upcoming hearing of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse will be an opportunity to examine the reality behind the Catholic Church’s claims that it has transformed its approach to child protection, says Richard Scorer.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
At the end of November, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) will begin hearings into the English Benedictine Congregation (EBC), a Catholic monastic order. The focus of the hearings will be abuse scandals at two elite private schools associated with the order, Ampleforth and Downside. A future hearing will examine events involving St Benedict’s school and the associated abbey in Ealing, West London.

What might we expect the inquiry to look at? A repeated refrain from the Catholic Church is that whilst there were dreadful safeguarding failures in the past, the Church has now transformed its approach to child protection. As a lawyer representing survivors of abuse in Catholic institutions, I recognise that some progress has been made in safeguarding. But I question whether that progress has been anything like fast enough, and whether new procedures have been underpinned by a conversion of “hearts and minds”. In 2001, the late Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster promised that with the ‘Nolan’ reforms the Catholic Church would become a “beacon for child protection”. Fundamental to this was the Church eschewing its past practice of dealing with cases ‘in-house’, and ensuring that all allegations of clerical sex abuse would henceforth be reported to police or social services ¬– something which it surprises many people to discover is still not a formal legal requirement.
The new policy was supposed to mean not only reporting of future allegations, but also that the Church would “cleanse the stables” by identifying past concerns and ensuring that those too would now be reported, especially where the cleric or teacher concerned continued to have contact with children. That at least was the promise: the hearings will provide an opportunity to examine the reality. The issue of reporting comes into sharp focus with Benedictine institutions: many of the scandals in the Benedictine Congregation are recent, and cannot simply be dismissed as ancient history from decades ago; moreover, the Benedictine culture seems to have been particularly resistant to external reporting.

Downside is a case in point. The Nolan reforms were announced in 2001. Yet in 2012, an abuse victim and former pupil from Downside alleged that the school was “infiltrated by paedophiles at all levels”. Anyone inclined to dismiss this as hyperbole should consider the facts. The victim’s comments followed the conviction that year of Father Nicholas White, a Downside monk who also taught at the school. White was jailed in 2012 for gross indecency and indecent assault on a pupil in the late 1980s. But the school had known about White’s behaviour since 1987. Documents made available at White’s trial indicated that the school had sought legal advice in the late 1980s as to whether they were legally obliged to report the allegations to the authorities; the absence of a mandatory reporting law meant that they were not obliged to do so, although one might think that a responsible institution concerned for the welfare of children would have elected to do so anyway. So no report was made. White had been allowed to continue teaching after he was first caught abusing a child in 1987, merely being restricted to teaching the very youngest boys; he then went on to assault another pupil in the school.

After the second incident, White was sent away to Fort Augustus, a Benedictine outpost in Scotland (This practice of moving a known or suspected sex abuser from one institution to another, failing to alert the recipient institution and failing to alert the authorities – a practice known colloquially as “move and forget” – appears to have been common in the Benedictine
Congregation, with some suspected abusers being sent as far away as Australia; victims’ lawyers have urged the inquiry to examine it closely in the upcoming hearings).
In 1998 White eventually returned to Downside. Despite the promises of openness which followed the Nolan reforms in 2001, police were not informed of the earlier allegations, and White was not arrested, until 2010. The police only stumbled across the case by accident during a separate investigation into another clerical sex offender at the school (an investigation initiated by another client of mine, who will be giving evidence in the upcoming hearings). The eventual exposure of White’s activities led to a flurry of inspections by Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI). The inspection reports make unhappy reading: the ISI complained of “serious mismanagement” of safeguarding and observed that in this respect, the school was “effectively in special measures”.
The school’s longstanding practice of inviting pupils from the school into the monastery for “overnight retreats” was only stopped in 2011 at the ISI’s insistence, since the monastery contained monks who were on “restricted ministry” because of the risk they posed to children. All of this begs the question, of course, of why those shortcomings hadn’t been picked up by inspectors previously: things had clearly been amiss for years, but it was only White’s arrest that brought these issues to light. Again this will be an important issue for the inquiry. The organisations responsible for inspection will almost certainly argue that they are not a police force. In the absence, therefore, of a mandatory legal duty on institutions to proactively report knowledge or suspicion of abuse, there is a high risk that much of it will go undetected by external agencies. I agree, but the concern must also be that the elite status of these schools and their apparently spiritual ethos blinded inspectors to the underlying reality.

