The Honesty Of The Catholic Church??????????

From my e-mails it is obvious that my regular and long term readers are getting anxious for news.  Every day I keep receiving e-mails asking what happened to the Duggan business.  After the Bishop’s fart of an apology published in the local Manchester rag on March 15 2011, was that it?  Was there not going to be any further probing?  Well to put you something at ease, it has been on-going since then and a tremendous amount of hard work has been put in by all involved.

For new readers “the Duggan case” is about the mental, physical and sexual abuse doled out to a hand-picked cohort of students by Monsignor Thomas Duggan erstwhile Rector of St. Bede’s College in Manchester during the course of his primacy between the years 1950 to 1966.  This abuse was so violent in its nature that some of the victims never recovered mentally from the trauma and have been living wretched lives for 50 to 60 years.  Some of them have been on prescriptive drugs for all that time and are now utterly dependent on them.  Some have died by their own hand, not able to live with the shame.

During the course of our investigations since the Bishop’s mealy mouthed attempt at apology, disturbing fresh evidence came to light resulting in a number of other priests becoming implicated in a ring of abuse.  Not only that and this is outside the remit of our present deliberations, but during our research other priests have been named since Duggan’s demise in 1966 until recently, who have continued this culture of abuse over and above Fr William Green, the only priest yet to have been brought to court from the school.

So to regress, after dealing with the Salford Diocese for a year and receiving all sorts of promises and to be told by them that Duggan was a bad man and that they knew all about him and then to be offered this shocking apology from the Bishop and be told that was all we were going to get, you can imagine how pissed off I was.  But in a way its publication was a good thing, the story was taken up in the main press of most countries on the five continents.  It was aired round the world and more victims got to hear about it and started reporting in to me.  The ball was rolling once more.

We have a list of victims and a long list of witnesses scattered all over the world.  I’ve never known such a diasporic bunch of men, but I think that when they left school, any port as far from Duggan as possible was sought.  But thank God for the internet and this blog which enabled these men to appear from nowhere and explain their plight.  Their responses were swift, reliable and intelligent, it was a pleasure to deal with them all and often emotions ran wild and all conducted anonymously to allay the fears of a lot of them.  These men have suffered abominably and I hope that sometime soon they will receive some peace.

I also hope that there will be a positive outcome to this journey, the trickery of the Catholic Church, the Diocese of Salford, the Bishop and the Safeguarding Commission of the Diocese of Salford will be shown for what it is, a sham.  These people are not interested in honesty and goodness, they have no Christian principles that they boast about frequently.  All they have is trickery, obfuscation, deviance and damn lies.

And while I am on the subject of all the four above nouns, I would like to tell you about a book that has just come out written by Ray Mouton, a lawyer who represented an abusing priest, Fr Gauthe, in the first ever trial that kick-started the prosecution of American clerical abusers in 1984.  He began to realise the stink of the Church then and he got together with Fr Tom Doyle and Fr Michael Peterson and wrote a short book, now called The Manual which advised American bishops how to deal with the train coming down the tracks at them.  They chose to ignore the trio’s advice to their financial detriment.  The book has taken Mouton 20 years to write and is in novel form but based exactly on the above case.  It is called In God’s House and shows the Church to be a lying, deviant, murderous organisation, intent on covering up and hiding its criminals.  It is published by Head of Zeus Ltd.  It can be bought on Amazon but even cheaper on Kenny’s Bookshop in Galway which offers free postage worldwide.