A colonial dispute involving drunken priests, misappropriated funds and scandalous relationships was fiercely denounced by this paper’s founding editor Every cafe today has the molasses-tinted brown sugar known as Demerara. It was also the name of one of three river colonies on the north-east coast of South America ceded by the Dutch to Britain in 1814. The British later consolidated them into the colony of British Guiana, with its capital, Georgetown, on the Demerara estuary. The economy was dependent on sugar and 100,000 African slaves were to work on its plantations before the abolition of the trade. Pope Gregory XIV made British Guiana’s small Catholic mission an apostolic vicariate in 1837, answerable directly to Propaganda Fide in Rome. When British and Irish Catholics