Paul Malpas

I have just been watching the film by Jason Berry of Marciel Maciel, a Mexican Catholic priest, who formed the religious orders of Legion Of Christ for men and Regnum Christie for women.  Both orders have massive support in the Americas and since the 1940s Maciel had been fund raising and building seminaries there for fledgling priests.   Numbering among his many benefactors is Carlos Slim, reputed to be the world’s richest man with a net worth of $53.5 billion.  Maciel was nearly canonized before he died, so highly did the Vatican think of him.

However from the late 1990s allegations of abuse and sexual malpractice against this man started to arise, so much so that Pope John Paul II ordered an investigation into Maciel’s organization and personal habits.  Before this investigation could bear fruit, Maciel became ill and the Vatican decided to close down the proceedings so that he could die with dignity, and this he did in 2002.

Suspicions and allegations still hung around however and eventually it came out that the man was not only a serial abuser of his own priests and seminarians, he also had women in Spain, Mexico and America who bore him children on a regular basis that were also abused by him.  Not only that but he had been putting money aside for his own use out of benefactors donations to build and develop property in various countries.  Certainly in Spain where he has at least three children.

This fact came to life when three of these Spanish children came forward with legal documents proving that they were his children and had beneficial ownership of properties that the Church was trying to claw back from his estate.  Last year Ratzinger set up another investigation into the man and his empire.  It is a television programme not to miss.  It is called Vows Of Silence. There is another by director Mary Healey called Holy Watergate.  Both these films show how it was in America, we have yet got it to come.

You just wonder about Maciel, with all his shagging how he had time for mass and prayer.  The only good thing in his favour is that he followed up John Paul II’s teaching on birth control.  He never used a johnnie.

Funnily enough when I get thinking about clerical abusers my mind always turns to Thomas Duggan, the bane of many a young boy’s life in Manchester in the 1950s and 60s.  For any of you who missed them, my blogs The Aftermath of a St. Bede’s Education on 5th April 2010, Monsignor Thomas Duggan on 31st March 2010 andThe Staff of St. Bede’s College on 18th March 2010 explain in some detail what this unholy man was about.  From correspondence I am receiving you all say that in the light of this recent clerical abuse scandal, as a man you reached for your keyboards to see if at long last  Tommy Duggan had been outed.  There was nothing at all about him only my blog but it strikes me that their first reaction says a lot.  Within the letters and e-mails received are the following bare bones of his life:-

Born in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire in about 1906

Educated at St. Bede’s College     1917-1923

Member of Staff at St. Bede’s        1933-1936  &  1940-1950

Rector of St. Bede’s                            1950-1966

Priest at St. Mary’s, Langho            1966-1968

Died in Langho, which is to the north of Blackburn in 1968.

From these bones a few questions need to be asked:-

1 )  Where was he between the years 1923-1928?  Presumably at a seminary.

2 )  Where was he between the years 1928-1933?

3 )  Where was he between the years 1936-1940?  I did hear he had some Vatican training but when and in what form.

4 )  With no offence to the people of Langho, why was he moved at short notice to this isolated place?  He was a powerful man in the diocesan hierarchy, why would his obvious talents be helpful to Langho?  Geoff Burke, the incoming Monsignor and Rector said in Baeda’s winter edition 1968 that he was sent on “new work which the Lord Bishop has asked him to do in the parish”.  In my experience any priest who is sent up north at a minute’s notice has sinned most greviously.

If anyone out there  can confirm or deny the above presumed facts please get in touch or if they can add anything to the pot or speak of their experiences contact me on e-mail at malpas46@eircom.net.  My main area of concern with this man is his abuse of power by physically, mentally and sexually assaulting the pupils under his control in the 16 years he was Rector of St. Bede’s College.  There is a hell of a lot of hurt out there even after 50 or 60 years.

Please continue to write into me about Duggan with any little morsel so that my report can be finished and sent off to all those past pupils who contribute and also to the Salford Diocesan Authorities.  All we can really hope for is an apology, but from correspondence received it is obvious this man blighted many young Catholic boys’  lives

A fellow called Geoffrey Burke was our headmaster at school, St. Bede’s College, the premier Catholic Grammar School in Manchester and its environs.  He eventually became an Auxillary Bishop of Salford in 1967, only four years after I was hounded out of the school.  I might have been holding him back.

