A Guest at the Feast, page 17
It isn’t as though Bergoglio, always hard to pin down on any matter, has become a poster pope for gay liberation. Many of his appointments to cardinal – Blase Cupich in Chicago, Joseph Tobin in Newark and Kevin Farrell in Rome – show an urge to get away from the emphasis on abortion, gay rights and divorce, but in a country where signals matter more, such as Ethiopia, he appointed Berhaneyesus Demerew Souraphiel as cardinal, a man who has referred to homosexual behaviour as ‘the pinnacle of immorality’ and who, in 2008, endorsed outlawing homosexual activity as part of Ethiopia’s constitution.
At eighty-four, as apparent in his latest book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, written during the pandemic, Bergoglio has come to sound like a gentle soul. In his final years as pope, Ratzinger was the same. It must make Bergoglio smile that there is a group, centred on the influential Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, which, Ivereigh writes, ‘has busily promoted the emeritus pope’ – Ratzinger – ‘as a pastoral and theological alternative to the Francis papacy’. In 2016 Georg Gänswein, still close to Ratzinger, ‘advanced his “two popes” theory that the papacy now consisted of “an expanded ministry, with an active member and a contemplative member”’, Ivereigh writes. When Bergoglio, on a flight back from Armenia, was asked directly, ‘Are there two popes?’ the old steely Jesuit in him re-emerged. He had no trouble putting paid to Gänswein, and gently also to Ratzinger himself. This was the tone that Buenos Aires had been familiar with, but it was sweeter now that Bergoglio was in power:
Benedict is in the monastery praying . . . I’ve heard, but I don’t know if it’s true . . . that some have gone there [to him] to complain because of this new pope . . . and he chased them away with the best Bavarian style. This great man of prayer is . . . not the second pope . . . for me, he is the wise grandfather at home.
The Ferns Report
London Review of Books, 2005
Everybody was afraid of Dr Sherwood. My mother was afraid of him at meetings of Pax Romana, the lay Catholic discussion group in Enniscorthy, because he had a way of glaring at women members when they spoke. He didn’t, it seemed, like women speaking. At St Peter’s College he was dean of the seminary, but he had once been dean of discipline of the boarding school, and had a fearsome reputation as a merciless wielder of the strap. I studied him carefully when I first saw him; he was gaunt and unsmiling. Soon, even though he had no business on the lay side, I saw him at work. Four or five of us were hanging around the squash courts after lights out. When he saw us, he stood quietly at first and watched us; then he picked on the most innocent and vulnerable boy. He called him over and began to interrogate him while pinching one cheek hard and then the other cheek and then pulling his ears with enormous slow ferocity and then moving to his slow-growing sideburns until he had almost lifted our poor friend off the ground. Dr Sherwood was evil. I made up a song about him with a vile chorus.
Soon, he was replaced as dean of the seminary, although he still hovered darkly in corridors. The new dean, Dr Ledwith, was young and friendly and open and very good-looking. He was also reputed to be really smart. One of my friends knew him from home so he often stopped to talk to us. He was a new breed of priest; he had studied in Europe and America. Many of the teaching priests spent their summers in parishes in America so they were full of new ideas. Everything was open for discussion, or almost everything. I went to a brilliant lecture by Dr Ledwith on ideas of paradox within Catholic doctrine. It was whispered that he would one day be a great prince of the church.
I got to know some of the other priests and realized that for some of the 300 boarders, being friends with a priest meant that you could go up to his rooms and hang out, make phone calls, listen to music, watch TV. I became friends with a few of the priests, but in my last year became especially friendly with a physics teacher, Fr Collins, because my best mate was one of his brightest students.
All of the teaching priests, except Fr Collins, had rooms off a corridor in a modern extension. Fr Collins’s rooms were in an older building. It was easy to go up and down to his rooms without being noticed, as the two other priests in his part of the building were often away. His stereo system was amazing. I listened to Tommy there and Jesus Christ Superstar. He always had a box of sweets. I could ring home on his telephone. On Saturday nights after lights out, with his full connivance, we could break all the rules and sneak up to his room and watch The Late Late Show, a controversial chat show on Irish television. We were often there until after midnight.
