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.

With the boring news that an Irish Catholic Archbishop has resigned from the priesthood and that the Pope with surprising alacrity accepted this resignation because the Archbishop says he cannot keep to his vows of celibacy, comes the thought that, that was hard luck on him and another nail in this stupid medieval rule that priests have to be celibates.

But then the news came through that he has been shagging young Nigerian girls for the last 30 years according to Dolores Atwood, a 41 year old Nigerian who had been under his physical and sexual spell for 27 years.  Dick Burke, has he is known to his friends, has been under investigation by his order, the St. Patrick’s Missionary Society or the Kiltegan Fathers, since 2007 or so they tell us and although they could find no evidence of abuse against young girls, they have accepted Dick’s confession that he cannot leave women alone.  They also say that they accept Dolores Atwood’s sworn statement that he had been molesting her since she was 14.  It seems though, that they only accept bits of her statement because molesting a 14 year old girl in a hospital bed seems to me to be sexual abuse of young girls.  These Kiltegan Fathers also claim to have given Dolores counselling after her ordeal.  Dolores says she does not trust the Kiltegan Fathers one bit.

Richard Burke, from Fethard in Tipperary, was made bishop of Warri diocese in Nigeria in 1997 by Pope John Paul II and then promoted to Archbishop of Benin City in 2008 by Benedict XVI.  This excuse that he failed to observe his oath of celibacy puts a new slant on child abuse and makes it seem not to much of a sin.  But what kind of a sin is it if the Church knew of his abuse of juveniles before he was made a bishop and I will come onto that later.

So now we have the boring bit over with, what made me start to look into this, is what Dolores also said in her statement, that Old Dick had visited St. Luke’s in Manchester in 2009.  That started me thinking that the only St. Lukes I knew in Manchester was the clinic for sexually transmitted diseases, founded in 1818 as the Lock Hospital in Ancoats, it became St. Luke’s in 1918, serving the returning soldiers who had picked up all sorts of nasties in France and the Middle East.

However after a little research I found the name of St. Luke’s, an unfortunate misnomer.  The St. Lukes Centre in Manchester is a private clinic which deals with a slicker form of sexual subversion that of supporting the psychological and physical needs of priests, and that is what Old Dick needed in 2009 when he stayed there.

This St. Luke’s Centre opened in a blaze of silence in December 2005 to try to straighten out those bent clerics who had previously been treated by the Paraclete Fathers at Stroud in Gloucestershire.  To get sent to Stroud as a priest meant you were well bent, you needed lots of straightening out.  Brendan Smyth, the most infamous serial abuser of children in Ireland, was a past pupil.  The Paraclete Fathers said they neither had the resources or the manpower to run this establishment and were going to have to close down and the Bishop’s Conference of England and Wales, with an eye on the Indians coming over the hill, decided they definitely needed such a place but run on more modern, sleeker lines.  They looked around and realized that the Church in America was in the deepest mire and decided to learn from them.  The American Church had opened up such a place some years before, called the St. Luke’s Institute in Silver Springs, Maryland and using their experience and model, the Bishop’s Conference opened up St. Luke’s in Manchester.

Now Dick Burke, in his travels, before bishopric tapped him on his shoulder, was sent by his order to New Jersey in 1995 according to Dolores Atwood’s statement.  A strange place to go for a man steeped in the missionary ethos of the Kiltegan Fathers, but on perusing a map of America, I realized that Silver Springs and the St. Lukes Institute, just north of Washington D.C. are only 65 miles from the border of New Jersey. In American terms, only a hop step and a jump away.  I just hope he was not treated at St. Luke’s Institute in 1995 because to suggest he was is to cynical to consider.

The Rev. Dr. Gerard Fieldhouse-Byrne BA(Hons), STB, MA, MSW, D.Min., MBAPC (Accred), a very highly qualified psychotherapist is the head of St. Luke’s in Manchester.  His education reads like a Who’s Who in the mindbending game.

1989-1992  Lancaster University BA (Hons)

1992-1996  Venerable English College and the Gregorian University in Rome

1996-1997  Angelicum University in Rome.

1997     Boston University School of Theology.

1998-2000  Boston University School of Social Work

2000-2002  St. Luke’s in Maryland.  Special treatment for priests’ addictive, sexual and psychological disorders

And then after these 13 years of intensive study and on his return to the Salford Diocese, he was sent as parish priest to St. Teresa’s, Little Lever, in Bolton.  It was like sending a rocket scientist to mind the corner shop.  He was only there for a year and he was then sent to St. Joseph’s parish in Todmorden for two years until July 2005 whilst retaining his status as Ex-Officio member of the Salford Diocese Child Protection  Commission.  He is top dog when it comes to priestly abuse of minors and it was to St. Joseph’s Todmorden he was sent, the parish where the homosexual abusing priest Fr Thomas Doherty left his slimy trail when he was imprisoned on 5 counts of buggery of children.  It was seven years after Doherty was sentenced and Featherstone-Byrne’s move coincided with his release from prison.  Was this to tidy up or to cover up, but again we can all get too cynical by far.

To return to Dick, who St. Luke’s could not straighten out and to Stroud where the Paraclete Fathers could not straighten out Brendan Smyth and to all the other serial abusers who could not straighten up.  Is there any point. Commendable as all this psychotherapy is, do you not think that Featherstone-Byrne and his cohort are just pissing in the wind.  Paedophiles are born with that preference and nothing will make them divert from their path.  All that can be done is to keep them under proper surveillance and do not give them opportunity.

Read Dolores Atwood’s statement here

And read Richard Burke’s statement here