Mgr Charles Scicluna, the Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told a summit in Rome that Church leaders must be held accountable “to their people”.

He said it was unacceptable for bishops to ignore protocols – either established by the bishops’ conference or the Vatican – about handling allegations of abuse.

He added that the Church in Ireland had “paid a very high price for the mistakes of some of its shepherds”.

One Irish bishop, Bishop John Magee of Cloyne, was found to have ignored guidelines about reporting abuse as recently as 2009. Mgr Scicluna did not mention the case specifically, but said: “When set standards are not followed, this is unacceptable.”

Mgr Scicluna was speaking to the press during a four-day symposium on the sexual abuse crisis entitled Toward Healing and Reconciliation.

He said: “We need to be vigilant in choosing candidates for the important role of bishop, and we also need to use the tools that canonical law and tradition give us for the accountability of bishops.”

Mgr Scicluna explained that there was already provisions in Church law to sanction bishops for “negligence and malice in exercising one’s duties”. He said this provision should be more vigorously applied.

Marie Collins, who was abused at the age of 13 by a hospital chaplain in Dublin, told an audience at the Gregorian University in Rome: “Those fingers that would abuse my body the night before were the next morning holding and offering me the Sacred Host. The hands that held the camera to photograph my exposed body, in the light of day were holding a prayer book when he came to hear my confession.”

Mrs Collins said “there must be acknowledgment and accountability for the harm and destruction that has been done to the life of victims”, calling for a strengthening of Church policies to avoid what she called the “deliberate cover-up and mishandling of cases”.

She was speaking during a four-day symposium attended by representatives of 110 bishops’ conferences and 30 religious orders, which included a penitential vigil to show contrition for the sexual abuse of children by priests and for the actions of Catholic officials who shielded the perpetrators from justice.

Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, presided over the vigil on Tuesday.

The conference, “Toward Healing and Renewal”, launched a global initiative aimed at improving efforts to stop clerical sexual abuse and better protect children and vulnerable adults.

The symposium was held at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University and was supported by the Vatican Secretariat of State and several other Vatican offices.

During the penitential vigil, held in Rome’s St Ignatius church, a “very profound, clear and explicit” text was read, in the words of Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, a licenced psychologist and psychotherapist and one of the symposium organisers.

Seven individuals from the Church who represent groups who have been “guilty or negligent” asked for forgiveness both from God and victims.

Mrs Collins said one of the reasons that abuse victims are still so hurt and angered is that, “despite apologies for the actions of the abusers, there have been few apologies for the protection given them by their superiors”.

She said: “There seems to be a lack of penalty for any of these men in leadership who deliberately or negligently covered up for abusers, allowing them to continue to abuse unhindered.”

She added that “we have had apologies, but forgiveness is a part of Christianity, a part of the Catholic Church” that is so important.

Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with priests accused of abuse, gave the symposium’s opening address, and Pope Benedict XVI delivered a message to be read to symposium participants. Among the other speakers were mental health professionals who have worked in the areas of prevention and treatment, and bishops from around the world, who talked about responses to the abuse crisis in their countries.

The conference was designed in part to help bishops’ conferences and superiors of religious orders respond to a 2011 circular letter from the doctrinal congregation requiring all dioceses in the world to develop guidelines on handling allegations of abuse.

After the conference, the Gregorian University and other institutions will launch an e-learning centre – the Centre for the Protection of Children – which will offer online resources in five languages.

The centre will be based in Munich and is designed to help Church leaders respond pastorally to the issue of sexual abuse in the Church and society as a whole. The centre has been funded for an initial three-year period and received significant funding directly from Pope Benedict through the Papal Foundation.

Next week, at the invitation of the Vatican, she will stand up in Rome and address some of the world’s most senior bishops, telling them the unwelcome truth that few wanted to hear 27 years before.

