Abbot Martin Shipperlee resigns

It was bound to happen. Once the inquiry's lawyers had dug through the documentation they demanded from the school, the abbey, the police, the DfE, ISI and Charity Commission, the cover-up could no longer be maintained and the extent of it could no longer be denied.

I have no means of knowing what was on Abbot Martin's mind when he wrote his letter of resignation, but the two failings that struck me the most were his admission that he had failed to pass to the police in 2001 a serious allegation about his predecessor Abbot Laurence Soper, and that the Abbey lawyers had in effect threatened another complainant against Soper into silence in 2004.


Anyway, whatever the detailed reasons, he's done the right thing and resigned. I have some degree of respect for him for that. However the respect would be greater if he had done the right thing without exhausting every other possible option first. For almost his entire time in office he has been engaged  in what looks from the outside to be an increasingly desperate search for measures to prevent this all coming to light.

There was the Wright/Nixson report commissioned in 2009. This was commissioned by the Abbot, it had a very narrow remit covering the abbey and monastery but not the school. Wright and Nixson spent a total of 2 days in the monastery, and did not undertake a detailed document review. Nonetheless a summary of the report was published on the school website as fulfillment of Shipperlee's promise to parents of a review of school safeguarding.

Then there was Lord Carlile's report. Ruth Henke, the barrister representing Ealing Abbey and St Benedict's School at the inquiry made a valiant effort in her closing remarks to suggest that a major turning point had been made by commissioning and accepting the Carlile report. She said:

As I said in opening, we have learnt from our past mistakes as institutions, and the institutions I represent today in my closing address before you are the institutions as they are today. We say that you can learn not simply from the mistakes, but it is also good practice to learn from the positives and from good practice itself. What was the significant positive? We say it was the commissioning of the Carlile Report in July 2010 when, when you look at the evidence, you may think we were between a rock and a hard place, but when we did the right thing. And that should be acknowledged. Because that results in a report that brings about fundamental and significant change.

On behalf of those I represent, I know that the independence of the report is put into question. So, in closing, may I say this: firstly, the report is by an expert. It is commissioned by the abbey. But I ask: how is that different from any singly instructed expert in any family or civil court throughout this land? We say no different whatsoever. Where does the integrity of the expert come from? From their professionalism, from their independence and from how they exercise it without fear and favour.

I would expect from somebody in her position to emphasise such positives as can be found from what I'm sure she will have been saying in private was a right car-crash of a case. And she said it very well. All credit.

But the claim that Carlile was a turning point really doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny. First, the culture of coverup was the primary problem. And it looks very much as if things were covered up from Carlile as much as from everybody else. In his position as a barrister and QC, I find it very hard to believe that had the 2001 and 2004 allegations been known to him that he would not have included them in the report. It follows that he was lied to, even if the lie was one of omission. The only alternative explanation is to suppose that Carlile and Shipperlee conspired to produce a misleading report. I really don't believe Carlile to have been unwise enough to embark on such a course. I do believe Shipperlee capable of not informing Carlile, just as he didn't inform the police of the 2001 allegation.

And this is not the only thing that Carlile was not told. When Abbot President Richard Yeo conducted his Extraordinary Visitation in 2010, he conducted interviews with all the monks. Several of them disclosed that they had known something about Pearce's activities for decades. One monk is recorded as saying "mid '70s, knew David engaged in dubious activities". Another "Knew since I was junior school head that there was something wrong. Graffiti: Father David is bent." Another monk spoke of rumours existing when he arrived 25 years ago and expressed disbelief that a previous Abbot claimed that he "never knew anything about it".

So it is clear that knowledge of Pearce's abuses at least were commonplace among the monks for 30 years or so before he was convicted. In the light of this, Shipperlee's own professions of ignorance when giving evidence aren't all that credible. Knowledge of wrongdoing doesn't magically evaporate when you reach high office. Shipperlee's serial inactions were put to him, and in giving evidence about them, individually and collectively they had no explanation he could offer. That was a very careful formulation. That doesn't mean they have no explanation, or even that he doesn't himself have an explanation. It is just that he can't offer it. The explanation could simply be that he was covering things up, and this is what I believe to be the case. I've believed it ever since my one and only meeting with him in September 2009. That impression was put to him by counsel to the inquiry.

Carlile's recommendations were solely to do with reform of governance, definitely a subject that needed attention, but no governance reform will of itself prevent abuse. Secular schools have safeguarding scandals as well, and to guard against that you need an excellent and unambiguous safeguarding policy, and Shipperlee and Cleugh just couldn't bring themselves to implement that at the time. The version of the safeguarding policy published with Carlile's report still had gaping holes in the reporting arrangements, suggesting that making reports depended to a degree on the permission of the complainant or his/her parents. Where the safety of other children may be at risk from an abuser this is irresponsible. Carlile was not as expert as all that, since he didn't realise this and warmly endorsed the policy.

