IICSA Inquiry Roman Catholic Church Investigation Wider Hearing 8 November 2019

IICSA Inquiry Roman Catholic Church Investigation Wider Hearing

8 November 2019

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Friday, 8 November 2019

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I indicate, therefore, there are some additional

(10.30 am)

statements from the NCSC witnesses, both past and present, from Rachel O'Driscoll, Elizabeth Manero, whom we have heard of, and a past member called

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THE CHAIR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the final

day of this public hearing. Ms Carey?

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Housekeeping

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Susie Hayward.

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MS CAREY: Good morning, chair. Before we turn to closing

submissions on behalf of the core participants this morning, may I deal with one matter of formality? During the course of this two-week public hearing, there has been reference to a number of documents, statements and exhibits that will be published on the inquiry website, and a list is going to be published on the website later today, along with the unique Relativity references for those documents.

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From Ofsted there is a statement of Sean Harford.

Chair, you will be familiar with Adrian Child. There is an additional statement from the former director of CSAS. In addition to the statements read out yesterday in relation to formation, the inquiry intends to publish those statements from Reverend Taylor,

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Monsignor Whitmore and, indeed, Canon Farrer and Canon Coyle, whom you heard from yesterday. Chair, in respect of the review by the Westminster Diocese of the safeguarding file in respect of RC-A711, Monsignor O'Boyle's statement will be published. And in respect of RC-A710's case, the statement of

A number have already been referred to during the course of the live evidence, but there are some additional statements that I need to deal with this morning.

Baroness O'Loan will also be published. All of those documents will be available on the inquiry website. Chair, it is not the intention of counsel to the inquiry to make any closing submissions to you. Can I invite, then, that we turn to Mr O'Donnell to make the first closing submission?

The inquiry intends to publish the statements of Reverend Christopher Thomas at CHC000582, INQ004770, in relation to the background and structure to the church. The statement of Dom Yeo at BNT004910 that gives the background to the orders and in particular to the English Benedictine Congregation will be published. I'm told I don't need to read out the URNs. Can

THE CHAIR: Thank you, Ms Carey. Mr O'Donnell?

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Closing statement by MR O'DONNELL
MR O'DONNELL: Chair, thank you. As you know, I act for the Slater & Gordon survivors in this case study. I propose in this closing to address you, firstly, briefly on

12began inserting his fingers into her. A19 was first able to disclose the abuse

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in August 2014. She brought a claim for compensation

which then brought her into contact with various members of the Roman Catholic Church. She met with the director of the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service, Colette Limbrick, in April 2019. She was told that there was no national or independent body to investigate complaints within the church and that responsibility for that was with the individual dioceses. Various

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their evidence and also on the fact that, despite all of

its promises of learnings and improvement, the fact that the Roman Catholic Church remains as dangerous a place for children now as it was before this inquiry began. A19 and 20 first. They were both abused by a Roman Catholic priest of the Salesian Order, RC-F515. A19 was treated badly by her father after the death of her

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 exchanges follow and A19 soon came to feel that she was being given the run-around by the church.

mother, effectively being abandoned by her family and was left mentally vulnerable as a result. A maternal cousin contacted her and recommended she see F515 who was described to her as a psychologist as well as a priest. She agreed immediately and she met F515 at his offices. He arranged to meet her every week thereafter and began to sexually assault her. He forced A19 to remove all of her clothing and then lie on his sofa and told her he was hypnotising her before sexually assaulting her. He often plied her with alcohol. On one occasion, after forcing her to strip and then

A20 was also sexually abused by F515 during purported counselling sessions that he provided to her when she was a child. F515 had advised A20's parents that she needed to see him for these sessions every Saturday at his offices and also that they shouldn't ask her about these sessions, just as A20 was instructed not to speak about them to anyone as well. He met A20 once a week, made her strip naked and lie down before massaging her front and back. Then he penetrated her vagina with his fingers. He always finished by giving her a chocolate biscuit and a wet kiss on the lips, before telling her that the sessions were for her own good. They continued like this for years, until A20 was

sexually assaulting her on his sofa as usual, he grabbed her and laid her across his lap and struck her repeatedly on the rear, laughing as he did so. He soon

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8 November 2019

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brave enough to stop attending, after which she told her

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2where the visitors entered the building, another priest mother what F515 had been doing to her. Her mother complained to a more senior Catholic priest in London. By now, it will come as no surprise to you, chair, to hear A20's mother was told to go away and pray for F515 and not to bring any scandal on the church. A20 tried to commit suicide on multiple occasions during the weekly abuse. Her education faltered and she left home when she was still a child and moved into a squat. She continues to suffer, as a result of the abuse, to this day. walked in on them and observed the abuse. Again, chair, you won't be surprised by now to hear that this priest simply turned around and walked out again without a word.