“I don’t feel nervous or intimidated,” she tells me just days before her address. “I feel more hope that something I say might help. No matter how much help you receive as a survivor that 13-year-old child is still inside somewhere and still comes up, that little voice saying: ‘You’re not really a good person. You’re worthless.’ That never really goes away. But I’ve had a lot of help to become the person I would have been had I not been abused.”

Marie continued to practise her Catholic faith long after she was abused. She married a Catholic and they brought up their son in the faith. He served as an altar boy at Mass. But it was not until she experienced the Church’s response to her anguish that she became disheartened and could not bring herself to continue practising. This is one of the things she is quietly determined to explain in Rome next week.

“I have been a Catholic all my life and when I went to the diocese and the archbishop it was with the absolute conviction that once they knew they had a dangerous man in their control they would want to protect other children,” she explains. “And I found it devastating that they would not do that.”

It was Marie’s doctor who first urged her to report the abuse for the sake of other children within the diocese, if nothing else. Marie had had close contact with psychiatrists as her life had been marked by anxiety, depression and agoraphobia.

But when she approached her local curate in 1985 he told her: “It was probably your fault so I don’t think I need to do anything about it.”

“He even went as far as to say that I was forgiven and I should go away and forget about it,” Marie recalls. “He refused to take the name of the offending priest and just finished the conversation at that. That totally destroyed me. I just fell apart.”

For the following 10 years Marie was often hospitalised due to severe depression sparked by her utter dismay at the curate’s response. She resolved that she would never speak about the abuse with anyone ever again.

But 10 years after her first attempt to speak out disturbing media coverage of a serial abuser in Ireland, Fr Brendan Smith, confronted Marie with the nagging question: was she the only one?

“I always thought that this man abused me because it was something about me. It occurred to me at that point that he may have abused other children. And of course from that thought came the other thought: he may still be abusing children. At that point it wasn’t a question of whether I should go and report him again or not. I just had to. I had no choice. I had to do something.”

But once again Marie was crushed by the response after she urged that the offending priest be removed from his current parish where he was in regular contact with schoolchildren.

“The archbishop told me that I couldn’t possibly ruin this priest’s good name and that it all happened a long time ago,” she says.

It then emerged that the diocese had already known for many years that the priest in question was an abuser. He had been removed from the hospital where he had abused Marie but he was still working in the archdiocese.

Dublin archdiocese’s handling of Marie’s case has made it difficult for her to face Sunday Mass and practise her faith in full. She explains that she couldn’t stomach moral instruction from a priest in a pulpit given the wounds she had received at the hands of the Catholic hierarchy.

“Men in power covered up for these perpetrators,” she says. “It’s like having a fox or a rabid dog and it has killed hens in a hen house. So you move it into the next field and it kills hens in that hen house. You’re the one in charge of it. It’s up to you to stop it.”

Marie hopes to tell her audience in Rome next week what she now tells me: “Being treated in the way that I was by the Church can destroy your Catholic faith and actually exacerbate all your problems. I mean, I was a practising Catholic up to that time that I reported to the diocese in 1995-1996. I now find it very, very difficult to practise my religion.

“I’d like to see the Church going back to the basics of what Christ said, and he did not teach that institutions are more important than little children.”

Marie is also determined to communicate to the conference that the psychological effects of child abuse are far-reaching and enduring.

“Child abuse destroys a person’s view of themselves,” she says. “You can’t just judge it by what’s physically done. It’s the psychological damage which is so dreadful.”

Marie describes how her mother, a devout Catholic living in a nursing home, was heartbroken when Marie finally told her about the abuse in anticipation of media coverage.

“It was heartbreaking to see her reaction because immediately she felt she hadn’t protected me,” she recalls. “She was quite devastated.”
The daily purgatory that Marie endured made simple sociable activities seem insurmountable.

“I couldn’t do the things with my son that I’d like to do. I had agoraphobia, I couldn’t take him out to play. I couldn’t take him on picnics. I really felt he was losing out in his life as a child. He didn’t have a mother who could do all the things that a mother should do.”

