As I write, the St Ambrose College in Altrincham’s abuse allegations are multipling as fast as Jimmy Savile’s did a few weeks ago. The allegations began a couple of weeks ago against a former teacher at the school, a 63 year old Christian Brother, by a ex-pupil. Greater Manchester police arrested him and bailed him to appear in court on March 12th next year. Since then former pupils by the van load are now coming forward talking of further abuses in the school by this man and other members of the staff of the school. The police force have now widened the scope of their investigation and are now looking at allegations of abuse from the early 1960s to the present day.
It reminds me so much of St Bede’s College in Whalley Range in Manchester, a close neighbour of St Ambrose’s and as I said in my blog posting regarding St William’s School in York about 18 months ago, you can take any school anywhere run by an independent Catholic order, like Ambrose’s is, or priests of a Catholic Diocese, like St Bede’s was and you start digging, incidents of sexual abuse will immediately rise to the surface, as though sexual abuse and clerics are hand in hand, synonymous even. As an American priest of world renown in this field, Fr Tom Doyle, said to me over a year ago when I started down this legal path of exposing St Bede’s history of sexual abuse of pupils, “Paul, what you are talking about is massive but it is only the tip of the iceberg. A lot more will come out” and how right he was and so he should be, he has suffered 35 years of this climate in the USA.
At St Bede’s, we now have evidence to prove sexual abuse by any number of clerics over more than 50 years. Our earliest allegation is in 1951 and it went on continually for more than 50 years to my knowledge, probably longer. A television film maker specialising in worldwide pupil sexual abuse told me recently that once abuse starts in an educational establishment, it is almost impossible to wipe out. It is like a cancer, the longer it lies insitu, the more malignant it does become.
I started off nearly three years ago naively thinking that only one boy had been abused at Bede’s, a friend of mine Michael, by only one man, Monsignor Thomas Duggan, with as it happens tragic results. I now know that dozens and dozens of boys were molested by several clerics over all this period. As one died or got too old another took up the cudgel, with at any one time two, three, four and more staff were sexually assaulting pupils at the school. And what makes me laugh is that the Diocese of Salford and their insurance companies are denying it ever happened even after the Bishop of Salford, Terence Brain, admitted abuse happened to the Manchester Evening News on 15th March 2011.
Why they and their insurance people keep throwing money at these type of stupid defences of the indefensible is anybody’s guess. Obviously the insurance companies have money to burn and the Catholic Church has a name and position to lose, which it seems it does not mind doing as it will not scatter many of the sheep that follow it. Certainly the Church has no heed for the victims of all this abuse, it has no heed at all on the thousands of wasted lives caused by this harm done.
Their sin, this sin of disregard for victims of their abuse will be the biggest corporate cock-up in the world’s history and eventually could and certainly has the propensity to destroy the physical entity known as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to see these harlequins of clerics perish. The good for not standing up to the evil in their midst and the bad for being that evil.