Naked priest and novice nun nabbed necking

July 22 2000 at 10:35PM

Lima - Peruvian police said Saturday that they caught a 40-year-old Spanish priest and a 24-year-old novice nun in the act of breaking the celibacy law.

The two were found naked in the bishop's car while in an "obscene position", a police spokesman confirmed.

Despite being in an "unfavourable position" the priest tried starting the car but police blocked the vehicle.

Asked why they were unclothed, the couple said they could not say why. The two were taken into temporary custody. - Sapa-DPA

Clergy who abuse over-16s face jail

By Colin Brown and Robert Mendick

23 July 2000

Clergy who abuse their power by forming sexual relationships with young persons in their care who are over the age of consent face jail under tough new proposals being considered by the Government.

The Home Office last night confirmed it was looking sympathetically at a plan by Tory peer Baroness Young to amend the Sexual Offences Bill to include the clergy as well as teachers and care workers under the new offence of abuse of trust. This is designed to protect young people over the age of 16 who are in full-time education or in a hospital, care home, community or residential home.

The move comes amid growing disquiet over the Catholic Church's handling of priests accused of child and sex abuse. The proposed law change follows the allegation last week that the Most Rev Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, knowingly allowed a paedophile priest to work in a ministry with access to children. He was Bishop of Arundel and Brighton at the time.

The case of Father Michael Hill, jailed for five years in 1997 for 10 sex attacks on altar boys and other children, is likely to increase support for the amendment in the Lords while putting the Government under pressure to back it.

The Birmingham diocese, which has been particularly plagued by child abuse, admitted last night that it had paid compensation to two victims of paedophile priests, though it is contesting several other legal actions. The Independent on Sunday knows of three priests in the diocese who were moved to different parishes, but later exposed as paedophiles.

Alan Draper - an adviser to the Motherwell diocese on child abuse, who wrote a report on the case of Father Sam Penney, jailed for seven-and-a-half years in 1993 for sexually abusing seven children in the Birmingham area - told the IoS: "I would call it a cover-up. There was a tendency to protect the institutions and to minimise the full impact of what was going on."

Two other priests - Fathers Eric Taylor and Ted O'Malley, both currently in jail - also moved around the diocese before being caught. Father Taylor was convicted of child abuse in 1975, but is alleged to have been allowed to carry out church duties between 1989 and 1996. In 1998, the priest was jailed for seven years on 18 charges of sexually abusing boys at Father Hudson's Children's Homes in Warwickshire for crimes dating back to the 1960s. A complaint against Father O'Malley is understood to have first been made to the church in 1987, but he continued to work in parishes for another 10 years until his conviction for indecent assault last year.

Monsignor John Moran, vicar general for the Birmingham diocese, vehemently denied there has ever been a cover-up. He told the IoS: "Priests are moved around for other reasons than they are doing something wrong. It is in the nature of the job they are moved from parish to parish.

"There is no evidence that I know of that has shown that we knew a complaint had been made about a man in this area of child abuse and that we knowingly moved him on to another parish. There is no evidence of that as far as I know."

Baroness Young, who has led the campaign in the House of Lords to resist the liberalising of laws on homosexuals, is planning a new amendment to include the clergy in the scope of the Government's Sexual Offences Bill. A Home Office spokesman said last night: "It's an area of great concern. The Government is definitely looking at the amendment."

The Sexual Offences Bill, which will reduce the age of gay consent to 16, was blocked in the Lords in 1998. It was reintroduced but, in a move to reassure Labour MPs, who demanded more protection for the young, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, included a new offence of the abuse of a position of trust.

Behind the liturgy, a litany of abuse

The Archbishop of Westminster's response to a paedophile priest has raised disturbing questions about the Catholic Church's attitudes

By Paul Vallely

23 July 2000

The procession of priests in their white vestments - some solemn, some smiling - moved slowly down the aisle at Westminster Cathedral. "It makes you wonder," said the woman standing next to me, "how many of them are child abusers."

The scene was the enthronement of the Most Rev Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as Archbishop of Westminster. Only this time the procession was being rebroadcast behind a TV news report claiming that the new archbishop had knowingly allowed a paedophile priest to continue in a ministry where he had access to children. Suddenly it was possible for the passage of the priests to take on an altogether more sinister aspect.

In Ireland, where cases of child abuse by Roman Catholic clergy seem to have reached epidemic proportions, some priests no longer wear their dog collars. The symbol that once opened doors as well as hearts has now become a goad to verbal and even physical abuse. Last week as Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor went on to the back foot, looking shaken, it seemed as though things might yet go in a similar direction here.

The archbishop denies that he acted irresponsibly in failing to control Fr Michael Hill, who was jailed in 1997 for assaults on boys as young as ten. The victims' families insist otherwise. Many social workers agree; Michelle Elliott of the child abuse charity Kidscape demanded that the archbishop should resign.

Whatever the truth, perceptions are as important as facts here. The public appears prepared to think the worst of Catholic clerics, which is hardly surprising after the litany of betrayal that has filled the press in recent years.

The case which first brought home the seriousness of the problem was that of a Birmingham priest, Fr Sam Penney, who in 1993 was jailed for seven years after admitting charges of indecent assault on seven children. It was only the start. Over the past five years no fewer than 21 Catholic priests have been prosecuted for child abuse. The tales that came out in court were sordid ones.

One case gave a particular insight into the obsessive world of the fixated paedophile. Fr Adrian McLaren, "a fine parish priest" in Durham, did not just abuse young boys but posted photographs of them on the internet. When police raided his home four years ago they found the biggest collection of child pornography ever seized, on hardware capable of storing all 29 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 11 times over. It took four policemen seven months to catalogue.

