Letter to Michael Devlin, Chair of Salford Safeguarding Commission 11 June 2009 and his reply 22 July 2009

18 Dean Head

Todmorden Road

Littleborough

OL15 9LZ

philipgilligan@lineone.net

11 June 2009

Dear Mr Devlin,

Re. Thomas Doherty – priest and tenant of the Diocese of Salford, sentenced to 6 years imprisonment in February 1998 for five offences of indecency against a boy under-16.

I refer to your letter of 5 June 2009, which you indicate has been sent in response to my letter to Uschi Műller dated 16 May 2009.

In my letter to Uschi Műller , I raised a number of questions regarding actions taken or not taken by the Diocese of Salford in relation to the former parish priest of St Joseph’s in Todmorden, Thomas Doherty (please see http://caads.blogspot.com/ for contemporary reports from the Todmorden News about this case).

In particular, I asked

What trust can you or the people of the Diocese have in its Safeguarding Commission when almost 8 years after our Bishop committed himself to fully implementing Lord Nolan’s recommendations, it appears that Doherty has still not been laicised and is, now, living in a house owned by the Diocese?

In your ‘reply’ to this, you state “I believe that Mr Bill Kilgallon, Chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, has already dealt with these matters in previous correspondence.” You, also, add that you have no further comment that you “wish to make”.

However, my previous correspondence with Mr Kilgallon has very little, if any, direct relevance to the particular matters I raised in my letter of 16 May 2009.

Firstly, the correspondence you refer to ended with a letter from Mr Kilgallon dated 26 November 2008, while the matters raised in my letter to Uschi Műller arise from disclosures made about Doherty’s case by Father O’Sullivan to Isabel de Bertodano of The Tablet more than a month later, on 6 January 2009. (These were, most notably, Father O’Sullivan’s confirmation that Doherty has not, in fact, been laicised as would have been expected, if Bishop Brain had acted on his November 2001 commitment to fully implement the recommendations made by Lord Nolan in A programme for action: Final report of the independent review on child protection in the Catholic Church in England and Wales and his shocking revelation that Doherty is “renting a house from the diocese”.)

Secondly, the correspondence you refer to was, in fact, focused on a different set of concerns relating to the actions of some members of the Safeguarding Commission regarding the review of posts within the Commission, the timing of such decisions, who was and was not involved in making these and the subsequent very limited advertising of the posts which emerged. (I had suggested to Mr Kilgallon that the actions taken by some members of the Safeguarding Commission may not have been within the spirit of recommendation 22 of Safeguarding with Confidence, particularly as regards transparency and local decision making.)

Thus, in my view, you have not provided any relevant response to the major question I raised in my letter of 16 May 2009, i.e.

What trust can you or the people of the Diocese have in its Safeguarding Commission when almost 8 years after our Bishop committed himself to fully implementing Lord Nolan’s recommendations, it appears that Doherty has still not been laicised and is, now, living in a house owned by the Diocese?

Meanwhile, I would suggest that, if the people of Salford Diocese are to have any confidence in the way which the Church responds to incidents where priests have abused children or vulnerable adults, they need to know that they can trust statements from their Bishop and Safeguarding Commission, and they need to know what these statements mean in concrete terms. They need to know whether a priest who is convicted of a criminal offence against children and is sentenced to serve a term of imprisonment of 12 months or more will in fact be laicised or will, as in the case of Doherty, be housed by the Diocese and allowed to retain his canonical status as a priest, without any justification being offered for the failure to follow recommendation 78 of A programme for action. They need to know, if (and, if so, when) Bishop Brain abandoned his November 2001 commitment to fully implement the recommendations made by Lord Nolan (please see http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=13606). They need to know, when Uschi Műller writes that the Safeguarding Commission will “follow the national policies and procedures”, whether or not these policies and procedures include those such as Lord Nolan’s recommendations which have previously been announced to them and which are still offered as links on the Salford Safeguarding Commission webpage (please see http://www.salforddiocese.org.uk/safeguarding/index.html).

In light of this, I hope that you, as chair of the Diocesan Safeguarding Commission will, now, accept the need to comment more fully on these matters and I look forward to receiving a more relevant response to my letter of 16 May 2009.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Gilligan