Paul Malpas

Today in Ottawa,  Canada,  ex-Bishop Raymond Lahey B.Th.,  L.Th.,  Ph.D., D.D.,  of Antigonish Diocese in Nova Scotia faces the longest day of his 71 year old life.  Almost two years ago to the day from his finest hour on 7th August 2009 when he concluded an historic legal case of priestly child abuse in his Diocese for $15 million.   Called a class action law suit whereby the Diocese set up a compensation fund to pay off any victim of clerical abuse in the Diocese since 1950.  Any survivor of abuse could sue the diocese independently or he could apply for monies under the fund, provided they could persuade a lawyer, in this case it was Mr. John McKiggin, of their abuse.   This saved the poor victims taking the costly protracted legal route through the courts.   At the time this decision along with Bishop Lahey’s heartfelt apology to all survivors was hailed by Mr McKiggin to be the model of how the Catholic Church should deal with this problem.  He said it was extraordinary and unprecedented in this world wide failure by the Church.   He went on to say  “it was the first time I know of that a bishop of that authority had apologised and had acknowledged the resposibility of the institutional Church to survivors”.

Then shock!!   Only seven weeks later he resigned his episcopate without any explanation on 26th September 2009.   The Catholics in the Diocese were scratching their heads in amazement,  he was a well liked bishop and had only recently done the decent thing with those poor survivors even though the Diocese had to sell and his still selling most of its properties to finance the fund.   They feared the hand of the Vatican at work,  but not this time or so one would think.

On 15th September, two weeks prior to his resignation and after a visit to the United States, Bishop Lahey was stopped by the Canada Border Service Agency officers at Ottawa airport and searched and his laptop computer was found to contain various images of child pornography,  which consisted of 600 still photographs,  60 videos of eight to ten year old boys having sex with each other and with adults and lots of pornographic literature.   He was charged with the possession and importation of child pornography on 25th September the day before the puzzling resignation.

At a preliminary hearing in Ottawa in May this year the importation charge was dropped but the possession charge remained and he was told that a sentencing hearing would take place on 4th August,  today.   He asked for his sentence to start immediately,  11th May 2009.

Now this whole affair begs a question,  WHY?   This man was a good man so it appears,  pleading guilty immediately.   He was well liked, he was intelligent,  he had empathy with survivors of clerical paedophilia, yet he practised a form of paedophilia in his private moments.   He did not have the strength of mind to disregard this temptation.   He was able to compartmentalise this evil and carry on with his good episcopal duties.   To me this smacks of emotional immaturity;  most priests in one way or another seem to suffer from this.   Fr. Gerald FitzGerald the founder of the Servants of the Paraclete or Paraclete Fathers in 1947  who to this day treat the emotionally immature priests round the world,  recognised this deficiency by 1950 and yet the Church 60 years later have still not been able to recognise this trait within itself.   Unless it recognises this fact and puts in place some psychological vitamin boost, the institution will be plagued with this problem until it eventually destroys itself.

As the Church starts to dig its grave in America, the Church here is getting out its shovel.   I see one,  Christopher Jarvis,  a father of four and the Safeguarding Officer for the Diocese of Plymouth has been discovered with 4000 images of child pornography on his computer.   Christopher Budd,  Bishop of the Diocese smugly says  “Mr Jarvis was suspended from his position as soon as the Diocese was aware”.   I suspect he is still drawing his wages though.   This man had been doing this job for a number of years.   Do you not think that in these  very sensitive positions and bearing in mind what the Church should know about this problem,  that they do not have strict psychological stress tests on these individuals.   Who is guarding the safeguarders?

On a last note even the Anglican Church are feeling the pressure.   After the earthquakes in Christchurch in New Zealand the Diocese is contemplating building a new cathedral out of cardboard to a revolutionary Japanese design.  Shades of the three little pigs and the big bad wolf  -  bricks,  my boy,  is the only answer.

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