Similar concerns have arisen at Ampleforth, the other institution to be examined in the upcoming hearings. Scandals there have a long vintage, dating back to the days when Cardinal Basil Hume was headmaster. In those days the practice of “move and forget” seems to have involved removing clerical sex offenders from the school and dumping them in Ampleforth’s “mission parishes”, working class districts where monks would be sent from Ampleforth for outreach work amongst the poor.

One of my clients who grew up in Workington on the Cumbrian coast was abused there as a young boy by Father Gregory Carroll, who had been rusticated to a “mission parish” in Cumbria following abuse of pupils at Ampleforth. The local community in Cumbria were told nothing about Carroll’s history. That was in the late 1980s.

But the issues at Ampleforth are far from historic: some of the recent scandals have been painstakingly detailed by Andrew Norfolk of The Times. A teacher was convicted and jailed earlier this year for sexual exploitation of a pupil in the very recent past; this went on for several years. Safeguarding procedures at Ampleforth had ostensibly been updated but the more recent cases suggest some attitudes and culture remain ossified.

Jonathan West, a leading campaigner for mandatory reporting who also helped to expose the scandals at St Benedict’s, makes the remarkable point that despite the English Catholic Church’s apparent conversion to the idea of external reporting after 2001, not a single case of abuse in the English Catholic Church has subsequently come to light because a Catholic institution decided to formally report it; cases continue to come to light only because of the bravery of victims or whistleblowers.
Against that backdrop, the leadership of the English Benedictine Congregation will also rightly be under scrutiny. For 8 of the 12 years between 1998, when Father Nicholas White returned to Downside, and 2010, when he was arrested, White’s Abbot at Downside was Richard Yeo. Yeo was certainly aware of White’s history; he was also in charge at Downside when White was permitted to return. But Yeo had another important role as well: between 2001 and 2017 he was President of the entire English Benedictine Congregation. In the light of the sorry history described above, it is perhaps no surprise that earlier this year Yeo stood down as Abbot President of the Congregation, to be replaced by the apparently more media savvy Christopher Jamieson, a former Abbot of Worth Abbey.

However, Yeo has been called to give evidence in the upcoming hearings. On his watch, several of the EBC institutions have failed to implement the separation in governance between the school and the monastery recommended by the Carlile Report into the scandals at St Benedict’s Ealing; the governance reform was implemented there, but not at Ampleforth and Downside. This is one of many decisions he will need to defend. (Remarkably, Yeo, in addition to the other positions he held, was also a member of the 2007 Cumberlege commission, whose task was to review the way the Catholic Church in England and Wales responded to Nolan. He is therefore considered by the Catholic church to be one of their leading authorities on child protection).

Of course, there have been many abuse scandals in secular institutions: nobody would claim that religious institutions are uniquely affected. However, the Benedictine scandals highlight some of the ways in which religious culture can increase the risk of abuse, and the risk of it being swept under the carpet. In Benedictine institutions, the geographical reach of the Congregation led to the dumping of paedophile monks in missions or abroad. Monasticism meant monks having freedom and no oversight. The adamantine certainty of belief and sense of spiritual rectitude which sometimes characterise religious organisations make it harder to ensure the institutional challenge, self-awareness and self-criticism which are so necessary to uncovering and tackling abuse. All of this makes a powerful case for mandatory reporting, a change supported by the NSS and hopefully in due course by IICSA itself.
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COMMENTS BY BRIAN MARK HENNESSY,
A MEMBER OF THE COMBONI SURVIVORS GROUP.

The Benedictine Order is not the only Catholic Order that will be coming under the spotlight of the United Kingdom Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. The Italian Comboni Missionary Order, which has operated within the United Kingdom in varying numbers since the end of the First World War, will also be the subject of a specially convened hearing to establish the diverse ways in which Orders of the Catholic Church have boldly striven to conceal abuse and hide its perpetrators. Unsurprisingly, many of the failures exposed above in the Benedictine Order were also common practices within the Italian Comboni Missionary Order.

