Benedictines should not run schools now
Shaun Middleton, a former Ampleforth monk, says the order must show that it has confronted the horror of pupil sex abuse
Iwasn’t surprised when I sat down last week to read the full report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) on Ampleforth and Downside, two Catholic boarding schools run by the Benedictine order. It took me back to my four years at Ampleforth, North Yorkshire, as a trainee monk in the mid-Nineties, and to the culture that existed there.
I left for all sorts of reasons – mainly because I wanted to return to be a parish priest in my diocese – but there had also been aspects to the life of the Ampleforth monks that had unsettled me. I remember clearly, even though it is now more than two decades ago, being amazed at how close the monks were to the boys. I felt something wasn’t right, that there needed to be more professional distance.
And I had been there in early 1996 when the police came to arrest a monk, Bernard Green, on charges of indecently assaulting a 13-year-old pupil as he slept in the dormitory. He was later found guilty and given a community sentence. Patrick Barry, the abbot at the time, called the community together. He spoke of his shock and sadness at what Green had done, mentioned his compassion for the boy – then said the equivalent of, “OK chaps, back to work”. That was how Ampleforth dealt with child abuse.
At least the statutory authorities had been involved in that case, but it should have been standard practice. It wasn’t.
Many other institutions at the time were making similar mistakes, but they went on to learn that they had to do much better. Ampleforth continued to live in a time warp, refusing to establish proper safeguarding procedures until very recently – it is clear from the IICSA report that this was also the case at its sister school Downside in Somerset.
One flagrant example came when Ampleforth chose to opt out of the system established everywhere else in the Catholic Church in England and Wales as a result of Lord Nolan’s 2001 report on safeguarding failures around paedophile priests. Ampleforth thought it knew better, and would form its own safeguarding committee. In matters of safeguarding, you cannot maintain credibility without independent arbitration. The number of those who suffered sexual abuse at Ampleforth is “likely to be considerably higher”, the IICSA investigation states, than the convictions that will be wrought. Those accused of abuse were moved from the abbey and school into parish work, as was the case with Piers Grant-Ferris, part of the monastic community when I was there, who was jailed in 2006 on 20 counts of indecent assault on boys.
Then in my mid-thirties, I never witnessed or heard admissions of indecent behaviour taking place during my time at Ampleforth, but I visited there after the allegations against Grant-Ferris became public. A senior monk complacently remarked to me, “You have to understand that Piers is a child himself ”. It caused me to challenge the abbot to use more robust language with the community: he should not have been afraid to tell them that an allegation of raping a child had been made. It would have shattered that air of complacency, but this just wasn’t the Benedictine way.
Timothy Wright was elected abbot of Ampleforth in 1997, shortly after I left. To his credit, he did try to improve the situation by engaging a female psychologist to support monks who were in distress – prior to that, the best you were offered was an appointment with an elderly Catholic psychiatrist.
As I understand it, this psychologist set about her work with great professionalism. She asked for access to the records of the monks she would be working with. Wright refused. She grew so frustrated by this non-cooperation that she went to the statutory authorities, prompting the police to launch Operation Ellipse, through which Grant-Ferris was arrested.
Why didn’t the authorities at the monastery take more responsibility? Part of the problem lay in the role of the abbot, who is seen as both spiritual father and a counsellor to the monks, meaning that he tries to help them to seek God’s grace in absolving their sins.
It is a good approach for some things, but cannot be allowed to condone criminal acts. It is therefore hopelessly inadequate when dealing with paedophiles, whose psychosexual dysfunction, I have come to understand since training as a psychotherapist, can be managed but never “cured”. The community at Ampleforth appears to have struggled to understand that.
The monastery prides itself on its traditions, and on being different. That takes the form day-to-day operating with the outdated upper-class attitude to problems of “just ignore it and it will go away”. Even those monks like me, who didn’t come from such a privileged background, were sucked in by the life in that secluded Yorkshire valley.
Reading the IICSA report made me feel profoundly sad: first and foremost for those who have been abused and whose lives will be scarred by the experience, but also for those monks in the community I still know, who are good, decent people, committing their lives to providing for the majority of the children who go there a fine education, based on Christian principles of service and mission.
Yet it is because Ampleforth constantly proclaims its high ideals – “your children will be safe with us,” it reassures parents – that the report is so shocking. Will mothers and fathers trust the school now?
Ampleforth regards itself as a family, in which members work out their problems together, but with the sexual abuse of children you need to admit that you can’t manage and call in the authorities. Yet in the monastic community, asking for outside help is counter-cultural.
It is often said that the particular problem that the Catholic Church has with child sexual abuse arises from the imposition of celibacy on priests and monks. But it is more complicated than that. What existed in my time at Ampleforth was a deeply infantilised culture around sexuality that contributed to the arrested sexual development of some monks, and to a view that, when abuse was reported, it could be dismissed as a case of “boys will be boys”.
When abuse was reported, it could be dismissed as a case of ‘boys will be boys’
Will these two schools recover from such a damning report? I don’t know. Numbers will speak. Benedictine education in this country was already getting to a point where questions were being asked about the sustainability of monastic schools.
One option might be for the monks to withdraw from education, to demonstrate that they finally have confronted the horror of what happened to children in their care. It would be a powerful sign that the wider Catholic Church is starting to “get” the damage that has been done. The English Benedictines have the opportunity to publicly acknowledge that running a school is now too complex, and instead look for ways they can more fruitfully serve God.
That choice is for others, not me. But as one who continues to regard Ampleforth with affection, I know that it cannot just carry on as if nothing has happened.
Father Shaun Middleton is a parish priest in the diocese of Westminster and a psychotherapist. He was talking to Peter Stanford