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A711 tried to escape F500 after he went on a course

to Rome. When he returned, he turned up at her home and raped her. She reported the abuse to the church in October 2016. A church safeguarding coordinator contacted her and said she could either go the criminal route or let the church investigate her allegations. She told the panel on 29 October that it was suggested to her it would be a less stressful experience to let the church, rather than the police, investigate, so of course she did.

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The panel didn't hear from A19 or A20, but it did hear from our survivor A711. We say that she was, on any view, a calm, dignified and considered witness, even when she was describing being raped by her abuser, F500, a priest in her parish. I invite you to make findings about the manner in which A711 gave her evidence for reasons I will come to shortly.
Her complaint was transferred from her home diocese to the Westminster Diocese a few months after she first came forward. As she put it in her evidence, she expected to see Catholic safeguarding practice at its best, as she had been transferred into Cardinal Nichols' jurisdiction. Her experience was far from that expectation. She described how, "Over the best part of two and a half years, I came face to face with the church at its most defensive and protective of its own. I felt that I was in the wrong and every step in the
She was 15 years of age when she was groomed by F500. He began to sexually abuse her by holding her forcefully against his erection when they were both in the swimming pool. The abuse escalated. Soon she was being forced to perform oral sex on him at her local church priory. On one such occasion, while he was abusing A711 in the parlour at the front of the priory,

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12process to have information shared with me was an exhausting battle."
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Westminster that made her feel like she was being kicked from pillar to post.

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She was told by the safeguarding coordinator of her

own diocese, as you will remember, that

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I referred to A711's demeanour during her testimony

as being calm, dignified and considered. I say the same point applies to her written exchanges with the church, all of which were polite, I say, to a fault.

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a church-instructed forensic psychologist was going to

risk assess her abuser and that she would be given immediate verbal feedback from that assessment on whether or not her abuser had admitted anything during the assessment, which was obviously of massive importance to her after the years of abuse. The risk assessment eventually occurred after her case had been transferred to the Westminster Diocese.
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Following her efforts with Westminster, A711 was

still so frustrated by its lack of any proper response to her concerns that 11 months ago she made a subject access request, as you know. She discovered she was being described by the church behind the scenes as "deeply manipulative" and "a needy victim", who was generating a passive-aggressive threat that, "If we don't do what she wants, she will cause trouble", such that the Westminster Diocese should "keep playing the good practice card if we are to contain this person's manipulative behaviour". That last comment came from Peter Houghton, the chair of the Westminster Safeguarding Commission, a man who remains in that post today. So not only was A711 being given the run-around by the Westminster Diocese, she was also being insulted by its safeguarding team behind the scenes at the same time.

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After the transfer, Westminster simply told her that there would be no feedback. The whole "One Church" approach, as it has been described, was starting to seem to her like a nonsense. In May 2017, she went to Cardinal Nichols in his capacity as Archbishop of the Westminster Diocese, of course, to complain. She then wrote to him again repeatedly, as you heard. She was directed by Cardinal Nichols' private secretary to the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, but the NCSC told her it had no jurisdiction over individual dioceses,

effectively leaving her with nowhere to go.

The panel hasn't heard any further evidence from the

survivor A117 in this case study, but, chair, you will

So she ended up in a pointless back and forth with

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12remember hers was the incredibly powerful evidence in

12covered up or failed to act when hearing about abuse by those within the church's ranks. Yet again, A117 felt like she was being given the run around. She describes her experiences of making a formal complaint to the Westminster Diocese as a result of the way in which she was treated as showing, as she put it, more than anything, the Catholic Church does not see coverup, collusion or awareness of abuse and failing to act as a safeguarding concern because, to quote them, "it is not criminal".

the Ampleforth and Downside hearings in 2017 when she described being abused by the English Benedictine Congregation priest, F80, after he groomed her during a pilgrimage to Lourdes. The panel will recall her evidence on how her complaint was passed between Cardinal Hume and the ex-headmaster and abbot and Downside, Aidan Bellinger, and how Abbot Bellinger was found by both the police and by COPCA to have failed to assist the investigation into her complaint of sexual abuse. When A117 has produced an updating statement for this fourth case study setting out her experiences since she gave evidence to the inquiry back in 2017, she describes having a meeting with the head of the English Benedictines in September 2018. She was then contacted by a safeguarding officer from the Westminster Diocese. As a result, exchanges with the diocese then followed in 2018. A117 asked during those exchanges how many of the diocesan priests were safeguarding trained. She was told that the church couldn't share that information. She was then told that every diocese was advised on safeguarding by the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service, CSAS. She was also told that CSAS
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So what are the Catholic Church's actual national policies on the reporting of child sexual abuse? Well, two points. Firstly, we say the church's national policies are simply not fit for purpose. Put simply, because of the widespread use of the word "should" rather than "must" throughout those policies, members of the church can continually deliberately cover up abuse whilst still claiming full compliance with the guidelines. Given the substantial past history of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, we say that the discretionary nature of its national policies means there can't be any genuine determination on the part of the church to get to grips with the crisis of