All this was bad enough. But the institutional church compounded the sins of its individual ministers with a conspiracy of silence and a culture of cover-up.

In the case of Fr Penney, the archdiocese of Birmingham merely moved the culprit for at least six years - despite reports of abuse and one arrest - to new parishes and new victims, while he still paid return visits to a family where he was abusing all five children. In Glasgow, it has recently been revealed, paedophile priests were moved across Scotland from parish to parish, with Cardinal Thomas Winning refusing to report them to the police and instead paying £42,000 in damages to one victim in a secret deal.

This became the pattern for dealing with other paedophile priests. When another case eventually became public, the Glasgow archdiocese defended its secrecy, saying: "It was the parents - not the church - who said they did not want to go any further with this." Critics did not believe them and spoke of a celibate freemasonry closing ranks to protect its own.

Yet there are those who argue it is important to set all this in the right historical context. "The first medical paper on child abuse was not published until 1978," says Dr Kevin Illsey, one of the pioneers of child abuse diagnosis in this country. "Even in the years which followed people still didn't believe sex abuse really happened."

The two complaints that Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor received about Fr Michael Hill before 1983 were interestingly couched. One couple said the priest was showing "too much interest" in their boys. Another accused him of "inappropriate behaviour".

"In retrospect, we all know what that means," says Dr Illsey. "But at the time such phrases were not euphemisms but vague expressions of unease. Given the general state of knowledge of child abuse at the time, Archbishop Murphy-O'Connor did what was then thought to be required - withdrawing the man from his parish and sending him for treatment at two therapeutic institutions."

Such a response sounds naïve now. But, says Dr Illsey, in those days the received wisdom among doctors, teachers and care workers, as well as bishops, was that paedophiles could be successfully treated and rehabilitated. "We're not so sure about that now and would be far more cautious. But at that time the action taken would have seemed right."

Even so, doubt must be cast upon the decision to send a paedophile priest to a busy airport full of children. Yet it is clear that from this point the Catholic Church in England and Wales, at any rate, began to respond more adequately as an institution. In 1994 its Bishops' Conference drew up much more informed guidelines on how the church should handle abuse allegations. Two years later it produced a report on the pastoral care of survivors which said it had to move from a "culture of disbelief" to one of openness and honesty. Dioceses set up child-protection teams (which have since, ironically, been accused of being "over-zealous" in their scrutiny of priests). Most recently the new Archbishop of Birmingham made a public plea for forgiveness from the victims of sex abuse.

It may not be enough. There are child abusers in all walks of life but in the church the problem is tangled up with the issue of celibacy among a generation of priests many of whom entered seminaries as teenagers and were never able to develop a proper understanding of their sexuality.

There are those in the church who dispute this. "The real problem with celibacy is loneliness, not sexuality," says Mgr Kieran Conry of the Catholic Media Office. "The estimates are that some 4 per cent of the male population are child abusers. If just 21 of the country's 5,500 priests have been prosecuted for child abuse it means that the percentage of child abusers among priests is less than a third of 1 per cent."

There will be many who will be unconvinced and who will ask how many undetected culprits lie behind the 21 who have been caught. But there is a more damning consideration. In the end it is not enough for the church to argue that the proportion of child abusers among Catholic priests is probably no greater than in the rest of the population. For we do not expect our priests to be no worse than the rest of us. We expect them to be better.

Which is how the police were first alerted to the Durham paedophile priest with the massive internet porn collection. They received a tip-off to say there were paedophile videos at the presbytery. The call came from outraged burglars. They might have been criminals, but they did have some standards.

'Mischievous medieval monks spread syphilis'

July 24 2000 at 01:53PM

London - The long-cherished British belief that it was the returning Spanish conquistadores who brought syphilis to Europe from the Americas, has been turned on its head by skeletal evidence that medieval English monks had the so-called "Spanish pox" long before Columbus set sail in 1492.

Research carried out on skeletons at an excavated priory in Hull unearthed evidence of the disease in many of the 14th-century monks, reported the Daily Telegraph on Monday.

This refutes the widespread assumption that syphilis had its origins in America, based on the belief that there had been no trace of the disease in Europe before 1492.

However, radio carbon dating of a male skeleton, possibly a friar, with obvious signs of syphilis has shown that the remains belong to the mid-1340s.

'Syphilis was present in medieval England' "This discovery changes our views about the history of syphilis," said Anthea Boylston, who led the six-year project at the University of Bradford.

"There had been a couple of skeletons around the country with signs of syphilis that could have pre-dated Columbus, but the interesting thing about this burial site is that there are cases of the disease in many individuals. That makes us think that syphilis was present in medieval England," she said.

The disease first attracted public attention soon after 1494, following a severe outbreak among French soldiers occupied in the siege of Naples. The "Great Pox" spread rapidly, afflicting victims with suppurating sores that ate away flesh and bone, followed by bone deformation, insanity and death.

In 1525, the chronicler Fernandez of Oviedo first raised the possibility that it had originated in America.

"American academics had always insisted that the disease came from there, but how could this be the case if a pre-Columbian man showed such obvious signs of it?

The 'Great Pox' ate away flesh and bone and was followed by deformity, insanity and death "The signs include pocking of the skull and a hole in the soft palate. They can be mistaken for leprosy but there is no doubt here," said Charlotte Roberts, an expert in palaeopathology.

Among the disease's more famous victims were Ivan the Terrible, Schubert, Nietzsche and Mussolini.

Although the disease is now controlled by penicillin, about 40 million new cases are notified annually around the world, according to the World Health Organisation. - Sapa-DPA