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March 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda On Sundays, during my last year at Downside School, I would meet a Benedictine monk for extra philosophy lessons. He would unlock the Monastic Library, and there – away from the noise and distractions of the school – I’d learn about Plato or Kant for a couple of hours. Father patiently answered my questions and, at the end of each session, gave me a week’s reading.
There is no sinister twist to that story. The monk was simply being generous with his time. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you were expecting one. For, as it happens, a disturbing story, about the same school and the same Monastic Library, has recently come to light.
Richard White – known as “Father Nick” – taught Geography in the 1980s. He used to lure one 12-year-old boy to the library and subject him to sexual abuse there. On each occasion, the boy was paid 50p.
I didn’t meet Father Nick at Downside. In fact, I didn’t know he existed until he was jailed last week for five years. At that point, the Abbot of Downside emailed all old boys and girls. “I apologise without reservation for what he has done,” he wrote.
But there was another admission in the email: until his arrest, Father Nick had “been through therapy and a risk assessment and had lived under restrictions”. And where had he lived? In the monastery attached to the school, from 1999 to 2010. The email ended with the school’s motto: Apud bonos iura pietatis (“Among good men there are laws of piety”). It had never sounded so hollow.
So what were they thinking? The Benedictines who educated me plainly decided that Father Nick didn’t pose a threat to pupils. The monks wouldn’t have allowed him to live at Downside otherwise. I am certain of that.
But cases of abuse at other Benedictine schools have shown such decisions to be dangerously naive. At St Benedict’s, Ealing, a known paedophile, Father David Pearce, was allowed to live in the monastery next door – even though the High Court had awarded damages against him for abusing a pupil. He sexually abused a pupil again, as recently as 2007, and is now in prison.
Former Downside pupils are asking the obvious question: what if Father Nick had crept out of the monastery and committed another heinous crime? It’s alarming to consider that when I was there, he’d have been able to walk through the monastic cloisters to gain access to the school.
To restore its reputation, St Benedict’s called in Lord Carlile, the Liberal Democrat peer and QC, to report on historic cases of abuse at the school. He concluded that a “more modern form of governance would have rendered it more likely that abuse would have been suspected, detected, rejected and the future secured”. He recommended that a new educational charity should be established, entirely separate from the monastery. St Benedict’s accepted his conclusions in full.
Other Benedictine schools, however, seem reluctant to follow suit. When Lord Carlile noted their “strikingly similar” governance structures, parents at Ampleforth received a message from their abbot. “[Lord Carlile’s] opinion does not in fact reflect some important recent changes introduced in the governance of our schools,” he said. This was due to an education trust taking responsibility for the school and its junior department. Incredibly, though, all the Ampleforth trustees are monks – and will be until September.
Such a sluggish response makes me lose sympathy for Catholics who claim they are besieged by the forces of secularism. Yesterday I spoke to Downside, which said that the relationship between monastery and school was being “reformed” and that Lord Carlile’s recommendations would be taken into account, as well as “other models of governance” (Ampleforth’s, I assume). But despite some media reports, it is not necessarily true that the monks are to “lose control” of the school.
It must be said, Downside is a radically different place from my schooldays. It’s fully co-ed; there are coded locks on almost every door; and the monastery is in effect divided from the school. That’s why a young letter-writer to this paper recently complained that, because of Ofsted’s “Kafka-esque absurdity”, he could no longer visit the abbey pastoral centre “for a coffee and a slice of cake” with the monks.
To some, this is more evidence that secular forces are using child protection laws to target religious schools and destroy the centuries-old Benedictine ethos at a place like Downside. I disagree. The days of cake and coffee at the monastery – not to mention one-to-one tutorials in the Monastic Library – are over for a simple reason. The porous relationship between monastery and school was a wonderful thing, but because of it children were not always safe. If Benedictine schools cannot guarantee that safety, they will play into the hands of those who want to remove religion from education entirely. And it will be their own fault.
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