Scottish Catholic Observer

A spokesman for the Scottish Catholic Church said he was horrified by the allegations made in a BBC documentary this week but stressed events at the schools fell out with the jurisdiction of the Scottish Catholic Church and hierarchy.

Dom Richard Yeo, abbot president of the English Congregation of Benedictines, said allegations of abuse, at the monk run schools Fort Augustus (below) in the Highlands and Carlekemp Priory School near Edinburgh had appalled him and he was ‘very sorry for any abuse that happened’.’

Dom Yeo said he was also liaising with senior figures in the Scottish Catholic safeguarding office, an agency of the Church that oversees child protection policy within the Church. Once the police inquiry was complete, he said, the Benedictines were likely to conduct their own investigation. He said that he had been aware of a few cases of alleged abuses at Fort Augustus made by some individuals over the past three years.

“But the BBC are saying it’s more than a few cases, that it’s a significant number of cases, so that’s new to me,” he said. “They’re talking about a culture of abuse.”

Both schools involved are now closed: Carlekemp Priory school closed in the 1970s, Fort Augustus in the 1990s. The schools were independent and effectively autonomous, run by the monks and abbot in charge, so the Benedictine order had no direct oversight or control over them.

The Fort Augustus school falls within the geographic borders of Aberdeen Diocese but a spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland said neither the former archbishop of Aberdeen, Mario Conti, who was in place during the latter years of the school’s operation, nor the current Bishop of Aberdeen, Hugh Gilbert, had had any knowledge of the allegations.

He also said the Benedictines were entirely self-governing and were not under theoversight of the Scottish Church.

“If they had known, it would have been handed immediately to the diocesan safeguarding team and to the police,” the spokesman said. “We have only discovered through the media that these allegations have emerged and that Police Scotland are now dealing with this.”

A former Carlekemp pupil who later taught there told the SCO: “We were not aware of what was going on in such tragic but isolated cases.”

—Bishop Emeritus Maurice Taylor responds to points made in the BBC Scotland’s Sins of Our Fathers programme in this week’s print SCO, in parishes now