Child Abuse Is 'Imagined', News Shopper [United Kingdom], March 27, 2007

Child Abuse Is 'Imagined'

News Shopper [United Kingdom]
March 27, 2007

http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/topstories/display.var.1289236.0.child_abuse_is_imagined.php

A priest walked free from court today after a jury cleared him of sexually abusing an 11-year-old boy helper more than 30 years ago.

Father Edward Michael Wright, 69, was accused of plying the schoolboy with drink and repeatedly molesting him at St Stephen's Church in Lewisham, in the early Seventies.

But Wright, vicar of the anglo-Catholic St Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford, since 1980, insisted the alleged abuse was a "figment" of his accuser's imagination.

And the jury at Blackfriars Crown Court cleared him of 12 sex charges after he said: 'I'm not a paedophile.' The complainant, now a 44-year-old man, claimed he was sexually assaulted and the victim of a "group rape" incident involving Wright and a number of other men after a service.

Giving evidence Wright, who was arrested last year, admitted he was gay but insisted he done nothing inappropriate to the boy.

He claimed to have only a "very hazy memory" of the church helper.

He said: "I would have passed him in the street I'm sure."

But Wright denied having physical contact with any boys who visited the church, but admitted he occasionally may have "cuffed them round the head" if they misbehaved.

He added there was "absolutely not" any truth in the claims.

The cleric counted Lewisham-born Reggae star Maxi Priest as one of his former helpers at the church.

He said: "One I remember playing truant a lot and his father wasn't around a lot and I helped his mother.

"Trouble is I can't remember his name - I have since been told he became quite a famous pop singer called Maxi Priest."

Describing his reasons for keeping his three-year homosexual relationship with a man who lived with him at the vicarage a secret from his congregation, the cleric told jurors: "That, they would have found unacceptable."

Edinburgh-born Wright, whose of the vicarage at St Barnabas Church in Jericho, Oxford, was cleared of six counts of buggery and six of indecent assault December 1973 and December 1976.

After his arrest Wright was suspended by the Oxford Diocese and stood down from his role as a governor at the church-aided St Barnabas Primary School in Jericho, in Hart Street.