Yet Marie has not allowed self-pity or bitterness to hinder her constructive efforts to safeguard Catholic children in partnership with the Church. She has organised liturgies of reconciliation to cultivate spiritual healing for survivors of abuse. She has also written and spoken extensively about the effects of abuse.

Marie admits that her participation in the Vatican’s conference next week is controversial, given that some, including survivors of abuse, will regard it as simply a public relations exercise on behalf of the Church, rather than an expression of a genuine desire for change.

“I think this conference is a sign that things may be changing,” she says. “I hope things are changing and there is now going to be a new, more enlightened attitude to the whole abuse crisis, because we have had blame thrown out in every direction, from the secular society, to homosexuals, etc, etc. That’s sort of blame game is pointless. I’m hoping that this conference will at least improve things from now on – and it’s only a hope. And that’s why I am taking part. I’ve always lived on hope that they will learn and that things will be right for the future.”

The strongest test of Marie’s firm faith occurred when her abuser asked her to visit him in jail. By 1997, her tenacity had resulted in his conviction. Before he appealed against his sentence he asked to see Marie so that he could apologise. One can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the timing of the apology, but Marie talks about it without cynicism.

“If someone sits across a table from you and asks you to forgive them, if you’re Christian, it’s part of what we believe,” she says. “I
had to believe that he was sincerely sorry and looking for forgiveness. I would not withhold it from him.”

Marie has undoubtedly lost trust in the Catholic Church but her faith in God is firm.

“Even through all that time of struggling with the hierarchy my faith has carried me through. Before I speak in Rome I will be praying for the Holy Spirit to be with me and help me through it.”

She explains that one day she hopes she can return fully to her Catholic faith, “but in the meantime I’m definitely still holding on to my belief in God”.

The appointment, announced by the Vatican on Saturday, comes at a delicate moment in Vatican-Irish relations. In July, the Vatican recalled its previous nuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, after Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny and others sharply criticised the Vatican’s handling of clerical abuse.

In early November, the Irish government announced it was closing its embassy to the Holy See for economic reasons, although keeping diplomatic relations open.

Archbishop-designate Brown, a 52-year-old priest of the Archdiocese of New York, has worked since 1994 in the doctrinal congregation, which was headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger until his election as pope in 2005. As nuncio, he will act as the Holy See’s ambassador to Ireland and will also serve as a liaison with the Catholic Church community there.

Vatican officials said it was unusual to appoint a non-diplomat to such a position. Some observers pointed to the fact that the doctrinal congregation has overall responsibility over cases of clerical sex abuse of minors. They said the Vatican appears to expect the nuncio to play a key role in the healing of the scandal.

Reaction to the appointment was generally favourable in the Irish media. The Irish Times said in an editorial that the new nuncio would arrive with two major advantages over his predecessors.

“As an Irish American he will have an intuitive understanding of the Catholic people of this state and of this island. As a man who has served at the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith] for 17 years he will be deeply familiar with the issue that has plagued the Irish Catholic Church for almost two decades,” it said.

Born on October 13, 1959, in New York, Archbishop-designate Brown graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1981, where he studied history. He holds graduate degrees in theology from Oxford University, in medieval studies from the University of Toronto and in sacramental theology from the Pontifical Athenaeum Sant’Anselmo in Rome.

He was ordained a priest in 1989 in St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and served from 1989-91 as vicar at St Brendan’s parish in the Bronx. He came to the doctrinal congregation in 1994, working in the doctrinal section, and in 2004 also became an adjunct secretary of the International Theological Commission.

… to acknowledge personally the suffering inflicted on the victims and the honest efforts made both to ensure the safety of our children and to deal appropriately and transparently with allegations as they arise.

He then went on to say that it was his hope

… that the Church’s conscientious efforts to confront this reality will help the broader community to recognise the causes, true extent and devastating consequences of sexual abuse, and to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society. By the same token, just as the Church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards.

