THE Roman Catholic Church has been bedevilled by allegations of child
abuse in recent years and accusations it had failed to grasp the
seriousness of the problem within its ranks.
After the scale of abuse in Ireland
became clear with the publication of damning inquiry results in 2009,
the leader of the church in England and Wales said those who perpetrated
abuse should be held to account “no matter how long ago it happened”.
Archbishop
Vincent Nichols said: “Every time there is a single incident of abuse
in the Catholic Church, it is a scandal...I hope these things don’t
happen again, but I hope they’re never a matter of indifference.”
Brother
Ambrose O’Brien was sacked for abusing boys at the St William’s home,
in Market Weighton, East Yorkshire, in 1965 but it appears it was there
and then that accountability ended.
Whether what happened afterwards was
down to incompetence, indifference or worse will, probably, never be
fully known.
That the police were not involved then is, perhaps,
not surprising given different social attitudes towards abuse 40 or more
years ago.
But that Ambrose O’Brien went on to become Father
Joseph O’Brien, ordained by the same Middlesbrough Diocese which held
the record of his dismissal, is, at the very least, surprising.
The
dismissal of Brother Ambrose – the name he took at the time as a member
of the De La Salle Brotherhood – was formally reported to the diocese,
which had overall responsibility for the St William’s home through the
Middlesbrough Diocesan Rescue Society.
But his application to the
diocese to become a priest in 1972 was accepted, after De La Salle, the
Catholic lay order which ran the home, failed to mention the dismissal
when it was asked for a reference.
Consequently, Brother Ambrose
O’Brien emerged as Father Joseph O’Brien in 1975, and went on to serve
in Middlesbrough and then, through the 1980s and 1990s, in North
Yorkshire.
Whether there were further allegations against him – or
what they were – is unclear.
In 2002 a former brother who worked at the
home, Noel Hartnett, told Humberside Police, who were investigating
wider abuse allegations at St William’s, that he had been approached by
another priest who was compiling a dossier on Father O’Brien because
there were further allegations of abuse.
He also told detectives about
Father O’Brien’s dismissal, which he had witnessed at first hand.
If
Humberside Police had interviewed Father O’Brien in 2002, the full
picture may have emerged then.
Whether the diocese would have acted is
not known, though by this point Father O’Brien had retired four years
earlier in 1998.
In the event, Father O’Brien was not interviewed and
his history remained below the radar.
However, Father O’Brien’s
history would have been difficult to ignore when his dismissal formed
part of the evidence in an ongoing compensation case by former residents
of St William’s over alleged wide-scale sexual and physical abuse at
the home.
The report on the dismissal – disclosed by the diocese
during the proceedings – was cited by Judge Hawkesworth QC in his High
Court judgment in November 2009 that the diocese, rather than De La
Salle, should be held responsible for the home.
Two months later, Father O’Brien died in his home city of Hull aged 87.
His
dismissal for child abuse was not mentioned by the diocese when it
publicly recorded his passing and gave details of his funeral Mass.
It
has never publicly acknowledged his history until now.
The Yorkshire Post approached Archbishop Nichols for his views on the story of Father O’Brien.
He declined to comment.