After The Late Late Show, we would switch over to a British channel to watch a programme about new films. One night, without any warning, it showed the naked fight scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women in Love. I was pretty interested in the clip, but I knew to keep quiet afterwards. Modesty was a primary virtue at the school: there were doors on each shower and we all slept in cubicles. In the debating society everything was open to discussion except homosexuality, which no one would have even thought of mentioning.
I knew that Fr Collins took a very dim view of homosexuality because he had deeply disapproved when I told a joke about Oscar Wilde at the debating society. And when a friend, who looked slightly effeminate in any case, began to part his hair in the middle, he was told by Fr Collins that it was better to part it at the side; a middle parting, he said, was a sign of homosexuality. Nonetheless, there were often vague whisperings about Fr Collins. I knew that he liked my friend, but I never allowed myself to think too much about the implications of that. Nothing ever happened.
The dormitory was overseen by a seminarian whom I liked and respected. He was fair-minded and decent. Through him, I got to know another seminarian called James Doyle. He would stop and talk if we met in the corridor, even though fraternization between seminarians and lay students was frowned on. He had many opinions and enjoyed gossip and had a habit of winding me up so I could never quite tell whether he was serious or not. I liked him.
In the second half of the 1990s these three men – Michael Ledwith, Donal Collins and James Doyle – became part of the pantheon of Irish priests whose names were often mentioned on the news. In 1990 James Doyle pleaded guilty to indecent assault and common assault on a young man and was given a three-month suspended sentence. Four years later, Dr Ledwith resigned suddenly as president of Maynooth College, Ireland’s main seminary. He had been secretary to three synods of world bishops in Rome and had served three full terms on the International Theological Commission, the group of thirty theologians who advise the pope. He had made a private settlement with a young man after allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour. He is no longer involved with the Catholic church. In 1998 Fr Collins was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, after pleading guilty to four charges of indecent assault and one charge of gross indecency at St Peter’s College between 1972 and 1984.
These men and others like them became public enemies; they were often filmed leaving courthouses with anoraks over their heads (although it should be emphasized that Dr Ledwith never faced any charges in court). Part of the reason Doyle was given a suspended sentence was that he promised to leave the Republic of Ireland. He went to England. The country wanted rid of these priests.
Everyone in the country had strong opinions about these men. And so did I. Mine had their roots, I suppose, in the fact that I had known these people and liked them and in the fact that I was gay. The word being used to describe them was ‘paedophile’, which struck me as wrong. They were simply gay; they had believed that their homosexuality, in all its teenage confusion, was a vocation to the priesthood. Whereas other boys, as religious as they were, could not become priests because they were attracted to women, these men had no such problem. No one ever asked them if they were homosexual. Thus they moved blindly and blissfully towards ordination and, eventually, towards causing immense damage to vulnerable young people.
It was easy to ask the question: if heterosexuality were not only forbidden but unmentionable, if blokes married other blokes, and you, as a good closeted heterosexual man, were put in charge of a boarding school of 300 girls aged between thirteen and eighteen, would you not at one point over a long career make sexual demands on one of the girls? Or hit on one young woman in a seminary of young women aged between eighteen and twenty-five? It was a great argument and I enjoyed making it. I was sure I was right. I am not so sure now.
This is because of the publication of the Ferns Report, written by a tribunal chaired by the former Irish Supreme Court judge Francis Murphy. Ferns is a diocese made up of County Wexford and parts of some of the bordering counties. The tribunal was set up by the Irish government because there seemed to be more clerical offenders in this diocese than in any other, and in reaction to a BBC documentary about abuse there.