Now this is not an emphasis usually to be found in his statements on the subject of clerical child abuse. But it was necessary to say it: that this is not uniquely a problem for the Catholic Church, even though we have been the first ones who have had perforce to confront it. Now, it is for others to do what we have done, “to respond effectively to this scourge which affects every level of society”.

For the fact is that though it cannot be any kind of excuse for the abominable crimes which have indeed been committed by a tiny minority of our priests, in the words of a headline in Newsweek magazine (April 10) last year – which I quote as being an irreproachably non-Catholic source, as well as being a journalistically respectable one – “The priesthood is being cast as the refuge of pederasts. In fact, priests seem to abuse children at the same rate as everyone else.”

It turns out, in fact, that even that didn’t go far enough: the evidence (of which more presently) is that Catholic clergy actually abuse them less than everyone else. But it’s worth recalling that Newsweek magazine continued by pointing out that “experts say there’s simply no data to support the claim [that the Church is “a refuge for pederasts”] at all …. based on the surveys and studies conducted by different denominations over the past 30 years, experts who study child abuse say they see little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue. ‘We don’t see the Catholic Church as a hotbed of this or a place that has a bigger problem than anyone else,’ said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

According to Dr Thomas Plante of Stanford University, “available research suggests that approximately two to five per cent of priests have had a sexual experience with a minor” which “is lower than the general adult male population that is best estimated to be closer to eight per cent.” I repeat (for I know from experience that I will be hysterically accused of making excuses for clerical child abuse and of seeking to underplay the importance of the problem) that this is no excuse: the abuse of minors by priests should simply never happen.

But there is a danger, which the Holy Father has recognised, though he has not, rightly, unduly emphasised it: if he did, he too would be accused of trying to minimise the Church’s share of responsibility. The danger is that if we Catholics accept without contradiction the unjustifiable scapegoating of the Church which has been going on for far too long, we give society at large a ready excuse for not confronting what needs urgently to be confronted: which is that this is a simply massive problem, which society at large has not even begun to address. And that is appallingly unjust to the overwhelming majority of abused children, most of whom have never even met a priest.

A document published by the NSPCC, which I quoted on this subject earlier this year, entitled “Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom: a Study of the Prevalence of Abuse and Neglect”, gives the general background of this problem in society at large within the wider question of all maltreatment of children. This is what it has to say (under the heading “Who are the abusers?”) about who is most likely to be involved in child sex abuse:

Numbers of respondents recording sexual activity with relatives which were against their wishes or with a person 5 or more years older, were very small: 3% reported touching or fondling and the same proportion had witnessed relatives exposing themselves. The other categories of oral/penetrative acts or attempts, and voyeurism/pornography were reported by 1%. Much larger numbers had experienced sexual acts by non relatives, predominantly by people known to them and by age peers: boy or girlfriends, friends of brothers or sisters, fellow pupils or students formed most of those involved. Among older people, neighbours and parents’ friends were the most common. Very few said that the person involved was a professional.

Nowhere does the report refer to the Church or to Catholic priests.

Not everyone agrees about professional misconduct. According to a report carried out for the US Department of Education entitled Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature, “9.6 per cent of all students in grades 8 to 11 report contact and/or non-contact educator sexual misconduct that was unwanted”. The percentage of students who report experiencing sexual misconduct by teachers indicated that more than 4.5 million children were subjected to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade. The report continued that “Possible limitations of the study would … suggest that the findings reported here underestimate educator sexual misconduct in schools.” The report’s author, Charol Shakeshaft, concludes, inter alia, that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by [Catholic] priests”.

Again I repeat: abuse by Catholic priests should never happen. In the words of Dr Pravin Thevathasan in a book published by the CTS, The Catholic Church and the Sex Abuse Crisis: “It is true that the abuse of minors is rife within society. But we claim, by the grace of God, to be members of the one Church founded by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and we are therefore called to a higher standard than that found in society at large.”

