Yet the Catholic Church, in the form of the Salford Diocese, is still saying that they had nothing on the man, their records are clean, although Barry O’Sullivan, the Coordinator of the Child Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese as said on record that he has been a priest for 23 years and has heard stories about Duggan for all that time.  See Philip Gilligan’s blog http://caads.blogspot.com/2011/04/duggan-there-is-no-evidence-to-suggest.html

But myself, Bishop Terence Brain and Barry O’Sullivan all know different.  In fact myself and O’Sullivan had a telephone conversation on 8th October  2010 during which he explained to me how the Bishop, the Chair of St. Bede’s Governors, Monsignor Quinlan, the headmaster of St. Bede’s, Mr. Michael Barber,  Michael Devlin, a solicitor and Chair of the Safeguarding Commission and O’Sullivan had met up in early October 2010 and discovered “serious and sensitive” evidence against Duggan that was too “serious and sensitive” to discuss over the telephone and that it required my presence at a meeting in Manchester as soon as possible.  The next day O’Sullivan fell out with me and this meeting never happened and the truth about Duggan never saw the light of day.

But the truth about Duggan is coming out, on a daily basis, with testimonies from his many victims, all Old Bedians in the mid 50s to mid 70s age group.  When you think about it Duggan was in clover, all those young boys to choose from, all scared to death of him, with the power the Church had over all Catholics in those days.  The boys, the few who spoke of their ordeals, were not  believed by their parents in the main and the various bishops, including Bishop Vincent Marshall, Bishop George Andrew Beck and Bishop Thomas Holland who had all received parental warnings and chose to cover it up and Bishops Kelly and Brain who pushed this information to the furthest reaches of their files.

To my mind this knowledge by the bishops is possibly the most wicked of the sins committed around this subject.  To allow a known pervert free rein to do has he wanted, with whoever of the boys within this cohort of 2500 who passed through his hands during the 16 years of his aegis, was an unbelievable act of vicarious liability.  Probably the biggest sinner in this whole business was Bishop Geoffrey Burke, who worked with and was the right hand man of Duggan for 25 years and was rewarded with his Auxiliary Bishopric after Duggan was sent out to grass at St. Mary’s in Langho in 1967 and for a further 21 years kept the sins of Duggan quiet.  Not far behind Burke are the staff of St. Bede’s, who repeatedly and often, too often to be healthy,  sent appointed boys up to Duggan, as and when he required them.  They might now,  those that are still living, of course,  squeal and get angry and say they did not know this sodomy was being perpetrated, but they knew, the whole bloody school knew.

The pattern of Duggan’s behaviour,  by the week,  is becoming more and more certain.  To an extent,  but not always, it started in Preparatory School, which was in a large house,  just outside the walls of the main school.  This establishment prepared youngsters for the 11+ Examination,  the passing of which entitled the child entry into the senior school.  In the main this school kept itself separate from all the senior school’s activities,  except for the fact that Duggan was  in overall charge.  Two priests in the Prep,  as it was known,  have been accused of sending these young boys up to Duggan for absolutely no reason at all.  It was  as though they were grooming their charges,  some of whom were only nine years old.  These priests, Fr. Bernard Rylands and Fr. Charles Mulholland have been mentioned in various testimonies, with Mulholland especially,  forcing some boys into sexual activity of the grossest sort.

Duggan’s victims,  in the main,  were  quiet  placid individuals,  generally from poorer backgrounds than the majority, some had emotional problems in their families and Duggan knew it.   His activities started with quiet chats,  then simple threats of punishment or expulsion from the school;  then massaging of the pubic and anal regions,  which calmed some of the victims and these he then penetrated,  afterwards wiping them clean and then diminishing them with cruel words to make them think it was all their fault.

The boys who have come forward have been very brave individuals, some have been prescribed tranquillisers for all their adult lives,  some have had long sessions of therapy,  some in 40 year marriages have not told their wives, some were unable to sustain relationships,  nearly all had an inbuilt anger that portrayed itself frequently and all had a sense of guilt of their juvenile experiences.  To listen and read of their trials and tribulations is heart rending and at times horrific.

Duggan was a bullying, psychopathic, sexually very active and unbelievably cruel man, disliked by everyone who ever knew him.  If he were alive today  he would probably give the details of his illigitimate birth as mitigation for his crimes,  but that would not wash.  He was an educated,  scheming  horror of a man,  disliked by pupil,  lay teacher and priest.  However he was not the only psychopath on the staff.   There was the likes of Fr.  Joseph Coulthard and Fr.  Hynes  who dished out illegal physical punishment by the day and who were hated by everyone who came into contact with them.  But Duggan was different,  his sin was Machiavellian in its origins,  carried out with malice aforethought and required the conspiracy of those all around him.  How he got away with it for all those years is too dire to consider.

Most of his victims were culled from the first three years of senior school (11-13 years old) and some  from preparatory school (9-11 years old) after that presumably they became too mature to handle.  Very,  very few reached O Level status,  being weeded out and discarded after they had served their purpose.  Just a few quick calculations will tell you that in the 1957 intake 139 pupils were accepted and 108 were entered for O Levels.  In the 1956 intake 122 were accepted and 80 were entered for O Levels.  Of the 1957 intake 31 pupils had been discarded and of the 1956 intake 42 had been discarded.  All these boys had passed their 11+ examination and were in the top 6% in the country of their age group,  so we were told.  These 73 boys were denied a reasonable and humanitarian education and were then discarded,  most after serving their purpose.

In conclusion I would like all Old Bedians who have not yet been in touch to contact me through the Comments section of my blog or better still e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  We have to get the message across and have it proclaimed to everybody, that abuse of the most hideous form took place at St. Bede’s College all those years ago.  It is no use saying it is water under the bridge and let sleeping dogs lie.  This perverse behaviour has ruined the lives of many young and now old men.  It cannot be left to disappear like some want it to;  it has to be shouted from the roof tops  so that all might know of the canker in the Church and in the Diocese of Salford in particular.

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

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.