The report explains why Fr Collins’s rooms were not close to those of the other teaching priests. In 1966 he had visited the dormitory known as the Attic, which became my dormitory four years later, and, according to the Ferns Report, had performed ‘examinations of an intimate nature involving the measurement of the length of the boys’ penises on the pretext of ascertaining whether or not they were growing normally. The inquiry was told that approximately twenty boys were involved. Fr Collins has disputed the detail of this account of the alleged abuse.’
Dr Sherwood and another priest, according to the report, soon afterwards approached the bishop’s secretary with this news. The bishop sent Collins ‘to a pastoral ministry’ in Kentish Town in north London for two years. The bishop did not inform the diocese of Westminster why the priest was being sent there. The bishop was called Donal Herlihy. I knew him a bit. He had spent many years in Rome and was rather disappointed to be returned to an Irish backwater. It was said of him that he would have made a very great bishop if only he had believed in God. His sermons in the cathedral in Enniscorthy were lofty in tone and content. He loved Catullus and Ovid and Horace and he could not refrain from quoting them to a bewildered congregation. I once sat through a long sermon on the small matter of the ‘lacrimae rerum’. While Bishop Herlihy was very worldly in an Italian way about many issues, his worldliness did not, I think, stretch to a priest under his control wishing to measure the length of twenty boys’ penises. He simply would have had no idea what to do.
According to the Ferns Report, the bishop ‘believed that the problem had been solved’ by sending Fr Collins to England for two years and that it ‘would be unfair and vindictive to pursue the matter further’. The bishop is reported to have said to his secretary: ‘Hasn’t he done his penance?’ In 1968 Herlihy ordered Collins back to teaching. This time, however, the bishop instructed that the erring priest should have his lodgings in the old building, at a distance from the dormitories, so that he would not be so easily tempted when night fell.
What is interesting about all of this is that no one at any point considered calling the police. The Catholic church in Ireland in those years was above the law; it had its own laws. By the time I arrived at St Peter’s in 1970, Fr Collins had been fully restored to the swing of college life. He prepared students for the Young Scientist Exhibition in Dublin every January, spending time alone with them, travelling to Dublin with them. He was in charge of the darkroom, and taught me and many others how to develop photographs. In 1972 he directed the school play. In 1974 he was put in charge of swimming lessons. The other physics teacher, also a priest, gave his classes and then disappeared each day. There was no law in the school saying that a teaching priest had to have any involvement with students outside the classroom.
Dr Sherwood continued to haunt the corridors, making a constant nuisance of himself. He must have noticed all of Fr Collins’s activities. Since the priests had three meals a day together, there must have been a moment when Collins alluded in passing to the swimming lessons or the sessions in the darkroom. Did Sherwood catch the eye of one of the other priests and give him a knowing look? Or did they all pretend it was nothing? According to the Ferns Report, one priest who ‘lived downstairs from Fr Collins . . . from 1970 to 1971 and again from 1985 until 1988 . . . was aware of the traffic on the stairs going to his, Fr Collins’s rooms, even after lights out, but stated there was “not the slightest suspicion of anything untoward”’. The report also states that it received ‘direct evidence from past pupils and a lay teacher who were in St Peter’s during that time, to the effect that Fr Collins’s continuing inappropriate behaviour with young boys was well known in the school during that period and it is clear that sexual abuse was occurring during that time’.
Also, the report states that ‘at least six priests’ working in the college at the time knew why Fr Collins had been sent to England in 1966. The bishop’s vicar-general said in a statement to police in 1995 that ‘it was generally believed that Fr Collins had a problem with abusing young boys in 1966 and that Bishop Herlihy had sent him away because of it.’ I presume that he meant the priests only when he said ‘it was generally believed’, because it was not, in my opinion, generally believed by the students, despite the evidence given to the Ferns Report by past pupils; it lay instead in the realm of innuendo, rumour and nudges. It was not generally believed, in my opinion, by the young boys getting swimming lessons or being taught to develop photographs, with the exception of the very few picked on for abuse, most of whom told nobody what was happening until many years later, or by parents, or by the police.
