An Easter letter to the Archbishop

By email to: archbishop@rcdow.org.uk
Archbishop Vincent Nichols
Archbishop’s House
Ambrosden Avenue
London SW1P 1QJ


3 April 2010

Dear Archbishop Nichols

I have been reading in the press the sad record of the Catholic Church with regard to the abuse of children by a small number of clergy.

As you point out in your article submitted to The Times on 25 March 2010, "in the last forty years, less than half of 1% of Catholic priests in England and Wales (0.4%) have had allegations of child abuse made against them. Fewer have been found guilty."

I would like to draw your attention to some of the abuses which occurred in the 1950s at Prior Park Prep School in Cricklade, Wiltshire, run by the notorious Irish Christian Brothers.

I am writing now having read that most of the abuse suffered by children at the hands of priests occurred outside the UK, notably in Ireland and Germany, and that to an extent this country has remained "on the sidelines." This is not true.

I am now retired, but I think I may have gone into education as a teacher partly because I could not believe that it was right for children such as myself to have suffered in the way that we did at Cricklade.

The headmaster, Brother B, was a brutal sadist. More than 50 years on I still have memories which I am sure will shock you. Punishments inflicted by this monstrous man included:

- public beatings on the buttocks in front of the whole school administered to a boy who had a problem with faecal incontinence;

- publicly slapping a naked boy on the face in the showers;

- escorting from classroom to classroom in the school a boy who had problems with urinary incontinence. The child, aged 10 or 11 I suppose, was forced to wear a sailor suit - why I don't know! - and was beaten on the hands with the usual implement used by the Brothers, a heavy leather strap.

- slapping brutally and repeatedly in the face, in front of the whole school, a boy of the same age who had refused to shake hands with another boy after a fight.

I myself was given the strap by Brother B at the age of seven, shortly after joining the school, because I had neglected to bring a pencil to the exam room. At the time I did not know the meaning of the word 'exam'. I used the story in my retirement speech to colleagues to illustrate how I had thankfully seen progress in education during my lifetime, so I suppose the episode did have some value.

One abuse which I did not mention to my colleagues was that practised by one of the elderly staff at the school, and from which I and many others suffered. In fairness it was not of a brutal nature, involving simple senile groping. Brother A must have been in his 70s and had spent time in India. I remember him as quite a kindly man, actually, who used to play gramophone records to us boys. But I still have, strangely in my memory after all this time, the sensation of his scaly hands caressing my private parts. He did this quite openly in the presence of small groups of boys, almost absent-mindedly; we thought it was rather odd, but accepted it as an eccentricity rather than as a crime. Today, I know he would have been charged with assault. Looking back, I did wonder what he had got up to in India with the native children in his more active days.

Now I am writing this letter not out of any vituperative feeling, but simply to help put the record straight.

You maintain in your Times article that "every year since 2002 the Catholic Church in England and Wales has made public the exact number of allegations made within the Church, the number reported to the police, the action taken and the outcome."

I would like the contents of this letter to be kept on file and passed on to the police by your office. Those two Brothers died a long time ago of course, and so there is no way that they can be charged. I am not even thinking of mounting any legal suit against the Catholic Church. But it does seem to me that the Diocese of Clifton in which Cricklade fell was guilty of extreme neglect in not monitoring the behaviour of the Christian Brothers at the prep school.

You have courageously expressed publicly your shame at the offences against children carried out by Catholic priests. I would like to suggest that to convince the public of the Church's sincere regret in the matter of child abuse by its clergy, such accounts as mine be published in archives which you would make freely available to anyone. I would be interested to hear your reaction to such a suggestion. For all I know this has already been implemented.

I look forward to hearing from you, and I am sorry to be writing in this vein at such a sacred time for the Catholic Church.

Yours sincerely

Michael Downes