Paul Malpas

St Mary’s Church and parish is in North Lancashire, probably the northernmost parish in the Salford Diocese.  The village is famed for its prettiness and old world charm.  The church and graveyard is famed for its bones ie, the bones of Monsignor Duggan and Lord Nolan, the man the Bishops of England and Wales asked to sort out their Safeguarding problems back at the turn of the century (21st that is).  While Nolan was beavering away at his report published in 2002, which really made clear to the dioceses of England and Wales how they were supposed to deal with this pesky problem of priestly abuse on children, Duggan’s bones were already 34 years in the cold Lancashire clay.  No two men could be more poles apart, Duggan, the arch-abuser of vulnerable young boys at St Bede’s College in Manchester and Nolan, the antithesis.  Yet here they are side by side in this lovely Lancashire vale.

St Mary’s had been presided over by Fr Anthony Grimshaw, ex- strapper in chief at St Bede’s under Duggan in the 1960s, a man, who once he had shrugged off the cloying mantle of Bede’s, distinguished himself in Africa as a missionary priest before returning to parish work in Manchester.  A lovely man by all accounts and in my few recent dealings, he seemed to be a good honest man.

Idly flicking through the web this morning, I came across a site named Holy Spirit Interactive, their message for today Friday 4th May 2012 was a long rambling piece on how boring, the boring mass should not be, the writer must have written 5000 words on this boring subject and by the time I reached the end, I was bored to tears.  Then my heart gave a leap because the writer turned out to be no one else but my old mate Bazza, Fr Barry O’Sullivan, who described himself as the parish priest of St Mary’s Chipping.  So what happened to Fr Grimshaw, I do hope he is alright but I did understand he had been in poor health.

So if the the web is not lieing Old Bazza has found his little heaven in the sun.  For those not aware of O’Sullivan or this blog, let me just tell you that in his previous life Bazza was the Coordinator of the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese.  The man charged by Brainless Bishop Brain to look after the welfare of young people and vulnerable adults in the Diocese.  Brain’s nickname could not have been nearer the truth.  O’Sullivan was the complete square peg trying to fit into a round world.  In fact in O’Sullivan’s world there was no square hole even, he was just one useless son of a bitch.

After 10 years slaving away at nothing except feeding his two scraggy dogs he accepted the inevitable, when Brain’s advisors eventually got through and told the Bishop that the present situation in Salford regarding Safeguarding was ridiculous, it could not go on.  Even Cardinal Brady of Armagh was sniggering at Salford.  Bazza with downcast head left his plush Cathedral offices supposedly to devote his time to the poor prisoners in Strangeways Jail in Manchester and devote himself to his 11+ studies in Counselling at Manchester University.  The prisoners revolted and the senior professors threw up.  They have all been saved by Bazza’s mate Brainless removing him to Chipping where he can polish bones and look after another old mate of mine, Ronald Shelley, who I went to school with and who is now a parishioner in St Mary’s.  It was Ron who barked at me one day two years ago that I should leave the sacred bones of Duggan to lie in peace and not publicise the horrors that this devilish man had bestowed on young boys at St Bede’s for 16 years (1950-1966).  Well Ron you have another fine man now so look after him.

It was O’Sullivan who told me one day that he and Brain had discovered something terrible about Duggan and that it was too serious to talk about on the telephone and would I come over to Manchester.  I said I would but before the meeting happened he, in his stupid childish little way, fell out with me over a matter of protocol and said I was an unworthy advocate, not to be trusted and that he could no longer see me and therefore could not speak to me and therefore could not deal with me.  I was persona non grata.  How could a man faced with the biggest clergy abuse scandal to ever hit the Salford Diocese, become my enemy over something so trivial, unless he was the blithering idiot that everybody now knows he is and was.  A man so far removed from reality that he even puts Brady in the shade.

It was the learned O’Sullivan who once threatened to sue me for deformation if I did not retract something that somebody else had written on my blog.  I told him that all resonable gentlemen argued in words and that he had every right to counterbalance the offending sentence with one or two of his own.  Perhaps at that time he had not learnt to write but he is certainly making amends now with this boring old piece of bunkum on the website.

It used to be said that as a priest if you had done something wrong, made love to a women, robbed a bank or went on a drunken wrecking spree, you were sent to North Lancashire to cool off and repent and let the breeze of that area wash you clean.  Unfortunately with O’Sullivan that will not happen because the poor chap needs counselling himself and with his two dirty mutts snuggling up beside him each night, the rancid smell of dog will be with him for life.  God help Chipping.

I am willing to change anything in the above piece if I am proved wrong and the internet has lied to me but I do not think it has and I do not think I will, but at least this piece will be ongoing as more facts arrive.

