Some of those who gave evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse,whose latest report published this week deals with the Catholic Church in England and Wales, here describe the physical, psychological and spiritual anguish they have endured

On a spring morning in May 2018, three people walk through the cemetery at Wonersh seminary in Surrey. They approach a gravestone with an inscription dedicated to “a wise priest much loved by his family and all who knew him”, but they carry no flowers and offer no prayers. One of the three is Deirdre McCormack, cousin of the dead cleric, Canon Dermod Fogarty, and she and a second person, who is filming, watch while the third, carrying a sledgehammer, begins to smash the stone.

Piece by piece, it is demolished. Nobody comes running to stop them, or calls the police to report this act of desecration. The seminary and the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton agreed that McCormack could organise the destruction. For Canon Fogarty, who had been a senior cleric in Arundel and Brighton, a teacher at Wonersh and a parish priest in Midhurst and Chichester, had been guilty of an even greater desecration: the violation of a child.

In 1987, Stephen Bernard was 11 years old, and Fogarty, a trusted priest, invited him to his presbytery on the pretext of giving him personal tuition in French and Latin. For years, there was a pattern of behaviour: Fogarty would take Stephen upstairs, rape him and then return with him to the living room, where Fogarty would demand that Stephen make his Confession. The abuse eventually stopped, but the suffering continued.