By David Jones
Daily Mail
November 5, 2011
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2057875/Predators-Abbey-As-Vatican-launches-child-abuse-investigation-Britain-victim-reveals-horrors-cover-up.html?ITO=1490
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| Painful memories: Jeff suffered serious abuse at St Benedict's Catholic school in Ealing |
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| Harrowing: Hundreds of former pupils may have been abused at St Benedict's |
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| Investigating: The Vatican has ordered a high-level enquiry, known as an 'apostolic visitation' |
Standing beside an elegant Gothic abbey whose austere, black-robed monks supposedly provide spiritual and pastoral guidance to its pupils, St Benedict's School boasts of offering the finest Roman Catholic education in London.
Down the years an impressive array of high-achievers have been spawned on its sprawling campus, in a leafy corner of Ealing, from entertainers such as comedian Julian Clary and actor Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings films) to the BBC chairman Lord Patten. They were the fortunate ones.
This week, however, when I accompanied one St Benedict's old boy back to the school, which he attended between the ages of six and 13, he began to shake visibly and clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.
'They say this is a place that instills Christian values but for me it was a living hell,' said the man, now aged 42, who cannot be named for legal reasons but whom we shall call Jeff. 'Just standing here makes me feel like being sick.'
Struggling to keep his emotions in check, he gestured towards the school's motto. 'You see that sign? It says "Teaching a way of life". That's a sick joke. Their way of life was abusing little kids.
'When I came here I had a future, but they took my future away and ruined a lot of other boys, too.'
Having spent a harrowing afternoon listening to Jeff's story, one understood his feelings. For he is among a steadily mounting number of Old Priorians, as former St Benedict's pupils are called, coming forward to reveal how they were abused by paedophile monks and lay teachers at the £12,000-a-year independent day school, in an astonishing scandal spanning half-a-century.
Jeff is one of several deeply damaged victims I have spoken to this week while investigating this child sex saga — the latest of many that have plunged the Catholic Church into a global crisis.
The ordeals they endured make a mockery of St Benedict's mission statement: 'To promote the development of young men and women who will . . . be happy in their personal and family lives.'
According to campaigners, those affected must number in the hundreds; and worse, many might have been spared if the seemingly endemic abuse had not been covered up for years by senior monks at adjoining Ealing Abbey, which founded the school and effectively serves as its governing body.
Last week, finally, it emerged that the Vatican has ordered a high-level inquiry — known as an 'apostolic visitation' — into every aspect of life at the abbey, including the abuse claims and all related matters. It is thought to be the first such review instigated in Britain in modern times.
Conducted by the Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, John Arnold, and Father Richard Yeo, president of the English Benedictine Congregation, it has almost unlimited powers, and could, in theory, even close down the abbey and school — though, of course, nothing of the sort will happen.
More likely, say critics, there will be a few recommendations and a slap on the wrist, and a discreet veil will then be drawn over this embarrassing episode.
Indeed, it might never have been investigated at all but for the dogged persistence of Jonathan West, whose son attended St Benedict's and who in 2009 happened to spot a small news item reporting indecent assault charges against a well-known priest and former junior school headmaster.
When the 49-year-old computer consultant posted the item on his blog he unwittingly opened the doors on dark secrets dating back half-a-century.
Dozens of former pupils came forward to recount how they, too, had been subjected to sexual abuse and sadistic bullying at the school.
Determined to root out more abuse and ensure it was never repeated, Mr West formed an action group, Against Abuse At Ealing Abbey (causing St Benedict's headmaster Christopher Cleugh to suggest, in his prize-giving address last year, that they might be guilty of some anti-Catholic plot).
Mr West persuaded the Department of Education to send in the Independent Schools Inspectorate. In the face of mounting concern, the school commissioned its own inquiry conducted by Lord Carlile of Berriew, whose report will be presented to parents next Tuesday.