Shock and horror 12 hours after the above went public a very learned friend who is much closer to the action tells me that I have been duped by that stupid inefficient website Holy Spirit Interactive.  They had the date right but the entry written by our friend O’Sullivan was at least 10 years old.  It seems he was attached to the parish for some time just after the turn of the 21st century.  So I am glad that Fr Grimshaw is in good health or at least as good as it can be at 75 years old and I am happy for the parishioners of St Mary’s.  The last thing I would wish on them is the nincompoop O’Sullivan especially for a second time.  We must also give the website a new name, how about Holy Spirit Inactive.  But at least they gave me a chance to give out about O’Sullivan, another inactive if ever I saw one.

So sorry Tony Grimshaw, sorry parishioners of St Mary’s but God blast you O’Sullivan for being the stupid man you are and to you Ron Shelley watch how you go and listen out for the rattle of bones as Duggan lies uneasily in his bunker.

One of the disturbing news items coming out of Syria today is the Amnesty International report that the Assad security forces are using 31 different methods of torture to create a “nightmarish world” for those protesters picked up off the streets of that beleaguered state.

Victims who were taken into custody report the fact that they were beaten up and further abused with whips, sticks and fists when admitted to detention centres.  Other prisoners were anally raped or hung by their wrists from ceilings and beams.  Many have died as a result and survivors are coming and giving their testimonies from all over the country, all telling a similar story showing that this systematic torture is widespread.

As I was reading the reports of this in the Guardian newspaper this morning, memories of similar tortures came flooding back into my mind, from a time when Amnesty International was only a twinkle in Peter Benenson’s eye (Peter founded this august institution in 1961).  The times I speak of were the late 1950s, the location was St. Bede’s College in Manchester, the perpertrator was Monsignor Duggan and his clerical staff.

St. Bede’s College, the premier Catholic grammar school in Manchester, was where I was unluckily sent after passing my 11+ examination in 1957.  We were faced with torture of equal magnitude, which probity, to use a popular word, forbids me to mention .  A whole generation of clever Catholic boys lives wasted, some have even been lost.

More news to come out of the Catholic dustbin this week is that the Salford Diocese have now appointed a new co-ordinator for their Safeguarding Commission to replace Fr Barry O’Sullivan, who was ignominiously sent to Strangeways Prison in Manchester in December 2011 to commit therapy on the prisoners.  The new Coordinator, who starts in April 2012, is a lady called Dawn Lundergan, who works for Rochdale Council at the moment and who must be at least one step up from the blithering idiot she is replacing.  It makes one wonder though, whether after over three months without a Coordinator, do the Salford Diocese need one?  From all their accounts they have the situation under control and there is not one priest or servant of the Diocese stepping out of line.

You can read all about the new appointee, with comments from professionals in the field and a look once more at Bishop Brain’s excuse for an apology in March 2011 for the aforementioned Bedian abuse in this Friday’s edition of The Tablet.  If you cannot buy a copy, read it on line.  However as a person who has had vast experience of Ms Lundergan’s new department, I cannot let this opportunity pass without giving her some good advice.  To start with, her committee are a waste of space, they are only expected to attend a couple of meetings a year and some cannot turn up for those.  They are only there because being on the Committee is good for their CVs, Sullivan knew this and did not bother to involve them, preferring to do his dirty work alone.  Dawn’s chairman, a solicitor chap called Devlin, who likes to control meetings whatever they are about, because his head is full of empty words, but who used to wash his hands of O’Sullivan’s malpractices, is only there for his Bene Merenti medal from the pope and also because his position looks good in the practice brochure.

So Dawn, clear them all out, let your new brush sweep clean, do not allow it to become glabrous, you owe it to the many survivors of clerical abuse who live precarious lives in the Salford Diocese and who cannot find an outlet for their experiences.

In June 1996 the IRA did most people in Manchester a bit of a favour.  They detonated a bomb, the biggest in peace time history, on Corporation Street, near to the junction with Market Street.  The bomb caused that much damage, it advanced the development of Manchester city centre by about 30 years, leaving us with a city centre today that anybody would be proud of.

The damage was so great in relation to the infrastructure that most buildings within a few hundred yards had either to be demolished or had to have fundamental demolition to large parts of its structure.  This led the movers and shakers to think that while we are doing this we might as well do that as well.  Insurance and investment money came pouring in from all angles and kept the construction industry in business for many a year.  No wonder that although the authorities knew who the culprits were they did not have them arrested.  Had they not done Manchester and the North of England a great service?

The only building within the bomb’s vicinity that did not get demolished was the Royal Exchange, a massive Victorian monolith which had experienced Hitler’s bombs in 1940 and stood to tell the tale.  It was formerly the heartbeat of the textile industry which conducted world wide trade within its porticos, but was now offices, shopping centre and avant-garde theatre.  We, as demolition contractors, were lucky enough to win the contract for the complete internal demolition and clean up of this building and so we embarked on two years of hard, busy and lucrative work.

