A DISGRACED Catholic priest who downloaded images of child pornography when he was at parishes in Leamington and another near Reading has been given a conditional discharge.Father Anthony Jones had pleaded guilty at Warwick Crown Court to three charges of making indecent images, and a further 14 charges were left to lie on the court file.
Fr Tony, 57, who has since moved to St Mary’s Abbey in Little Hayward, Stafford, was given a conditional discharge for two years on Friday (March 23) and ordered to pay £982 costs and to register as a sex offender.
Prosecutor Tom Schofield said that while Jones was parish priest in Caversham near Reading he had a computer installed in the presbytery.
He left there in 2005 and went on a pilgrimage to Santiago in northern Spain before taking up a new post at St Peter’s Church in Leamington in October 2005.
When he arrived there was already a computer, and he also had the services of a secretary, Geraldine Clarkson, who showed him how to access the internet using her password.
The matters came to light when Mrs Clarkson used the computer on November 21 that year and went to the Google site.
She was shocked when web addresses with titles such as ‘boys photos’ appeared but did not act immediately although she knew Jones was the only other person to have her password.
But when she used it again a week later she saw that further homosexual porn sites had been accessed, with ten new searches mainly for legal sites of homosexual fantasies.
She told another priest, and the matter was passed on to the Archdiocese of Birmingham, and when questioned Jones admitted accessing homosexual sites, but denied looking at sites of boys.
The police became involved in December 2005 and the computers from both parishes were examined, and indecent images of boys were found on both.
When Jones was questioned he admitted coming across the pictures while he was searching for homosexual fantasy stories about incest and child sex, added Mr Schofield.
Gerard Quirke, defending, said many of the images in the original charges had been within ‘banner images’ over which the person accessing a site has no control, and there were only three for which Jones accepted responsibility.
He added: “This man is a gay man. He is prevented from expressing his homosexuality with another man, so because he is flesh and blood, like the rest of us, in order to gratify himself he has gone onto the computer looking for adult homosexual images.“The vast majority of the images are of adult males but it is a danger when one puts in words like ‘twink’ which is homosexual slang for a young-looking male that an image appears of someone appearing to be under the age of 18 – and the offence is then committed."
Mr Quirke said Jones, who had served in the armed forces in Northern Ireland at the time of the hunger strikes, would always remain a priest, but had lost his right to minister and could not perform mass or tend to parishioners.
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