The indications are, he finds nevertheless, “that the sexual abuse of minors is significantly higher in secular society than in the Church”, though he insists that “this does not excuse the behaviour of abusive priests”. All the same, he says “One of the immense dangers of focusing unduly on clergy abuse is that we might fail to protect vulnerable children in the wider society”. Now, the Holy Father has very gently suggested the same thing: “just as the Church is rightly held to exacting standards in this regard, all other institutions, without exception, should be held to the same standards.”

So far, that hasn’t even begun to happen; now, it should.

The Community of the Beatitudes, in a statement posted on its French website yesterday, said that under the oversight of a commissioner appointed last year by the Vatican, it was undergoing a process of “purification, restructuring and re-founding”.

The detailed statement came two weeks ahead of the scheduled start of a criminal trial of Brother Pierre-Etienne Albert, a top member of the community, who has been accused of dozens of acts of sexual abuse of minors over a period of 15 years.

The statement said it wanted to emphasise that the community’s own process of self-examination had been going on for several years.

“The new information about the gravely culpable acts committed by several of its members, in particular its founder, has led the community to move further ahead in the process of repentance and purification of its memory,” the statement said.

The Community of the Beatitudes was founded in France in 1973 by two Protestant couples who desired to live as the first Christians did. The primary founder, Gerard Croissant, was a Protestant minister who became a Catholic and was ordained a permanent deacon in 1978. In 2002, the organisation was given official recognition by the Vatican.

The statement said the founder, Croissant, had committed “crimes against the moral law of the Church” and had acknowledged “serious failures” in sexual matters, particularly in regard to sisters in the community, many of whom left because of the abuse. One case of abuse by Croissant involved an underage girl, it said.

“His prestige as a charismatic founder, together with the seduction of his words, led most of his victims to be taken in by supposedly mystical arguments, which covered grave violations of morality with spiritual themes,” it said.

The statement said all this was “for too long kept secret inside a small circle” in the community. In 2008, it said, diocesan and Vatican officials intervened and removed Croissant from diaconal ministry and forced him to leave the community.

Although Croissant has been told to live in silence and penitence, he has continued to give talks and hold meetings without the Church’s permission, the statement said.

“The community is deeply ashamed by the behaviour of (Croissant) and expresses its closeness to the suffering of those who were abused by him,” the statement said. It said the community would do everything to ensure that such abuses do not occur again.

The statement said abuse was also committed against members by Croissant’s brother, who served for a time as the head of the community but was expelled when the accusations came to light in 2010.

The community said the first signs of “fragility and error” began to appear in the movement in 2002. In addition to acts of abuse, it cited “unbalanced psycho-spiritual practices”, a confusion between consecrated and lay status of members, and problems of governance.

Many members began to leave, and in 2007 the Vatican first outlined a restructuring program for the movement, reconstituting it as a community of diocesan right, under the canonical authority of the Archbishop of Toulouse, France. In 2010, in the face of continual internal divisions, the Vatican named Dominican Fr Henry Donneaud to take charge of the organisation and complete the process of internal reconciliation.

The statement posted online, which was signed by Fr Donneaud and the community’s general council, said that despite the mistakes of the past, it was false and defamatory to call the Community of the Beatitudes a “sect”. It said the community has placed its fate in the hands of the church, which in turn has recognised the community’s “authentic fruits of vitality, solidarity and evangelical witness”.

The community is active in more than 60 dioceses around the world, including the Archdiocese of Denver.

Goulder, who used to regularly visit the Benedictine abbey adjoining the school for coffee and cake on Tuesday mornings, says that a recent Ofsted inspection has forbidden it as it is “a clear breach of child protection”. Apparently a short path between the school and the refectory is now out of bounds for the same reason. Further, “students can no longer enter the abbey church, the centre of spiritual life at Downside, without being accompanied by an adult. So those who wish to attend the Benedictine office or use the church as a sanctuary for prayer during a busy school day cannot do so.”

