Archbishop ‘told victim to pray for his abuser’
Nothing done after confession
A TEENAGE boy confessed to a priest who later became one of Scotland’s top Catholics that he had been sexually assaulted – and was told to pray for his abuser, an inquiry heard yesterday.
Joseph Currie, 64, said he endured around four years of sexual abuse by a male helper at a home run by the Sisters of Nazareth in Aberdeen.
In early 1967, when he was 13, he claimed he went to confession to tell Father Mario Conti – later Bishop of Aberdeen and Archbishop of Glasgow – about his ordeal.
Mr Currie told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) that Father Conti told
‘The priest has a duty to report it’
him to ‘pray for [his] abuser and say three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers’.
The retired postal worker said he was ‘having no luck’ with the priest based at the orphanage, so he had gone to a cathedral in Aberdeen to tell Father Conti, but he said no action was taken.
Mr Currie told the hearing in Edinburgh: ‘I do not know why he never acted on it.
‘He could have easily had a word with the Mother Superior and said, “Get rid of this man who’s been abusing one of the boys”.’
SCAI chairman Lady Smith asked why – as a child who was reporting abuse – he should have been the one to say three Hail Marys. Mr Currie, of Glasgow, said: ‘If someone walks into a confessional box and reports abuse, I think the priest has a duty to report it to the police or do something about it.’
In June 1997, Mr Currie had reported his abuse but was told six months later that officers believed his abuser was dead. Then in 2000 he discovered that some of his friends had attended the man’s funeral only two weeks before, proving the abuser had been alive in 1997.
Mr Currie, who was admitted to the home at the age of two and left in December 1967, said police apologised to him for the blunder in October 2000.
Meanwhile the inquiry also heard that a male helper at the home stripped and beat a boy ‘black and blue’ in an assault.
A witness, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said the man ‘battered hell’ out of him in the 1960s when he was 11 years old.
He told the inquiry: ‘I thought my time was up.’
The witness said the nuns who ran the home would have been aware of the incident but did not come to see how he was.
The inquiry continues.