If anyone were ignorant of the irrevocable damage which sexual crimes by an adult – more particularly by a man in your position – how fully they would be informed by hearing the victim impact statements in this case.

You carried on the abuse, undeterred by the gossip and rumour you were beginning to generate.

As early as 1964, you were challenged by the parents of one of your victims, S. That complaint was reported to the diocesan hierarchy. A senior member of the clergy had a meeting with the boy’s parents. Nothing was done to remove you from the parish.

You went on to commit, in the same parish, the most serious forms of abuse against your principal victim, M.

You were able to continue getting away with your crimes for two reasons. First, because of the position you held. In the years that you practised in the Catholic ministry, devout parishioners revered the priest, and trusted him without question.

Secondly, you were held personally in the highest esteem: formidable, charismatic, very intelligent and extremely popular.

Apart from your duties in the church, you were closely involved in other activities with children of the parish. The parents, many of whom had no car of their own, were happy to allow you to take their children swimming, and on other activities.

They could never have guessed that you were a predatory paedophile.

You were in reality cunning, devious, arrogant – in the word of one of your victims, despicable. I have read a letter sent to me by a teacher who worked alongside you all those years ago.

She wrote it in good faith, portraying your qualities as a priest, and in the way she saw you behave towards children. But that letter simply reinforces the point: you led a double life, your public persona and behaviour belying your revolting behaviour.

You took full advantage of your position, and the trust in which you were held, to satisfy your perverted lust.

The children were all young, and had been indoctrinated in such a way that some did not think that what you were doing was wrong.

Others did realise it could not be right, but had no idea how to report it, or to whom.

It was that the issue was too monstrous for them. All your victims have, to different degrees, continued to have difficulty discussing the abuse, even with those very close to them.

I have read their impact statements, which have been referred to in the course of the Crown’s careful and detailed opening.

Their whole lives have been blighted. In a number of instances, relationships between the victims and their parents suffered terrible damage. To say that you were a disgrace to your cloth understates your activity.

In 1991, your crimes at last caught up with you. One of your victims, H, then only 12, stayed with you for a fortnight at the presbytery in Nottingham. His parents had gone on holiday. Plainly intending what you had in mind, you offered to look after the boy in his parents’ absence.

After the holiday, the boy told his mother what you had done. You were arrested, charged and put before magistrates. They bailed you. Far from owning up to your crimes, you skipped the country and went and hid in Tenerife for the next 22 years.

You can have no complaint that you are now having to face sentence so late in your life. You have brought that entirely on yourself.

More importantly, you have brought it on your victims. It is well recognised that those of very advanced years should ordinarily have a modest reduction of their sentence on that account.

But I have to balance against that not only the fact that the delay in sentence is your own doing, but that you have been on the run. There is no separate charge to reflect that.

Your victims have been cheated of justice all that time, with no idea where you were, or whether you were still alive.”