Most remarkably, however, it was Mr West who convinced the Vatican that the apostolic visitation was necessary. Last June, he presented a five-page appraisal of events at the abbey to the Papal Nuncio Archbishop Antonio Menini — the Pope's ambassador to Britain — who was sufficiently concerned to alert Rome.
When the two met, the following month, he was told the top-level review was already under way. Among the names in Mr West's weighty dossier, the one that most frequently crops up is that of Father David Pearce, a former St Benedict's junior school headmaster who served in the Dental Corps before being ordained as a priest, captained the school cadet force and liked to parade around in his khaki uniform and polished brown boots.
Among the countless pupils he leered over, pawed and sadistically caned, Pearce's proclivities were well-known and they called him 'Gay Dave'. So were his superiors in the abbey really unaware of his taste for young boys?
Pearce is said to have been the subject of complaints dating back decades, and in 2006 the school lost a civil action brought by a former pupil who claimed to have been abused by him. He received £43,000 in damages.
Disturbingly, however, these cases were not then brought to the attention of parents, and Pearce was allowed to remain in the abbey under a 'restricted covenant', an order made by the Abbot supposedly limiting his contact with minors. Or rather, as the Abbot, Dom Martin Shiperlee, put it, protecting him from 'unfounded allegations'.
The ineffectiveness of this order became apparent two years later when Pearce abused another St Benedict's pupil, a teenager employed by the abbey to do washing up.
It was not until 2009 that his terrifying, 35-year reign of abuse was brought to a halt. He was jailed for eight years (later reduced to five) for assaulting a string of boys between 1972 and 2007.
Jeff says he was assaulted by Pearce, but the prosecution decided that as the priest had pleaded guilty to 11 other charges, they would offer no evidence in Jeff's case (one of nine in addition to the 11 Pearce confessed to) and the judge ordered it should be left to lie on the file.
But another of Jeff's tormentors, John Maestri, an eccentric former maths master who, by dark irony, also served as the 'master of discipline' was convicted of assaulting him in a separate case.
It transpired that Maestri had already been jailed for two-and-a-half years in 2003 for abusing a boy in his charge (who lured him to a secretly recorded meeting at which the teacher attempted to buy his silence). But his only punishment for assaulting Jeff was a community rehabilitation order.
Listening to Jeff's story, it is difficult to believe Maestri escaped so lightly. Before he fell into the maths master's clutches he was a bright, middle-class lad with choirboy looks, yet by the time he was 'asked to leave' the school at 13, his character was utterly transformed.
He had become a sexually confused, dangerously disruptive misfit who would lock himself away in his bedroom and heat up live bullets until they exploded.
His nightmare began when he entered the middle school, then housed in a redbrick Victorian building at the age of 11. There he was among several boys preyed on by Maestri and Pearce .
The first sexual assault he remembers came when he was sent for private tuition one Saturday morning at Maestri's house near the school. As he worked, the teacher made him sit on his lap, kissed and fondled him and told him he 'loved' him. Terrified and nauseated, Jeff tried to brush him off by replying that he felt the same way, but was 'not ready' for a relationship.
'So my first kiss wasn't with a pretty girl, like everyone else, it was with some old man,' he says, his anger never far from the surface.
The humiliation went on for two years, he reveals. On one occasion, after Jeff caught Pearce abusing another boy, the priest got three older pupils to ram him backwards against a scaffolding pole that was sticking out from one of the school buildings. 'I still suffer from the pain of that, 30 years on.'
Later, he drifted between the Army and various menial jobs, suffered a nervous breakdown, lost the right to see his two-year-old daughter, and now lives alone, on benefits, in a grim flat in Kentish Town, North London.
He is being treated for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Damaged as he may be, however, Jeff has survived. Others did not.
In an apparent fit of despair, one of his friends in the middle school, Lewis de Luca, shot himself in the temple with an airgun at 16. It took 13 months for him to die.