Fr Collins began to abuse at St Peter’s again in the early 1970s, according to the report. Once more, he measured penises, but this was only for starters. Over a four-year period one boy was masturbated four to six times a year by Collins. In the 1990s ten boys made allegations against him, including that he ‘forced’ one of them ‘to engage in mutual masturbation and oral sex’ and that he on one occasion attempted anal sex. All of this occurred between 1972 and 1984. In court in 1995, some of his victims spoke about the detrimental effect the abuse has had on their lives.
Collins knew no fear. In 1988 he took time off from his many extracurricular activities to apply to become principal of the school. By this time Bishop Herlihy had gone to his reward, and there was a new bishop, Brendan Comiskey, an outgoing, friendly man who paid serious attention to the press and to public relations. He appointed Donal Collins as principal, despite being warned against doing so, according to the Ferns Report, by two priests.
The first allegation of sexual abuse since 1966 came in 1989, within seven months of Fr Collins’s appointment as principal. In 1991, as more allegations were made, Collins removed himself to Florida, where he sought help and worked in a parish. Bishop Comiskey did not tell the parish in Florida of his history. Although Collins admitted ‘the broad truth’ of the allegations against him to the bishop in 1993, the bishop told the police in 1995 that the priest was continuing to deny the charges.
The first allegations against James Doyle were made to my old friend Dr Sherwood in 1972. Sherwood’s response was, according to the report, ‘questioning and dismissive’. When the president of the college heard the allegations in the same year, however, he suggested that Doyle should join a religious order and not become a diocesan priest. This president was replaced the following year by a president who allowed Doyle to be ordained. When Bishop Herlihy heard a complaint against Fr Doyle in 1982 he sent him to a psychologist who wrote that it would ‘seem desirable that he should have a change of role, away from working with young people’. When a new priest, in whose parish James Doyle was a curate, was appointed in 1985, no one informed him of this report. Five years later, Doyle pleaded guilty to indecent assault and received his suspended sentence.
His case is interesting because it was the first prosecution in the courts of a Ferns priest. It is not hard to imagine how much the people of the diocese could have hated James Doyle. Surely he would have been pelted with turnips, which grow plentifully in the area, as he left the court? Instead, people blamed the local newspapers for printing the story, provoking, the Ferns Report says, ‘a considerable backlash’ against one local paper in the Wexford area ‘as it was felt that Fr Doyle had been badly treated by the publicity his case had attracted. As the media had already given enough information to disclose the identity of the complainant, this backlash was also directed towards him and his family.’ Thus in 1990 it was made clear that complaining about these priests to the civil authorities would take considerable courage. Bishop Comiskey told the Ferns Inquiry that ‘prior to 1990, the question of reporting child abuse complaints or allegations to the Garda authorities never arose.’
The case of Dr Ledwith is stranger. In 1994 an allegation was made that he had abused a thirteen-year-old boy in 1981, a matter that Ledwith disputes, claiming that he did not meet the boy until after his fifteenth birthday. In any case, Ledwith settled with the boy and his family, paying a sum of money with no admission of liability and with a confidentiality clause. After the boy had had a meeting with Bishop Comiskey, the diocese of Ferns paid for ‘intensive counselling’ for him and his family. In 1983 and 1984, when Ledwith was vice-president of Maynooth, there were complaints to bishops about him from the seminarians, relating to his ‘orientation and propensity’ rather than any ‘specific sexual activity’. When a senior dean at the seminary continued to make these complaints to the bishops, he was asked to produce a victim. When he could not, he was removed from the seminary.
When the Ferns Report came out, I was eager to read it because I had known these three men. I had believed that the problem lay in their becoming priests. If they had gone to Holland or San Francisco, I believed, they would now be happily married to their boyfriends. But as I read the report, I began to think that this was hardly the issue. Instead, the level of abuse in Ferns and the church’s way of handling it seemed an almost intrinsic part of the church’s search for power. It is as though when its real authority waned in Ireland in the 1960s, the sexual abuse of those under its control and the urge to keep that abuse secret and the efforts to keep abusers safe from the civil law became some of its new tools.
