Comboni Missionaries – Father John Pinkman

Category – Serial Abuser and Paedophile

This guy was an inhuman monster – and he was put in charge of the Junior Boys at St Peter Claver College, Mirfield – a seminary for boys as young as 11 years of age.

Pinkman, or Pinkie, as he was called (I wouldn’t say affectionately) was a serial abuser of young boys. As more than half of all ‘boys’ at one reunion said that they had been abused in some form by Father John Pinkman, I think it would be safe to deduce that he may well have abused dozens of young boys over a 4 or 5 year period in the Sixties.

These boys left home, their family and friends intending to train for the priesthood. Little did they know what they had let themselves in for.

Paedophile or Under-Age Abuser?

It has been argued which priests were abusers of under-age boys and which ones were technically paedophiles. Although most people don’t differentiate, technically a paedophile is someone who is attracted to, and has sex with, children who have yet to reach puberty.

Said one ex-seminarian of St Peter Claver College, Gerry McLaughlin, “I didn’t reach puberty till I had just turned 13 in the summer of 1966. However, I started getting the attentions of Pinkman less than a month after I arrived in September 1964.

“He told me I had to take a cold shower first thing every morning as soon as I woke at 6:40am down in the basement, where no one was at that time of day. He would open the shower curtain and watch me, rubbing his hands all the while. There was something I didn’t like in his demeanour. He said that he would soap me down with the sponge but I told him No. He did this several times”.

Abuse Revealed

He has ruined many young lives. Many men who are now in their fifties and sixties said that they had wasted lives after his abuse and many are still struggling to cope.

His abuse was revealed to other Comboni Missionaries, including those in authority, but nothing was done about it. In the end he was transferred to South Africa where he supposedly stopped his ‘activities’.

He died of a massive heart attack at the have of 48 in 1984.

When he died, a Mass of Celebration was said for him by the Comboni Missionaries in his honour.

It was said at the seminary in Mirfield, in the chapel at St Peter Claver College, just a few yards away from his bedroom door where he abused and ruined the lives of boys on an industrial scale.