A SEX abuse victim is set to sue the Catholic Church after a former priest who attacked him was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his sickening crimes.
Michael Clifford, of Chelmsley Wood, Birmingham, was just 11 years old when he was assaulted by Alexander Bede Walsh at Father Hudson’s Home in Coleshill.
The pervert, aged 58, was found guilty of sexually abusing eight boys aged eight to16 between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s.
Last night Mr Clifford, now aged 44, further revealed that he was prompted to report the abuse he suffered at the hands of Bede Walsh following an investigation into Father Hudson’s Home.
He waived his automatic right to anonymity following our reports on the former Catholic children’s home, which closed in 1988.
“I am determined to get some compensation for the horrible abuse I suffered while I was at Father Hudson’s,” he said.
“If it was not for the investigation carried out into Father Hudson’s Home I am not sure I would ever have come forward. I am overjoyed this sick pervert has finally been jailed. But the big question for me and other victims is – why did it take so long to convict him? Nobody cares about sexually abused orphans.”
In 2008, the Sunday Mercury investigated the seedy goings-on at Father Hudson’s Home and uncovered scores of victims who had been sexually and physically abused by priests and even nuns over a span of 50 years.
One of the victims included a man who claimed he was raped in a tent in the 1950s by a paedophile priest, and many others who found the courage to come forward and reveal the brutal truth about life inside the former Catholic children’s home.
The orphanage first hit the headlines more than a decade ago when paedophile priest Eric Taylor’s reign of terror was finally exposed.
He had sexually abused boys and girls from 1957 to 1965 but was only arrested when his terrified victims found the strength to come forward in the 1990s.
Taylor was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1998 for the vile sex attacks but died in jail, at the age of 80, in 2001.
He was the only person to be convicted of abusing children at the home.
Judge Paul Glenn labelled Bede Walsh “shameless” while sentencing him at Stoke on Trent Crown Court on Friday.
He told Bede Walsh: “You used the name of God as a lever, manipulating God’s teaching for your own devices.”