THE MONSTER OF BELVEDERE
After Tom Doorley’s moving piece last Saturday, the Jesuits issued an unexpected apology this week for the abuse perpetrated by Fr Joseph Marmion. But the battle for justice is not over yet
YOU are looking at the face of a monster. This is the man who the Jesuit Order in Ireland stated during the week ‘abused boys sexually, emotionally and physically while he was on the teaching staff at Belvedere College in the 1970s’. Unlike me last week, when I wrote about ‘Fr Oliphant’, the Jesuits named this vile character. He was Fr Joseph Marmion SJ, ordained in 1957, a predatory paedophile and bully, not just of boys, but of fellow Jesuits and lay teachers.
Writing here about him last Saturday, I had no idea that the Order was about to name him and to admit, after all these years, what he had been up to in one of three schools where he had been on the teaching staff.
A boy — and I’m going to refer to all those who were abused by Marmion as boys, because that is what they were then, even if they are now in their 50s and 60s — who was a classmate of mine had approached the Jesuits in 2019 with a simple request.
And very welcome though their statement is, it’s now 2021. They have taken their time in complying with what he asked.
In the statement made last Tuesday, the Provincial of the Order, Fr Leonard Moloney SJ, said: ‘In our communications, he made it clear to me that he was concerned for others who may also have suffered and that they should be proactively offered a response and support.
‘This man also conveyed to me that he believed others who were abused may be helped by the recognition that they too were dreadfully harmed.
‘He asked that we name his abuser... publicly and that we make this information widely available in order to reach as many former students as possible.’
When I wrote about the horrors of Marmion last week, I was immediately contacted by boys who had been abused by him, to varying degrees and in various ways, at Belvedere. All of them were glad that I had revealed what they knew to be true; some were shaken by having painful memories resurrected; a few were, in the words of one, ‘in bits’.
After the statement was issued by the Jesuits, the messages became a deluge. A very welcome one, but containing some heartbreaking accounts of what had happened to them and how it had affected them right up to the present day. One wrote: ‘I am not shaking, I’m in system shutdown... I rejected a super-charming request from him to audition in his room after school for the opera. After that, he had it in for me. I remember a level of hatred that overrode my fear and I can still feel it today. Your article brought back some dark memories.’
On Thursday, Joe Duffy’s Liveline heard from ‘Luke’, part of whose story appeared here last week. His account of being ‘measured’, naked, in Marmion’s special room, the long climb up the stairs, the one-bar electric fire, the towels, the racks of old clothes and the sense of isolation. When he referred to Marmion’s deceptively soft and gentle voice, I shivered. I was 14 again for a moment.
All of those who had been sexually abused by him recounted this experience. Last week I wrote that nobody I had spoken with recalled him touching their private parts. In the meantime, however, numerous boys have said that they were sexually assaulted during this process. Some were told to place a j-cloth over their genitals, most were ‘helped’ into flesh-coloured tights by Marmion while ‘feeling up your legs and around your bum’, in the words of one.
Several of those who got in touch had more to say about Marmion’s school trips to Vienna for carefully selected students from his German classes. Every August he would take 20 or 25 boys, on his own, for a few weeks in the Austrian capital.
All would be carefully monitored for any signs of illness and their temperature taken — rectally, ‘for accuracy’, as he claimed.
Then his particular targets would be taken to sleep in his room and drugged. Waking up 36 hours later, they had no recollection of what had happened to them.
One survivor, now a doctor, says: ‘I’ve often wondered what he was using. That amount of amnesia would require dangerous drugs, maybe potent benzodiazepines or hexobarbitone that need to be injected.’ We simply don’t know.
Two boys recall being concerned about what had befallen their friend and, when Marmion was out, found the boy groggy and confused in the Jesuit’s bedroom, lying on a camp bed. When Marmion discovered what they had done, he became furious.
‘We all knew about his temper and his violence,’ recalls one witness. ‘But I had never seen him go so berserk. There was saliva flying out of his mouth and he was yelling like crazy. It was like he was possessed.’
A boy who was blessed with a fine voice and musical talent tells me that he knew instinctively to avoid Marmion and to refuse to get involved in his Strauss operettas. ‘But as I went up the school, I knew what he was up to. My recollection is that the younger kids didn’t really discuss it. That came later. And from what I recall, Marmion became more and more brazen over the years. He had got away with so much that, by the Vienna trip of 1977, he must have thought he was unstoppable.’
But he wasn’t. Several boys who had been on that trip spoke to their parents about what had happened. Several boys tell me that one dad, whose son had not been sexually abused, went straight to the rector — effectively the head man within the school and within the Belvedere community — the late Fr Paul Andrews SJ, who was a friend of his.
