Monks must be stripped of control at schools

Benedictine leaders hid ‘appalling’ abuse of pupils as young as seven for 40 years, abuse inquiry finds

MONKS should be stripped of control at two leading Benedictine schools after sexual abuse was covered up for 40 years, a report has found.

Leaders at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset hid allegations of “appalling” abuse against pupils as young as seven to protect the Catholic Church’s reputation.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) yesterday published a damning report on The English Benedictine Congregation, which has 10 monasteries.

Ampleforth College and Downside School were two schools linked to the monasteries, run at times by “secretive, evasive and suspicious” Church officials who avoided reporting misconduct to police and social services.

The inquiry found that sexual abuse spanning four decades at both schools was likely to be “considerably” more widespread than previously thought. Both must implement a “strict separation” between the governance of the abbey and the school, if safeguarding arrangements are to be free from “often conflicting priorities”, it concluded.

Allegations stretching back to the Sixties encompassed “a wide spectrum of physical abuse, much of which had sadistic and sexual overtones”, the report said. Ten individuals linked to the schools, mainly monks, have been cautioned or convicted over sexual activity or pornography offences involving a “large number of children”.

“The true scale of the abuse however is likely to be considerably higher,” the investigation, led by Prof Alexis Jay, found. “Safeguarding children was less important than the reputation of the Church and the well-being of the abusive monks,” she said. She added that even after new procedures were introduced in 2001, when monks “gave the appearance of cooperation and trust”, their approach “could be summarised as a ‘tell them nothing’ attitude”.

Yesterday, both Ampleforth and Downside published apologies to the victims of abuse.

One alleged offender at Ampleforth abused at least 11 children aged between eight and 12 over a “sustained period of time”, but died before police could investigate. Those convicted included Richard White, a Downside monk jailed for five years in 2012 for five indecent assaults against two boys, and Father Piers Grant-ferris, a Benedictine monk at Ampleforth who was jailed for two years in 2006 for 20 indecent assault on boys.

“Many perpetrators did not hide their sexual interests... The blatant openness of these activities demonstrates there was a culture of acceptance of abusive behaviour,” the report found, allowing abusers at Ampleforth to prey on entire groups of pupils both outdoors and indoors.

The report concluded: “For much of the time under consideration by the inquiry, the overriding concern in both Ampleforth and Downside was to avoid contact with the local authority or the police at all costs, regardless of the seriousness of the alleged abuse or actual knowledge of its occurrence.

“Rather than refer a suspected perpetrator to the police, in several instances the abbots in both places would confine the individual to the abbey or transfer him and the known risk to a parish or other locations.”