Back at home my fifth child, Paddy Jo or on formal occasions Patricia Josephine, with one eye on her fast approaching second level education, was expressing a wish to learn to play the piano.  She was just over eight years old when the bomb inadvertently did her a favour and well into her tenth year by the time the favour was realised.

The Royal Exchange, as I have explained, was high, deep and massive.  Nine floors above the ground, four floors below and all sat on a footprint of 60,000sq. ft.  As each floor was handed over by loss adjustors and insurance men, we moved in and cleared everything back to structure.  Hard and difficult work in the confined spaces in which we were asked to work.  We literally shifted several thousand tonnes of debris in our time there.

Some time in late 1997 we were given the undercroft to clear.  The undercroft was the lowest floor of four basement floors, accessed by street traffic from a vehicle lift situated on its southern elevation, opposite Half Moon Street.  It was a warren of storerooms and service equipment rooms housing heating and ventilating and electrical equipment.  The tenants of these storerooms and there was several dozen of them had been permitted entry and had taken out what was considered valuable.  Any item they could not remove because of its size had to be bubble-wrapped and it was part of our responsibility to recover the said bubble-wrapped items and place same onto the tenants’ transport.  Everything not bubble-wrapped had to be removed to tip.

One day in the first week of this operation, we were given the keys to a long tunnel-like room, full of point of sale advertising boards for a shop upstairs that had once sold cosmetics and beauty products.  Struggling through this dusty and out of date paraphenalia and right at the end of the tunnel was a piano with no bubble-wrap around it.  I called the Project Manager on the radio, pointed out the instument to him and asked him the obvious question.  He turned to our job description and said “if it is not double-wrapped, tip it”  Although Paddy Jo did not know it then, her constant pleadings had been answered.

Within an hour of our meeting, the not bubble-wrapped piano was on the back of one of our pick-ups and making its way to our house in Heaton Moor.  With a little effort, four of us lifted it off the pick-up and safely installed it in our front room.  Helen set to work with damp cloths and polish and when I returned that evening there was this wonderfully manufactured upright piano dressed in the most beautifully coloured walnut cladding, a most desirable object.

A piano tuner was called and enquiries made for a piano teacher.  Within 24 hours we had both.  The piano tuner said it was a great example of a horizontally strung piano dating to about the 1870-1880 period.  The piano teacher said Paddy was approaching her lessons with great enthusiasm.  All our hopes and dreams were answered.

A couple of weeks later I received a message from the Project Manager asking me to come up to his office.  I entered and there sat a very irate looking matronly figure, who turned out to be the one-time manageress of the previously mentioned beauty parlour.  “Where is my piano, I did not think I had to bubble-wrap it” she squawked.  It seems, to ease the tensions of the day that rapidly build up in beauty emporia, madame used to visit her dungeoned piano and knock hell out of the ivories until her stress levels decreased.  The Project Manager winked at me and enquired as to where we had stored it.  I was nonplussed for a second but thought for the sake of everybody, I had better be straight.  I explained to the rapidly quietening lady that we had to remove it from its position  in order to keep the work moving but we realised that it had value to someone and that we had it in safe storage at our depot.  I received a delivery address but no thanks and the following day Paddy Jo was heart broken, the lady was happy and the piano teacher was out of work.  However the Project Manager was very pleased at the way he had been extricated from a very tricky situation.  But I had a problem how to placate my darling Paddy Jo and how to keep the piano teacher in business.

Longsight, in Manchester, where I spent my formative first 20 years, is a market for anything.  If you want it, Longsight has got it.  Within hours of me sending out distress signals I was informed of this piano showroom situated in an old mill in Hamilton Road, where I used to play as a kid, climbing its sheer vertical sides and generally doing anything that was just one step from death.  This showroom specialised in refurbished pianos and it was from there, having handed over a pocketful of spondulicks, Paddy’s refurbished Walberg piano was delivered next day.  Paddy and the piano teacher happy, me teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Paddy grateful to her splendid father, attacked the piano with all the vim, vigour and verve she could muster and 18 months later won the Music Scholarship to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range, my old alma mater. This Scholarship payed 50% of the fees during her stay at College.  With about £3,000 of a saving a year over her seven years at school that piano owed me nothing.  Paddy continued learning and finished up passing her Grade 8 examination which is as good as the normal piano player wants.  Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Deputy head of the school and Head of Music considered Paddy to be an excellent musician  That piano, the mahogany one, mentioned in my blog posting of 13 January 2012 entitled A Man With A Van, after crossing the Irish Sea the other day is hopefully going to earn some other deserving kid’s parents a few quid as well but it is all down to that beautifully clad walnut piano that we borrowed from that lovely lady.