An inquest heard that he had become depressed after being accused — falsely, he insisted — of stealing a tennis racquet at St Benedict's, and expelled on the eve of his O Levels. Jeff is convinced it was the paedophile masters who really drove him to his death.
At 13, he says, Lewis had been one of the school's most popular boys — outgoing, handsome and a champion athlete. Then he was summoned to a monk's office where it seems he was violently assaulted. Jeff saw him emerge white-faced and trembling with his trousers soiled.
'Lewis was terribly abused; broken down,' he told me. 'You just knew. I left the school at 13, and lost touch with him, and then one day I heard he was dead. I am absolutely convinced it had something to do with what happened to him at that school.'
Having followed the unfolding scandal at St Benedict's, Lewis de Luca's mother Rosalind harbours the same suspicions.
The experience of losing her teenage son was so devastating, she told me, that for many years she blanked out many memories. But now she remembers how he came home one day and told her someone, a teacher, had 'made a pass' at him, and he had made it clear he wasn't interested.
She hadn't thought this incident to be serious, but now wonders whether it was a hint of something far more sinister. 'It's very disturbing for a mother to think he might have been subjected to abuse and couldn't tell me about it,' she said. 'It's such a horrible feeling. In those days, I'd heard about Gay Dave, but I thought the boys were making it up. I didn't think it was happening. They were priests. Men of God. I just didn't believe they could go around doing that sort of thing.'
It will come as scant consolation to Mrs de Luca, but her unquestioning faith was typical among parents in those days.
Another victim, who is now 58 and runs an antiques business in Somerset, told me how he had only recently summoned the courage to tell his 86-year-old mother what happened to him at St Benedict's during the mid-Sixties. He didn't want to leave any secrets between them, he explained.
His abuser, he claims, was Father Kevin Horsey, a terrifyingly saturnine, 6ft 8in monk with 'hands like shovels' who abused him as he changed after rugby games at the school playing fields in Perivale.
'I was only 11 years old and he was this huge, daunting man in black robes,' he recalls. 'Besides, I was a scholarship boy, raised on a council estate, and was very naive. I had read Tom Brown's Schooldays, and I just thought these things happened and you had to put up with them.'
Father Kevin died several years ago, so he cannot answer for his alleged sins. But his victim is disgusted that a building at St Benedict's is named in his honour. The man recently volunteered his story to police investigating the abuse allegations, hoping it might help piece the case together.
The scandal has even drawn in one of the Benedictine Order's most respected stalwarts, 81-year-old Father Lawrence Soper, who taught at the school between 1972 and 1984 and served for nine years as Abbot of Ealing until 2000, when he was appointed treasurer at the order's Rome HQ.
Arrested after abuse allegations made against him last September, he was permitted to keep his passport and return to Italy, whereupon he jumped bail. He has not been seen for eight months now.
This week, as prosecutors prepared a European Arrest Warrant, his superiors in Rome insisted they had no idea where he was, but some observers are convinced he is being sheltered by the Church.
Given the way leading Roman Catholics have closed ranks to protect their own in similar scandals in America, Ireland and elsewhere, it wouldn't be surprising.
Both abbey and school insist the paedophile priests have been purged (though one priest, Father Gregory Chillman, is on 'restricted ministry' after allegations of inappropriate behaviour, which he denies).
They say a stringent new child protection policy is in place, and the sons and daughters of London's Catholic elite are no longer at risk.
Headmaster Mr Cleugh said: 'All those associated with the school have been shocked and horrified by what's occurred. We do know very serious abuse did take place and for that I wholeheartedly apologise on behalf of the school.
'Our focus now is on making sure we do all we can to make sure this does not happen again. But St Benedict's has worked hard to address past failings and to ensure that parents and pupils have confidence in the school and its staff.'
The Vatican-ordered visitation will doubtless endorse this.
But without the tenacity of one public-minded citizen, the wretchedly betrayed victims of St Benedict's might have been silenced for ever.
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