Catholic School Abuse in Plain Sight for Years

Sunday Times
December 17, 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/catholic-school-abuse-in-plain-sight-for-years-txthcxp8z


Long before the appalling cruelty inflicted on Stephen Bleach in the 1970s, the abuse at St Benedict’s School in Ealing, west London, was widely known but no one did anything about it (“The monks who stole my childhood”, News Review, last week).

In the 1950s I went to a grammar school in Wembley and we all heard stories about savage beatings by the monks and were familiar enough with the Marquis de Sade to recognise sexual perversion masquerading as discipline. We were thankful we weren’t Catholics. It diminished organised religion, and Catholicism in particular, in my young eyes.

Michael Cole, Woodbridge, Suffolk

Role models

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