Clerical sex abuse of children is nothing new it has been going on since priests became priests and is a direct result of the abuse of power.

Up until the 4^th Century AD, the priests of the Church were just ordinary lay people from various levels of society, who took it upon themselves to preach to the people on this new religion of Christianity.  They were accepted for the fact that they were intelligent and had knowledge and could speak and explain this new concept which Emperor Constantine had recognised as the official  religion of the Roman Empire and they could  translate the complicated teaching so that the ordinary man could understand.

These priests eventually evolved into a distinct privileged class and the best of them became bishops running the various districts or dioceses of the new Church in charge of a  number of priests who showed them allegiance.  They still lived normal family lives, marrying and having children but from the 4^th Century onwards the leaders of the Church were starting to advocate for celibacy to become part of the priestly state, but it was not until 1139, 800 years later at the 2^nd Lateran Council was the mandate for celibacy passed.  Even then there were priests living open married lives into the middle of the17th Century and some even admit today the practice continues with some priests in the face of constant denials by the Church.  The ridiculous thing today is that the Church is accepting Anglican priests into the priesthood of the Catholic Church complete with wives, children and presumably girl friends, to work alongside Catholic priests living under the yoke of celibacy.

However before celibacy began priests had started to commit adultery with women met with in their priestly work and had sex with minors under their control.  There were no real laws or rules dealing with this problem but the bishops of the time could see this dilemma needed sorting out.

The Council of Elvira in Spain in 306AD was the first mention of this problem in Church history and what catches the eye is that the worst form of abuse thought of at this time was priests committing sodomy on young boys and it was decided at this Council that priests found to be committing these acts had to be deprived of Communion.

Over the next 500 years various synods, which were a gathering of bishops getting together and forming legislation, spoke out and legislated against illicit sexual activity by priests.  In 1140 Gratian, a monk, collected all this legislation into a book, The Gratian Decree, which although never official became the basis of Canon Law.  After the passing of the Medieval Period, the various popes became the source of most legislation in this matter.

The Church realised very early on that the Sacrament of Confession proved to be the source of much of this abuse.  People were laying bare their souls and problems to priests, some of whom were taking full advantage of these vulnerable people and helping themselves sexually with threatened blackmail and sexual bullying after the individual’s confession.

Confession had long been part of the Church’s ritual, but in the form of mass confessions.  Individual private confession originated in the Irish Church in the late 6^th Century and spread eventually to all areas of the Christian world.  It became obvious that priests needed guidance on how to conduct this sacrament and how to deal with the various sins confessed.

This manual for priests took the form of several books written by learned scholars and were called Penitentials.  Several of these Penetentials refer to the sexual crimes committed by clerics on young boys and girls,  The most important and apt is the Penitential of St Bede, in the 8^th Century.  The Venerable Bede, the famous English historian and religious intellectual from the north east of England, is the man St Bede’s College in Manchester is named after.

His Penitential advises that priests who commit sodomy with young boys be given increasingly severe penances commensurate with their role, bishops receiving harsher penalties than mere priests.  The regularity with which these types of sex crimes were mentioned in these Penitentials show that the problem was not isolated, was known about in the community and was treated much more harshly than the same crime committed by laymen.  These Penitentials were the main books of reference from the 6^th to the 12^th Century.

Although mandatory celibacy was only decreed from 1139 it was never fully accepted.   Clerics married, committed adultery, had casual sex, homosexual activity flourished and acts of sodomy with children were rampant throughout Medieval times.  Gratian, the year after the 2^nd Lateran Council, repeated Bede’s Penitential and said that clerics should be punished harder than laymen and advocated the old Roman Law of Stuprum Pueri: that sexual violation of young boys be punished with death.  Even then, a 1000 years ago, the leaders of thought in the Church could see the mental damage this practice had on young boys.

So do not ever be misled by the argument put out by the Church recently that these  acts of abuse by priests is as a result of Vatican 2.  It is a result of the abuse of power and has been in existence since priesthood began.  In those early days the whole congregation knew about it and the authorities tried  unsuccessfully to eradicate it.  Why this abuse is a surprise to us today is because the modern authorities in the form of the Pope and his bishops have tried to cover it all up.

I was reading this morning how Hubert Vaughan, Bishop of Salford and founder of St Bede’s College in the 1870s named the school after his brother, the Bishop of Sydney, who had the monastical name of Bede.  This is not the case, St.Bede’s was named directly after the Venerable Bede in the hope his name would protect the school from sexual abuse.  He could not have been more wrong with the type of men his successors put in charge of the College.  He should have called it Salome’s; we might have stood more of a chance,