recommendations were only ever treated as a guide and that there was no policy on members of the church who

child abuse within its ranks. Second, there has been what we say is a wholly

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12inadequate rollout and implementation of their actual policies. Neither the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, the NCSC, nor the Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service have any powers to impose their policies on individual dioceses or religious orders. That means there's no continuity at all of safeguarding practice in the Catholic Church in England and Wales, as indeed A711 and A117 have discovered recently, to their own psychological cost.

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Let's leave that document to one side and consider what actually occurs in practice. The key point here is that, as far as we are aware, there's never been a member of the Catholic Church who has admitted to sexually abusing children in confession and then self-reported to the police thereafter. Not one. If a priest hears a penitent -- that's the person who is confessing -- to abusing children in confession, there's no penalty or sanction to make that priest insist to the abuser that he reports the abuse on to the proper authorities. Canon law only provides one penalty in relation to the confessional, and that penalty applies to the priest who hears a confession but fails to keep it absolutely secret in accordance with the sacramental seal. At present, any priest who hears a penitent admitting to abusing children during a confession dare not go to the police because, if he does, as

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But what does the Roman Catholic Church do when information about child sexual abuse does come to light? Well, any assessment of that question I say needs to consider the confessional on which the panel heard evidence from Monsignor Gordon Read in this case study, amongst others. The church has no formal policy on the seal of confession. The nearest it gets to a formal policy is a guidance document produced by the National Catholic Safeguarding Council in June 2019. That guidance effectively says that someone who admits to abusing children during confession should be advised to repeat their admission to the statutory authorities. "Should", not "must". That's it. That guidance is only five months old, chair. There's no indication of any guidance existing before that document was produced in July of this year.

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Monsignor Gordon Read said in his evidence on 4 November, the priest will be automatically excommunicated. If a priest hears in confession that a penitent has abused children, the priest can still grant the abuser absolution at the end of the confession. He can still forgive the penitent in the eyes of God for the sexual abuse he has just heard about, because there is no church rule that stops this.

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We say all of this obviously undermines the paramountcy principle -- the legal principle that the interests of children must, of course, be given primacy. It would appear from his evidence yesterday that Cardinal Nichols himself accepts this, as did
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I have addressed you on, and also about the case of F710 whom I came to represent during the course of this case study. Rather than going into the details of F710's case here, which of course were addressed in his evidence yesterday, I would invite you, chair, to conclude that the cardinal's claims to be focused principally on A710's welfare were entirely

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Monsignor Read at the end of his evidence on 4 November.

To be clear on this, as matters stand, if a penitent confesses to a priest that he sexually abused a child, the priest hearing that confession is compelled by Canon law not to report that sexual abuse to the police. If he does report it, even if that report leads to the proper criminal conviction of the abuser, he would then be excommunicated, without due process or disciplinary proceedings, the instant the church found out about his actions.
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unconvincing.

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It is obvious from Bishop Doyle's account of his

conversation with Cardinal Nichols that the cardinal's overwhelming motivation and concern was to protect the Pope. The welfare of A710 was not his focus and his attempt to persuade you otherwise yesterday was entirely implausible.
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When asked about the impact of the leak, he said the person whose confidence had been betrayed most explicitly was Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. Everybody was waiting for him to say "and A710", but the words never came. He didn't appear to care whether or not A710 had been betrayed. So we say it seems pretty plain on his evidence on these events that the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales remains more concerned with the reputation and well-being of his church leaders than he does with the survivors. Cardinal Nichols first gave evidence to the inquiry
What about the culture within the Catholic Church in the modern era? It's been said to this inquiry before that cultural change starts at the top and works down, the example being from an organisation and institutional leaders. Cardinal Nichols is the most senior Roman Catholic in England and Wales and he gave evidence, as you know, on Wednesday and Thursday. As well as saying that the church would reject any attempt to compel priests to break the seal of confession, he was asked about his handling of A711's case, which