As Goulder points out, this kind of inflexible and heavy-handed ruling erodes the communal trust that is at the heart of a Catholic boarding school like Downside. When you lose trust, what replaces it? An atmosphere of suspicion. The whole point of a Benedictine boarding school like Downside is to help its pupils grow into a mature faith by being part of a community, including monks, lay teachers and others, where they can learn from the example of dedicated lives. As Goulder comments: “Members of staff, monks, parents and aides to the monastery who were once considered as much a part of the school as the pupils must now be treated with caution.”

This strikes me as very sad. Surely there must be a sensitive way to protect pupils that allows for a measure of common sense and which does not mean endless monitoring and checking? Recently there has been another school scandal: that of Ealing Abbey school where an institutional blind eye was turned for too long on instances of abuse. Such scandals lead to an “overkill” response: we must always ensure that such cases will never happen again. This is an impossible goal. What matters most is avoiding a culture of secrecy where abuse can flourish and having a transparent, clearly defined policy for handling any complaints.

Goulder describes the Ofsted rulings as “Kafka-esque” ie both pettifogging and absurd. Do we want young people to think every adult is a potential predator? Years ago there used to be an advertisement to join the Salesians. It probably featured in the Herald. It showed a picture of St John Bosco, their founder, looking down kindly on a young boy, with the quote from the saint: “It is enough that you are young for me to love you.” Previous Catholic generations, who knew of Don Bosco’s apostolate to the ragged youth of Turin, understood exactly what it meant: that it was the very vulnerability of these poor boys that kindled the fatherly love of the priest (who had lost his own father very young). That advert has naturally vanished; in today’s climate of mistrust its meaning would inevitably be twisted. What sad times we live in.

The ruling by the High Court in London for the first time defined in British law the relationship of a priest to his bishop as that of an employee to an employer, instead of seeing the priest as effectively self-employed.

This means that a bishop and a diocese can be punished for the crimes of a priest. Survivors’ groups hope that it will also mean that many people who claim to have been abused by clergy will be able to claim compensation more easily.

The court granted the trustees of the Diocese of Portsmouth extra time to appeal the decision.

The case involves a 47-year-old mother of three, referred to only by the initials JGE, who claims she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Fr Wilfred Baldwin as a seven-year-old girl in The Firs children’s home in Waterlooville, in southern England, in the early 1970s.

She claims that she also was attacked in the dressing room of a church on the day she made her first Communion.

Besides the Diocese of Portsmouth, she is also seeking damages from the English province of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, which ran the home, because she said the nuns witnessed the abuse but did not intervene.

The court was not asked to judge the truth of the allegations but was specifically asked, as a preliminary hearing on the case, to rule on the question of whether the “relationship between a Catholic priest and his bishop is akin to an employment relationship”.

Justice Alistair MacDuff said that although the priest had no formal contract of employment there were “crucial features” that made a bishop vicariously liable for his actions.

He said the Church gave Fr Baldwin the “premises, the pulpit and the clerical robes” and that he was given full authority and free rein in the community to “act as a representative of the church.”

“Whether or not the relationship may be regarded as ‘akin to employment,’ the principal features of the relationship dictate that the defendants should be held responsible for the actions which they initiated by the appointment and all that went with it,” said the judge.

JGE first made her complaint in 2006 when police officers investigating complaints against Fr Baldwin contacted her to ask if she had been abused by him. Inquiries concluded the same year with the death of the priest, at the age of 75.

JGE is now seeking compensation for pain, injury, humiliation and hurt feelings, saying that she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, a borderline personality disorder, and that she has attempted suicide as a result of the abuse.

The court ruling was welcomed by the victims’ support group, Ministers and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors.

