Living where I do, on the banks of the Boyle River where even on a bad day you see more wildlife than cars, more rats than people, more rain than sunshine, our major task is the gathering of correct information. As by choice we do not have a television or radio nor do we venture into town for a newspaper because as I have just said our search is for correct information and not the unadulterated garbage and misinformation you get served up in the mainstream media.
I have to find another outlet that satisfies my obsessional desire for knowledge and truth and I find it through the internet, from the alternative media, from trusted sources of e-mails, websites and reading recommended books. I read possibly two books a week, trawl the internet or write. My week is full. I have no time to go out, socialise and have fun, I am too old for that marketing ploy. We make our own fun at home, talking, reading and arguing over a glass or two of wine. We, being my lovely wife Helen who has stood at my side for 43 years and watched whilst I do all the cooking, cleaning, gardening and all the rest of the mundane that makes life so well worth living.
Anyway a week or two ago we received an e-mail from the august chair of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society in Manchester. The SVP, as it is known, is at the centre of the Catholic Church and is paramount in the Church’s charitable works and pomps. The e-mail told of a book that had been published by an old time acquaintance of ours, Eugene Vesey and told of the physical, mental and sexual abuse in a junior seminary of the Holy Ghost Fathers as was. They have recently changed their title to the Spiritans. Their penchant for sexual abuse of young boys, especially here in Ireland, was getting them such bad publicity, a name change was so very necessary.
I pricked up my ears when my lovely wife of 43 years read this e-mail out because the Holy Ghost Fathers have been a big thing in both our lives. Both of us bought the book immediately on our Kindles. Eugene Vesey we knew 55 years ago but we had not seen or heard of him in 50 years. How time flies.
The book entitled Ghosters explains how a young boy of 12 years of age from Manchester was taken up to this junior seminary in the Lake District. This was housed in a large Victorian mansion which had been bought by this order of missionary priests. It explained the trials and tribulations of that enclosed life to a boy of that age and the unforeseen, unaccountable abuse those boys suffered of a physical, mental and sexual nature, whilst the priests of that order tried to mould them into Catholic missionary priests. The book is in novel form but I am assured by the author that it is basically autobiographical. It tells of the relationships that build up between these young men, the disgust they feel at the priest’s behaviour and the compulsion that existed which made them continue to accept the abuse being penniless and hundreds of miles from home. It also tells of the enlightenment that appeared when the hero of the story begins to realise the hoax that is being played on them in the name of organised religion, in particular with the Roman Catholic brand of Christianity.
It talks of the courage needed, in their miserable, boracic state, bereft of any power, to face up to the abusers and say “no more” and the ensuing depression that comes when the enlightened one comes into contact with the real world, having been virtually incarcerated for seven or eight years in the most important formative years of a young person’s life. How one’s emotional compass is all at sea especially in relationships with the opposite sex, the opposite sex that had been drilled into these young boys as being unclean, as being “the agents of the devil”. Helen was horrified that a man of religion could instil this thought into an immature mind of 50% of mankind.
As we finished our respective copies we looked at each other flabbergasted. We flooded each other with our thoughts and our opinions. We had a right, we had been plagued with this order of Catholic missionary priests for nearly 60 years.
Helen’s brother and my brother and a good few more of our peer group in and around Manchester had gone through the same process, through the same gates, the same doors, along the same corridors as contemporaries of the author. The author had suffered badly at the hands of these zealots. Had the same ignominies been forced on our brothers, our friends? When these lads had determined that enough was enough and came out at 19 or 20 years old, it was to a sadness of a failed vocation that faced them, not a happy relief from a gulag. We were young and callow, could not appreciate the depths they were in, could not see the emotional maelstrom that clouded their minds. They probably tried hard to hide it rather well but they certainly had a problem with relationships. Like the author who never wanted to talk of his previous life, not a dicky bird passed the lips of these unfortunates. For some now it is too late some have already gone to their graves. A little like the survivors of the atrocities of warfare, they took their secret with them.
I could ask my brother but the tragedy is that relationship is lost. He has not spoken to me in 25 years. I think blaming me for all the bad things in his life, the source lost in the mists of time.
To show how this mistreatment in teenage life follows you through life, the author wrote a second book Opposite Worlds detailing his failed relationships during his twenties with girls passing through London and his inability to sustain them, even when he meets a decent girl he fucks it up by choosing to lead a promiscuous life style.. His emotional immaturity still abounding at an age when lads who had lived a normal life had learned in the main how to control this key element of our psychological makeup.
Going on to his last book in his so far trilogy he talks about his burgeoning emotional maturity, how he wants to settle down and have a family but his old tricks keep returning and the book Italian Girls finishes with a possible new relationship or could he eventually grasp the nettle and go back to the decent woman in his life.
His story is like so many stories I have come into contact with whilst pursuing the physical, mental and sexual abuse that pupils of St Bede’s suffered under the tutelage of Monsignor Thomas Duggan in the 1950s and ‘60s. I am beginning to see it as the norm for abused kids.
The three books are exceptionally well written as you would expect from a scholar of English and I would advise any reader with an interest in this problem of clerical abuse and the detrita it leaves behind to get the three. They are all available on Amazon but at the moment only the first book is on Kindle.
After contacting the author to congratulate him on his work he tells me there is a fourth book in the pipeline and possibly a fifth. The man is 70 years of age and this problem is still affecting his thoughts. Meanwhile we are communicating regularly trying to catch up with the 50 lost years. Read away at these three thought provoking books and if possible try to pass on your thoughts through the comment section of this blog.
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Holy Ghostly Tales
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