What future for Benedictine schools after a damning abuse report?
Downside and Ampleforth: even these beautiful names are evocative. They summon up a past of Benedictine monks serving Christ in community, and at the same time educating Catholic boys in the Faith. These schools played their part in the Second Spring of 19th-century Catholicism, and in educating future politicians, artists and, indeed, monks.
But now those two words have another, very different resonance, one amplified by last week’s report from the Inquiry into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The details are unbearable. Ten individuals at Ampleforth and Downside – mostly monks – have been convicted or cautioned for offences of child pornography or “sexual activity with a large number of children”. But IICSA believes the scale of abuse was “considerably higher”.