But in a statement the group also expressed frustration on behalf of “hundreds if not thousands of victims” who were seeking damages but would have to await the “outcome of the appeal now to be brought by lawyers employed by the Catholic Church seeking to have this latest ruling overturned”.

The group claimed that while the Church spent millions of pounds attempting to avoid liability “the victims receive no support, and their suffering continues as they are re-traumatized by having to go through such adversarial and hostile legal processes to achieve justice”.

The Portsmouth Diocese said in a statement that it was “committed to creating a safe environment for all” and that it “works hard to ensure the welfare of children and vulnerable individuals.”

“The judgment of Mr Justice MacDuff involves complex and fundamental legal issues which remain the subject of legal proceedings,” it added. “In the circumstances, the Diocese of Portsmouth does not consider it appropriate to make any further comment about the case at this time.”

At a press conference on Wednesday the report’s author, Lord Carlile of Berriew, said that in essence his recommendations “remove all power over the school from the abbey, while still retaining the Benedictine connection which is important to many parents”.

His report said the existing trust structure “lacks elements of independence, transparency, accountability, diversity and is drawn from too narrow a group of people”.

Chris Cleugh, headmaster of St Benedict’s School, said that Lord Carlile’s recommendations would be implemented by September next year and a new system of governance would be established to separate the abbey from the running of the school.

He said: “Past abuses at the school have left a terrible legacy for those affected and have tarnished the reputation of St Benedict’s. On behalf of all at the school, I offer my heartfelt apology for past failures. The school could have, and should have, done more.”

The report follows the jailing in October 2009 of Fr David Pearce, who admitted indecently assaulting pupils between 1972 and 2007. Fr Pearce was headmaster at the school until 1993 and afterwards resided at Ealing Abbey.

Scrutiny of the school and abbey has intensified since the disappearance of Fr Laurence Soper in March following allegations of abuse. Fr Soper was bailed from Rome to a west London police station but failed to turn up and has been missing ever since, causing further embarrassment for the abbey.

Speaking at the press conference, Lord Carlile said Fr Soper’s disappearance had caused difficulties for the investigations into St Benedict’s School.

He said: “I would encourage Laurence Soper to surrender himself to the police… He may feel he has a personal and ethical duty to do so.”

The Vatican ordered an Apostolic Visitation of Ealing Abbey in a historic intervention as the scandal intensified. Auxiliary Bishop John Arnold of Westminster and Fr Richard Yeo, abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation, have reported separately to the Vatican.

Bishop Arnold said that he welcomed Lord Carlile’s report and that he had appealed to the Holy See to make public the content of the visitation’s findings. The Holy See has agreed to look sympathetically at his request.

Lord Carlile expressed concerns about possible conflicts of interest stemming from Fr Yeo’s involvement with the Apostolic Visitation and he said that individuals with no connection to St Benedict’s school should conduct future visitations.

Mr Cleugh made clear that some connection between the abbey and the school would be retained on a day-to-day basis. He said that three abbey monks were working at the school, who were much “revered” by parents, pupils and teachers. But Mr Cleugh asserted that the monks are answerable to him and are subject to the same safety checks as all other members of staff.

Lord Carlile said he hoped the change would provide a “template” for the governance of other Benedictine schools in Britain.

Full statement from Ealing Abbey

Abbot Martin Shipperlee said “The revelations of abuse which took place in the past have led to a time of shame to the monastic community and to myself.

I can only repeat what I have said many times before; we absolutely and unconditionally apologise for the hurt and harm caused by members of the monastic community.

It was awareness of this harm that led us in July 2010 to ask Lord Carlile to enquire into the conduct of St Benedict’s School so that we could understand what had gone wrong in the past, what was happening in the present and what needed to be done to ensure that our school, our parish and the monastery are as safe for children as they can possibly be.

We have the report and we accept Lord Carlile’s findings and recommendations in full and we have already begun work on putting them into effect.

