By Frances Burscough
Belfast Telegraph
March 26, 2009
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/frances-burscough/why-i-just-canrsquot-forgive-the-sins-of-the-fathers-14245292.html
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A story caught my eye in the national newspapers this week. And in doing so it shocked me to the core.
A former City lawyer has launched a ?5m High Court action — the largest of its kind ever seen in Britain — for compensation against his school, claiming that he has messed up his life as a direct result of being sexually abused there by one of the teachers in the 1970s. The teacher in question was a priest from the Jesuit order which owned and ran the school.
The man claims that the priest, who has since died but was the school football coach, would force him to strip naked and do warm-up exercises while he filmed him on a cine camera. He says that the priest forbade the boys in the football team from wearing underwear, would measure their genitals “to chart their growth” and joined them in the showers after training, often “touching them playfully” in the process.
It’s sickening, certainly, but it’s the kind of story I’d read time and time again. But then I saw the name of the school and the priest and the claimant and it really struck home.
This was my brothers’ school; my dad and all my uncles had gone there too; the boy was a school chum and the priest was a very close friend of my parents.
This person had stayed at my home, had wined and dined with my family on countless occasions, had chatted and joked, regaled us with his wit and imparted wisdom on us all as we were growing up.
My seven brothers and sisters and I had listened intently as he praised my parents’ longevity and unswerving faith in the church during a celebratory Mass for their ruby wedding anniversary and then one by one we and our children had lined up to take Holy Communion from his hands. He was, or at least seemed to be, a paragon of virtue. Since then mum and dad had remained firm friends with him, often spending Friday nights in his company drinking and chatting at the college old-boys club.
Reading the reports I felt utterly appalled. Here was someone I had known and had looked up to.
He had taught all three of my brothers ? had he done the same to them? I suddenly wondered; but then dismissed the thought just as quickly because it simply didn’t bear thinking about ?
In my lifetime, I estimate that I have personally known about 12 priests. And, of these, three have been involved in such scandals.
In 2007, Fr Edmund Cotter, who had been the curate at my church in Preston when I was a teenager, was jailed for five years for abusing girls aged between the ages of nine and 11 at the local primary school.
In this case I had been horrified but not at all surprised. I had always been wary of him when I was a teenager. He ran the local youth club and used to encourage girls there to dance on the stage to disco music while he sat below them, looking up.
He also used to ‘help’ with the costumes at the church nativity play and would always be on hand to dress and undress pupils backstage ? behaviour that I always thought was odd at the time but only latterly and in grim retrospect, was fully explained.
Latterly, another priest I had known in Liverpool was accused of abuse but later the charges were dropped through lack of evidence. My dad, who is a devout practicing Catholic, often asks me why I stopped going to Mass and have chosen to bring my kids up “outside the church”.
But I don’t even need an answer anymore because it’s there printed in black and white, emblazoned across the pages of the daily papers.
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