IICSA Report - Abbot President Richard Yeo

One of the reasons Shipperlee and Cleugh did what they did was that they could. There was no effective support or supervision from elsewhere in the church that would prevent them from going off the rails. In fact it can be argued that they were in fact not doing anything out of the ordinary by church standards but faithfully reflecting the culture and practices of the church as a whole.

The most obvious place from which supervision could and should have come was from the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation. But the report states:

The Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation in the period from 2001 to 2017, Dom Richard Yeo, did not significantly contribute to the response of Ealing Abbey to the allegations of child sexual abuse made in that period. During his 2007 Visitation he did not inquire into the restrictions upon Pearce and gave no consideration to issues of risk management. In his report to the monastic community, there was no express recognition of the fact that the judge in the civil proceedings in 2006 had found Pearce to be an unconvincing witness. He conceded that, in retrospect:

“I should probably have suggested at the 2007 Visitation that it was too serious a risk to allow ... Pearce to continue to live in the monastery”.

The report has specific examples of Yeo's failure. for instance:

At some point Abbot Ortiger learned of allegations of child abuse against Pearce, and he passed on this information to Dom Richard Yeo when Yeo became Abbot President in 2001.491 However, Abbot President Yeo did nothing about Pearce at this point.

Of Yeo's first Visitation to Ealing in 2003 the report says

In 2003, when Abbot President Yeo conducted his first visitation on Ealing Abbey, several monks told him of their concern about Pearce. They complained that he was “not being reined in as he should have been” and gave examples of how Pearce would pass through the school “in order to reach some offices”. The concern presumably being that Pearce could engineer access to children under this pretext. ... He spoke to Abbot Shipperlee about it, and said that Pearce should not be going through the school. However, Abbot President Yeo did not record the details of that advice, nor did he address it in his report to the monks as a whole. It does not appear that he was treating the issue with due seriousness. In his evidence to us, Dom Yeo criticised Abbot Shipperlee, saying “that it all seemed to be rather casual”, however his own approach was no less so.

The next visitation was in 2007. By then Ealing Abbey had lost the civil action brought by RC-A6 (given the cipher 'C' in the judgement at the time) against Pearce and the Abbey and RC-F41 had been tried and acquitted on abuse charges and had admitted another incident of abuse which could not be prosecuted in the UK because it took place abroad. The report says:

The 2007 visitation took place after several further serious allegations had been made against Pearce and the civil court had given judgment against him in 2006. Abbot President Yeo did not read that judgment; although he knew of the trial, he told us “I don’t think I knew then about the judge’s comments”. He did not inquire into the restrictions upon Pearce and gave no consideration to the details of managing the risk that Pearce posed to children. In his report to the monastic community, there was no express recognition of the fact that the judge in the civil proceedings had found that Pearce had abused RC-A6 and others. Rather, in that report he referred to the impact on Pearce himself, and thereby the community:

“all of you have been bruised by what has taken place – not only [RC-F41] and Father David but also the rest of you, because you are their brothers and when they are hurt, you are hurt.”

This is really quite amazing. Yeo is offering sympathy to the community because of the effects on them of two of their number having been subject to well-founded allegations of abuse, and included Pearce and RC-F41 in that sympathy as if they had done nothing wrong.

The report goes on to events in 2009.

In August 2009, Abbot President Yeo wrote a general report for the Holy See, following the EBC’s General Chapter. By that time, Pearce had been charged with the abuse of RC‑A621, a current pupil at St Benedict’s, committed while he was under restrictions. However, Abbot President Yeo’s report said only that:

“there is a court case pending which could cause serious damage to Ealing Abbey. It needs to be stressed that the problems arise as a result of abuse that is revealed to have taken place many years ago … ”

There were two mistakes here. First, Abbot President Yeo’s assumption that the abuse was entirely historic. Second, his representation of it as such without checking the facts. These illustrate a failure to obtain a proper understanding of the problem.

I would suggest that a further issue is that as expressed in his report to the Holy See Yeo's primary concern is the possibility of "serious damage to Ealing Abbey". It illustrates his priorities.

It wasn't until his 2010 Extraordinary Visitation that he took any action concerning the protection of children.

In 2010, Abbot President Yeo undertook an Extraordinary Visitation between 30 August and 7 September, in part as a result of Abbot Shipperlee asking for help. As he told us, “I think we both realised that something needed to be done.” In his report, Abbot President Yeo stated that he would enact two Acts of Visitation (ie decrees requiring compliance):

“I want to state in unequivocal terms, and this will be the subject of an Act of Visitation, that any member of the community who is under such restrictions is bound, in virtue of the vow of obedience, to observe those restrictions in full, and failure to observe them could lead to serious disciplinary action being taken against that person.”

“it is very important to be absolutely clear: there is never any excuse for the sexual abuse of children, young people and vulnerable adults. No member of the community may say or imply, either inside the community or when speaking to outsiders, that any victim who pressed charges against Father David has done wrong. This is so important that it will be the subject of an Act of Visitation, which means that it binds in virtue of the vow of obedience.”

This was in the context of two issues that had arisen: that RC-F41 had complained about the restrictions against him, and that there had been suggestions circulating within the parish that Pearce had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.


The inquiry's overall conclusions about Yeo are quite scathing.

Between 2001 and 2017, Dom Richard Yeo, who was then the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation (EBC), failed to treat allegations of child sexual abuse made against monks still resident next to the school with the necessary urgency and care. At his 2007 visitation of Ealing Abbey, he did not inquire into the restrictions upon Pearce, nor give due importance to the fact that a judge in the civil proceedings in 2006 had found Pearce to have abused RC-A6 and others.

The EBC as a whole does not come off any better.

The EBC, the abbeys and the schools associated with them were often slow to take action on safeguarding matters, frequently believing they knew better than those with specialist knowledge about child protection. There were repeated failures in making, and then keeping, appropriate records of safeguarding issues. Deficiencies in record-keeping were symptomatic of the generally casual approach of these institutions to issues of child protection, which in turn reflects an underlying failure to take such issues sufficiently seriously.

The EBC has not satisfied the Inquiry that in the past it had the institutional capability to ensure proper safeguarding of children, including those attending its schools. For example, during his tenure, Abbot President Yeo showed too little commitment to addressing safeguarding in the EBC with sufficient urgency. While visitations were undertaken, they had little if any practical effect on safeguarding and the protection of children from sexual abuse. The recent extension of the role of the Abbot President of the EBC to have a supervisory role independent of visitations should provide some counterbalance to the authority of the abbot. Much now will depend on the leadership of the Abbot President.

From this, it is abundantly clear that the Inquiry presently has very little or no trust in the ability of the EBC to reform itself unaided.  The Church overall has after all conducted 4 separate reviews of its safeguarding over a period of 13 years, from Bishop Budd's report in 1994 through Nolan 1 and 2 to Cumberlege in 2007, and many of the shortcomings described above postdate Cumberlege.

An important thing to to remember about Fr Richard Yeo is that he was a member of the Cumberlege Commission. Yeo can therefore reasonably be considered one of the Catholic Church's most experienced and authoritative voices on the subject of safeguarding. If he is the best, one can only wonder at the quality of safeguarding in the rest of the church.

This is likely to inform the final report of the Inquiry's investigation into the Roman Catholic Church, in which it is expected that recommendations will be made. (No recommendations have been included in this interim report.)  If the Inquiry concludes that the EBC (and possibly the church in general) is incapable of reforming itself and ensuring that it cannot possibly slip back into its old bad habits, then it is inevitable that the Inquiry will recommend some form of outside compulsion and supervision.