Having to face up to what happened in the past has, quite rightly, been a very humbling experience, but it has been necessary for us to move forward.

As I have said previously, I acknowledge a serious error in allowing David Pearce to remain resident in the monastery after he was placed on restricted ministry in 2006. I make no excuse for this, it was a serious error of judgement.

His offending in 2008 took place away from the school and monastery. I want to make the point that the victim, a 6th former, disclosed what had taken place to the Headmaster and the matter was immediately reported to the statutory authorities in accordance with all laid down procedures. The young man concerned remains in contact with the Headmaster and the parish. I say this, not to minimise what happened, but to show that he had trust and confidence in the school to deal with such a serious situation.

There have been no cases of abuse in the school since I became Abbot and since the present Headmaster came to the school.
In recent years, the various inspections have continued to confirm that children are safe and happy at St Benedict’s and this has been endorsed by Lord Carlile.

We have taken a great deal of professional advice to ensure that Safeguarding procedures in the school, parish and monastic community are compliant with standards set down by the local authority, the Independent Schools Inspectorate, the Department for Education and of course the Church. We have in place measures to monitor compliance with all procedures.

Over and above the recommendations made by Lord Carlile and the other advice we have received, I have arranged for an external safeguarding expert to make periodic, unannounced inspections of safeguarding procedures of the Abbey, the parish and the school.

Abbot Martin Shipperlee OSB
9 November 2011

Foreign minister Eamon Gilmore said the move was not a result of a dispute between Ireland and the Vatican, which led Italian Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza, papal nuncio to Ireland, to be temporarily called back to the Vatican in late July and later reassigned to the Czech Republic.

The Vatican had recalled Archbishop Leanza citing “certain extreme reactions” from politicians after the Vatican was criticised in a report into the mishandling of clerical abuse in the Irish Diocese of Cloyne.

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi downplayed the Irish government’s decision.

“The Holy See takes note of the decision of Ireland to close its embassy in Rome,” Fr Lombardi said. “Naturally, every state that has diplomatic relations with the Holy See is free to decide … whether to have an ambassador to the Holy See who is resident in Rome or resident in another country. What is important is diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the states, and this is not in question with Ireland.”

Mr Gilmore said it was with “the greatest regret and reluctance” that he had decided to close the Vatican embassy as well as Ireland’s diplomatic missions in Iran and East Timor.

He said the decision “follows a review of overseas missions carried out by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which gave particular attention to the economic return from bilateral missions”.

He noted that while the embassy to the Holy See is one of Ireland’s oldest diplomatic missions, it yields no economic return.

“The government believes that Ireland’s interests with the Holy See can be sufficiently represented by a non-resident ambassador,” he said.

“The government will be seeking the agreement of the Holy See to the appointment of a senior diplomat to this position,” Mr Gilmore said.

He insisted that tensions over clerical sexual abuse had “no bearing” on the decision and that “Vatican relations will continue and be valued”.

Cardinal Seán Brady, president of the Irish bishops’ conference, said the decision “seems to show little regard for the important role played by the Holy See in international relations and of the historic ties between the Irish people and the Holy See over many centuries.”

Cardinal Brady expressed his hope “that despite this regrettable step, the close and mutually beneficial cooperation between Ireland and the Holy See in the world of diplomacy can continue, based on shared commitment to justice, peace, international development and concern for the common good.”

The Vatican was among the first states with which the newly independent Irish Free State established full diplomatic relations in the 1920s. The post of papal nuncio to Ireland is currently vacant after Archbishop Leanza’s reassignment, but Church sources in Dublin expect a new nuncio will be appointed before the end of 2011.

Several countries maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See without having a resident ambassador in Rome, choosing instead to have an ambassador accredited to a neighbouring country conduct business with the Holy See. Under the terms of the 1929 Lateran Pacts between the Vatican and Italy, ambassadors to the Italian state are not permitted to serve as ambassadors to the Holy See.