Once known more commonly as the Verona Fathers, the Comboni Missionaries have had communities in Dawson Place London, Sunningdale in Berkshire, Leeds, Glasgow and Dublin almost continuously since the end of the Second World War. Perhaps their best known establishment, however, was at Mirfield in Yorkshire where they had a seminary for teenage boy aspirants to the priesthood from 1960 to the early 1980’s. Although it was not the only location of a Comboni Order seminary in the United Kingdom over the years where abuse is known to have taken place, Mirfield has become the most notorious on account of allegations of some 1000 incidents of child sexual abuse perpetrated there by clerics of the Order and a lay teacher. There have been additional allegations made against two more priests at Mirfield who have not been publicly named. Yet another priest is the subject of current legal proceedings.

The Comboni Missionary Order has resisted attempts by the West Yorkshire Police to have one of the priests still alive today extradited to the United Kingdom to face criminal charges. That priest named, Romano Nardo, a native of Prata di Sopra in Pordenone, Italy, was located in Uganda at the Aduku Mission in the Diocese of Lira from the time that his abuse of a thirteen year old boy was discovered at Mirfield. In that Uganda Mission he had access to children for decades – and there also he founded a school which is named after him. Following his exposure as a priest who had abused boys at the Mirfield seminary, he was moved from Uganda to Verona in Italy. After his discovery there in 2015 by one of his former victims, he was again moved to a secret place of hiding where he remains today under constant guard in order to prevent his extradition to the United Kingdom.

According to a press release in the publication “Il Gazzettino” in Romano Nardo’s native district of Pordenone, Father Martin Devinish, the current Provincial Superior of the United Kingdom Province of the Order, condemned the abuse by Father Romano Nardo at the Mirfield seminary, but explained that he was unable to obviate the laicization of the priest. That is a curious comment considering that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith may well have laicized Romano Nardo if the Comboni Missionary Order had reported Nardo’s crimes to that Congregation – but it appears that, contrary to the Comboni Missionary Order’s own Code of Conduct and Catholic Canon Law, the Order failed to make such a report to that Vatican dicastery.
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HELP GERARD GET THE CARE AND EQUIPMENT HE NEEDS – by Martin Murphy

Mirfield 1964-69
Dumfries 1969-70
Sunningdale 1970-71

My 21 year old son Gerard was in Sweden with some friends, when he decided to plunge into a lake. He hit a rock and snapped his neck. His friends pulled him out and he was airlifted to Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm, where he underwent surgery. I immediately flew out to be with him and got the disturbing news from the surgeons. Gerard is paralysed in both legs as well as his triceps, wrists and fingers. He won’t walk again. He has no movement from the chest downwards. He was flown back to UK by air ambulance and went to a stroke ward at the Lister Hospital, Stevenage. The ward was not ideal, it was a stroke ward, the average age was 70-ish, hardly the best environment. He did have a private room though and they allowed us to visit him at any hour. Only 20mins away we could visit him every day, sometimes twice. Miriam my wife always liked to call up last thing at night to brush his teeth and give him a goodnight kiss.

Then he was suddenly transferred to Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. These had better facilities but the journey was now an hour each way. He also had to share a room.

Finally Gerard got the news he’d been waiting for for 10 weeks, that he had a bed at Stoke Mandeville. Moving day 17th Oct. His 22nd birthday. He said that it was the best possible birthday present.

It’s been a seismic shock to us and our lives will never be the same again. For the past few months the family has been in a very dark place. All we can say is that we’re gradually getting used to the light.

At this moment we don’t know what the future will hold. The sadness comes in waves. We want to provide him with the best possible medical and technological help. His friends are organising something and you’ll find the link below. I hope you will help me provide for Gerard’s dissabilty. This will last a life time.

Thank you.
Martin Murphy

Mirfield 1964-69
Dumfries 1969-70
Sunningdale 1970-71

Help raise £50000 to help Gerard, get the care and equipment he needs.

Weʼre raising money to help Gerard get the care and equipment he needs. Support this JustGiving Crowdfunding Page below:

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/we-love-gerard-murphy