Abuse victims demand apology

A group of men has called on the Comboni Fathers to acknowledge and apologise for decades of abuse they allege took place at the order’s junior seminary in Yorkshire.

Brian Hennessy, one of 12 ex-students who have come forward to say they were abused by priests at Mirfield Junior Seminary in Yorkshire between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, this week sent a 157-page report detailing more than 1,000 instances of abuse to the archbishops of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.

The report was also sent to the abbots and religious superiors of all the religious communities in Britain and the heads of the religious conferences.

In an accompanying letter, Mr Hennessy said that priests and Religious had refused properly to acknowledge and validate their suffering.

Last year, a group of victims were given payments by the order of between £7,000 and £30,000 each, which Kathy Perrin, a lawyer with the Catholic Church Insurance Association, which represented the order, said was not an admission of guilt.

Mr Hennessy’s letter says that the Comboni Missionaries, also known as the Verona Fathers, had failed to care for victims. That failure “has run so deep in the veins of the hierarchy of that religious order that it has resulted in the hierarchical re-victimisation and discrimination of the victims of child sexual abuse that was committed by depraved members of their order. It is a failure that is characterised by arrogance, self-protectionism and denial of the ‘truth’”.

After a detailed report in The Observer newspaper last October about the Comboni allegations, Danny Sullivan, chairman of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, said that the response of the Comboni order “reflects a stark difference of attitude from that of Pope Francis”. He added he had been present at a Mass at which Francis addressed victims of abuse and humbly asked forgiveness; the Comboni Fathers, he implied, had taken a different approach.

This week, Jim Kirby, who was a seminarian at Mirfield from 1973 to 1977, when he was aged between 12 and 16, told The Tablet that all he wanted now was for the Comboni order to make an absolute apology and to admit that they failed to care for the young boys in their care. “We want them to meet us and to treat us properly and with respect,” he said. “So far we have been fobbed off and we have been insulted; some of us have been told by priests that we are ‘only in it for the money’.”

Mr Kirby concluded: “The ones who are still alive should be brought to court, but in the meantime it would mean so much if they invited us to meet them and said we’re sorry.”

The Comboni Fathers did not respond to a request for comment.