Questions asked about Bishop's commitment to child protection

After listening to the Chair of the Catholic Diocese of Salford Safeguarding Commission admit that a priest still retained his priestly status more than 12 years after being convicted for sexually abusing a child, the author of Concerned About Abuse in the Diocese of Salford has questioned whether Bishop Terence Brain of Salford is fully commitment to implementing the recommendations of the Nolan Report into Child Protection in the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

In 2001, all the Bishops of England and Wales, including the Bishop of Salford, said that they would implement the Nolan recommendations, but Philip Gilligan says that Bishop Brain has not followed recommendations 77 and 78 of the Report in the case of Father Thomas Doherty.

Doherty, the former parish priest of St Joseph’s, Todmorden in the Diocese of Salford, was sentenced, in 1998, to six years imprisonment for five offences of indecency against a boy under 16, but he has never been laicised by the Church.

Mr Gilligan wrote to Bishop Brain on 1 November 2010, after accessing an audio-recording of a meeting held on 10 September 2010 (available online at http://www.mediafire.com/?se3udyzz3jql7gr), in which Mr Michael Devlin, the Chair of the Salford Safeguarding Commission, and Father Barry O’Sullivan, the Salford Diocese Safeguarding Coordinator admit that Doherty was housed by the Diocese after his release from prison and that Bishop Brain had never pursued his laicisation, despite Doherty giving him authority to do so (The section concerning Doherty’s case is approx. four minutes long and starts approx. 33 minutes into the recording).

In his letter, Mr Gilligan asks Bishop Brain about his failure to either initiate the process of laicisation (dismissal from the clerical state under canon 290) or to publicly justify his decision to make an exception in Doherty’s case (see copy posted 1 November 2010).

Two weeks later, Mr Gilligan had still received no reply.He said,

“It comes as no surprise that I have not received a reply from Bishop Brain or his representatives. I have been asking similar questions for more than two years, but I have never received an answer from the Bishop of Salford in whose diocese I live. I find this extremely worrying and ironic. The Catholic Bishops of England, Scotland and Wales wrote specifically about child protection in the pamphlet they produced in advance of Pope Benedict XVI’s state visit. In Heart speaks unto heart. The visit of POPE BENEDICT XVI. UNITED KINGDOM 2010 (Cheadle Hulme: The Universe Media Group Ltd), they told us, “This is not a cover- up, it is clear and total disclosure”. They even gave a specific welcome to “the establishment of fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders”. However, in the Diocese of Salford, Doherty had not been dismissed from the clerical state, nine years after all the Bishops signed-up to the recommendations of the committee chaired by Lord Nolan, while it seems that Bishop Brain will not even reply to basic questions, let alone provide “total disclosure” to the people of his diocese.

In fact, despite my repeated enquiries since 1 October 2008, it was only last month that my suspicion that Doherty had never been laicised was, finally, confirmed beyond any doubt. I had accessed, on the internet, an audio recording of a meeting held on 10 September 2010 about an entirely different matter. This meeting was attended by Mr Michael Devlin, the Chair of the Salford Safeguarding Commission, and by Father Barry O’Sullivan, the Salford Safeguarding Coordinator and I was amazed to hear them volunteer information about Doherty. This included information about where in the country he had been housed by the Diocese after his release from prison and the very startling admission that Doherty had “given his authority to the Bishop to laicise him”, but that Bishop Brain had never acted on this.”