I knew Geoff well as he was a friend of our parish priest, Canon Vincent O’Shaughnessy and often took services at St. Robert’s where I was an altar boy.  As altar boys it was expected that we treated him with dignity, in return for which he gave us a spiteful grimace.  In the school he was worse and if anybody could bear a grudge it was him.  In the school his subject was History and in particular Reformation History which he taught us in Upper 5th for O Level.  His brand of history had nothing to do with Tudor History but only that of his dream woman, Bloody Mary.  Henry VIII and Elizabeth I did not enter the frame, so unless you read outside of the box you would never pass history.  He seemed so out of touch with reality you often wondered at his pronouncements.  I suppose a little like the bishops of Ireland today.

I remember one day in 1962, the first day back in 6th Form.  Myself and Mike Sheehan having both acheived seven passes at o Level (the maximum in our stream of Classics), we were confident with our abilities but possibly not with our behaviour.  We presented ourselves at the morning assembly, all the staff of the College in their mortar boards and gowns were on the stage in the hall.  The whole school, then around 900 boys, were present as Jack Rigby, the Prefect of Discipline, stepped forward to read out the names of the new boys and the classes they had been allocated in the Upper 3rd or First Year and then the names of the boys and their streams in Lower 4th or Second Year, either Classical, Semi-Classical, Modern or Remove.  Then the whole school were dismissed except for us boys in Lower 6th or Sixth Year.  There were three streams in this year, Classics, Literature and Mathematics and the names read out for each stream and then dismissed, leaving myself and Sheehan standing in the vast open space of the Hall with the emblazoned staff still standing on the stage looking down at us.  It must be remembered here that there had been no previous discussion, no letters to parents explaining that we were persona non grata. Geoff Burke stepped forward saying “what have you boys come back for?  See me in Our Lady’s Corridor in Five minutes”.  We did as we were bid and shuffled off, dismayed and disheartened and attended the interview some minutes later.

“We did not want you back; you caused enough trouble for us last year.  Why have you turned up this morning?”  We mumbled something along the lines that we did not have anywhere else to go.  Geoff thought for a minute and said “I’ll tell you what we will do.  We will let you go into the 6th Form if you join the Saint Vincent de Paul Society.”  Not knowing what that entailed, we immediately agreed and following the maxim of divide and conquer, Sheehan was allocated Classics and I, Literature.

Our first SVP meeting took place a week later on a Saturday morning.  We were given 200 Senior Service cigarettes each and told to go round Newholme, the geriatric facility at Withington Hospital and distribute 100 cigarettes each to the patients and the following day to go down to Salford Docks and distribute a further 100 each to the poor sailors on the boats, tied up at the docks.

We could not believe our luck or Geoff’s stupidity, we never gave the charity of the SVP a second thought.  The old folk got about 20 of their 200 and the next day we visited the docks and ascended the walkway on to what seemed like a deserted ship.  The sailors must have been ashore doing what sailors do; only the chef was on board in the galley.  He was as mad as a hatter and thought we were either trying to stow away or hoping to steal the ship’s cargo and he chased us off the ship, brandishing a cleaver and cursing in some foriegn tongue.

Although we continued with the geriatrics for a few further weeks. we never went back to the docks.  We were never as rich disposing of 140 fags a week each.  We kept 60 apiece for our own consumption.  This went on for five or six weeks before the source dried up.  In all this time we did not think of the crime we were possibly committing, our only thought was to treat the school as they treated us, with scorn and derision.  We knew we were on borrowed time and we eventually stopped going to meetings.  If Geoff Burke knew of this he never said anything and we kept out of his way and in fact buckled down to the grind for a while.  Sheehan was thrown out of school on some trumped up charge by the equally despicable Fr Dodgeon at Easter and I was asked to vamoose that summer after preferring to watch the Australian cricket team instead of doing games.  We both survived.