‘Andrews did absolutely nothing,’ I was told. This parent ‘built up a head of steam and he went to the headmaster, who took it seriously’.
However, the father of another boy, again not sexually abused, a teacher at the school, reported what he had heard to the headmaster. ‘So, it’s not true to say that
‘He became more and more brazen over the years’
none of the teachers did anything about Marmion. My dad tried to,’ he tells me.
Which brings me to parts of the Jesuits’ statement.
‘Following receipt of information from concerned parents in 1977, disclosures of sexual abuse were received by the school,’ it reads. ‘In consequence, a decision was taken that Joseph Marmion be removed from the staff in Belvedere...’
Which, of course, is what happened, nine months later.
What this statement — welcome and, indeed, courageous as it is — doesn’t say is what was known and when.
Last week, Luke told me, and told Joe Duffy on Thursday, that he had been approached by a Jesuit in 1973 who asked him — he cannot remember the exact form of words — if he knew anything about inappropriate behaviour on the part of Fr Marmion. And he told what he knew. Others, approached in the same way at roughly the same time, denied it out of fear of their abuser.
Reading the Jesuits’ statement, you could be forgiven for thinking that revelations made in September 1977 came as a bolt from the blue. Clearly this was not the case. Some of Marmion’s targets have described this to me as ‘Jesuitical’. One said to me: ‘They have told the truth. But not the whole truth. I think they owe it to us to make a clean breast of it.’
The relief and, in many cases, a kind of joy experienced by those who survived — and we must remember that there were some who didn’t — when the Jesuits’ statement came out, has given way, for some, to anger.
One told me: ‘That man, whoever he is, who brought this about is a hero. It can’t have been easy. But, for God’s sake, we all knew what that b ****** was up to. And I bet he was at it from the time he first came to the school in 1969. The Jesuits knew too. If I could calm down a bit I’d say they are being economical with the truth. But I won’t, so what I’m going to say now is unprintable...’ And it was. One thing to emerge after last week’s piece was a perfect example of what one survivor calls the ‘moral inversion’ that Marmion constantly effected. ‘There was a boy in my class, a nice guy but a bit of a messer,’ says someone who contacted me. ‘These days we’d probably say he had ADHD. We were 13 or 14.
‘One day he said something and Marmion went dead silent and still. Then he turned around and drew a little chalk circle on the board. “Put your nose in that,” he said. And he did. The boy had to bend down a bit. Then Marmion walked back down the class and took a run at him and gave him a vicious kick in the bum. The boy turned around, blood spurting out of his nose and he ran down to the classroom door. And he stood there for a second and yelled, “My dad is going to **** ing kill you!”’
The class sat in stunned silence. ‘And all we were thinking — when we’d just seen a criminal assault on a kid — was, “oh no, poor [this boy] is in big trouble. He said f*** to Marmion.”’
The Belvederian is a very wellillustrated annual produced by the school for over a century. I searched through the volumes from 1969 to 1978 and found only two photographs of this ordained thug. But I came across something he had written about his first Belvedere operetta in 1971, an example of the sense of humour, Wodehousean in this instance, that he employed to charm grown-ups.
‘There are, of course, two species of schoolboy: those who are interested in taking part in the school operetta, and those who are not. The former are a very charming and talented group, endowed with generosity and discernment. They will certainly do very well in afterlife, as bishops, stock-brokers and pillars of the community. The other group will inevitably turn out badly. Indeed some of them are already probably known to the police. And it serves them right.’
As many of the survivors have commented, it’s a shame that Marmion was never, as far as we are aware, known to the Gardaí.
I had an interesting suggestion from a number of survivors. One of them expressed it like this: ‘Would it be an idea for the Jesuits to present the Caravaggio that the Order has loaned to the National Gallery, to the nation, in recognition of the harm done to hundreds of boys and in acknowledgement of their collective failure to offer these children the protection that they deserved? And in recognition, too, of all victims of clerical abuse in Ireland? A plaque to that effect would be exhibited alongside the painting wherever it is exhibited.’
I am happy to put that suggestion out there. I want to thank all of those who got in touch with me since last Saturday.
I have rekindled some old friendships and have heard tales of both horror and quite amazing resilience. I was one of the lucky ones and I suspect I may be feeling the guilt of the fortunate.
Before I wrote last week’s account of the monster that was Marmion, I listened to two people cry as they told me what had happened to them. This week, it was my turn. To cry, not for me, but for every single one of the boys whose young lives he blighted. And for those who are no longer here to tell us what happened to them.
‘The boy had blood spurting out of his nose’