At the same time as Carlile was conducting his inquiry, a documentation review was carried out by Kevin McCoy. This in fact uncovered much more than Carlile's report about allegations against various monks and other staff, but was not published.

If the culture of coverup had been dispelled at the time of Carlile, then it would not have taken a public inquiry wielding statutory powers enabling it to force the disclosure of documents from the abbey and school and enabling it to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath to uncover all that has seen the light in the past week.

So I don't accept the suggestion that the Carlile report represents an attempt at fundamental change, that in commissioning it Shipperlee "did the right thing".

There also seems to be an element of "taking one for the team" in Shipperlee's resignation statement. He has apologised for his personal failures, but on the other hand has said he has "confidence in the present structures and procedures". I don't see how his confidence can be justified. Either those procedures are in place as a result of his actions in which case (given his admitted failings) nobody should have any confidence in them at all, or they have been implemented without and despite his views, in which case he ought to have resigned long ago.

However, there is plenty of blame to spread around and not all of it should be dumped on the shoulders of a hapless ex-Abbot. Earlier I described knowledge among the monks going back decades concerning the abuses. From the evidence given to the inquiry, it appears that few attempted to do anything with their knowledge.

Fr Alban Nunn made an attempt to bring abuse allegations to the notice of the police. Fr Peter Burns complained about Pearce taking confession in the Junior school when he was supposed to be under some kind of informal restriction, and Fr Edmund Flood came to the defence of "RC-A8" (the cipher given to a former pupil who gave evidence at the hearing) when Pearce and Soper were holding a kangaroo court over the supposed theft of a raincoat. With these honourable exceptions, I have to say that it seems that almost the entire monastic community appears to have had some degree of knowledge of the abuse, and chose to put the welfare of the abusers and the reputation of the community ahead of safety of the children in their care.

I suspect that those who had knowledge and did nothing are functionally atheists. At least, it would appear that they do not believe in the existence of divine justice. They knowingly and over an extended period allowed serious harm to come to a large number of children when it was in their power to act to prevent it. How do they expect to account to God for this?

But the blame doesn't stop there. Abbot President Richard Yeo, on learning in 2010 of the extent and duration of the knowledge the monks had, sought to support the community and not to disclose this knowledge to the statutory authorities. He doesn't even have the excuse of the knowledge having come to him during Confession, his notes were not taken during confession. Yeo was a member of the Cumberlege Commission, he is supposedly therefore one of the Catholic Church's foremost experts on safeguarding. If Yeo cannot be trusted to follow Cumberlege recommendations on reporting knoweldge or suspicions of abuse, then public confidence that anybody else in the church will do so will inevitably be close to non-existent.

Then there is the grubby situation of Soper's flight to Kosovo. He had opened an account at the Vatican Bank and and placed into it the money he inherited on the death of his parents. By Benedictine rules this money should have been handed over to the order, but Shipperlee did not demand it. The inheritance was of the order of €400,000. The Vatican Bank knew of Soper's address in Kosovo. He made repeated requests for transfers of funds and wrote to them with his address. The Bank ignored all requests from the British police for information as to Soper's whereabouts.

And if that wasn't enough, we have the repeated refusal of the Papal Nuncio to cooperate with the inquiry in providing a voluntary statement. Apparently the Nuncio (who is of course an accredited diplomat of a foreign power) is awaiting instructions from the Holy See, and in the meantime is relying on his diplomatic immunity to refuse to provide any kind of statement. An explanation from the Nuncio as to the reasons for the Vatican Bank's uncooperativeness would be welcome, but I don't ever expect to see it.

A few staff at St Benedict's School also deserve honourable mention for their part in trying to bring matters to light. Among those, there is Kate Ravenscroft who made a report to the police about Pearce. Then there is Harsha Mortemore, a former member of the non-teaching staff who made an attempt to raise concerns, only to be told "If you know what's good for you, keep your head down and do your job." Mr Halsall also attempted to raise concerns about Pearce with Cleugh on the latter's arrival, but this went nowhere. And Dr Carlo Ferrario, the deputy head and designated safeguarding lead at the time immediately passed on the concerns brought to him in 2008 that resulted in Pearce's arrest. I have great respect for all of them. All of them made statements to the police and/or the inquiry. They actually did something, no small feat in what has been described during the hearing as a "mafia-like" and intimidatory culture.

As for the future of the monastic community at Ealing, I have no idea what will happen. Fortunately it's not my problem. They will need to elect a new Abbot, but it is hard to imagine who that might be. Nobody who participated in the cover up would be a fit person for the job, but would anyone not tainted by the cover-up actually want the job?