Albie says ‘Not being believed hurts more than anything’
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Albie was sexually abused by a Catholic priest.
His experiences have left him with an abhorrence of the power that the church holds over some communities.
Albie grew up in the 1950s and 60s. His family was dominated by a grandmother who was staunchly Roman Catholic, and he and his brother were altar boys.
Not long after Albie began serving, when he was 10 years old, the priest, Father O’Sullivan, took him into a small study and made him strip naked. Father O’Sullivan then masturbated himself.
Father O’Sullivan continued to abuse Albie regularly for about three years, until one day Albie hit him. Albie never went back to the church, but he worried for a while that the priest would report him to the police.
When his grandmother asked why he had stopped being an altar boy, and he began to tell her about Father O’Sullivan, she said he was telling lies and would go to hell.
Albie did not realise it at the time, but Father O’Sullivan had abused his brother in the same way.
He began truanting from school, and ran away from home several times.
Albie also became aggressive at school and was expelled. This behaviour carried on into his adult life; he frequently got into fights and was in trouble with the police as a result. He says ‘Violence was always the answer … I put my hands up to that’.
He joined the armed forces for a short time, but he found it difficult that questioning anything was not allowed. ‘I can accept discipline’ he says, ‘but not blind obedience, because that’s what allows priests and others to get away with what they do’.
Albie married and had children, and he says he was extremely overprotective of them. When they attended any after-school activities, or Catholic mass, he insisted that his wife should be there to pick them up before the end. She never understood why this mattered so much to Albie.
Then one day, Albie read a newspaper article about sexual abuse committed by the priest who had abused him. He showed his wife, and told her what had happened in his past. He relates ‘My wife said that suddenly it all made sense, the way I was’.
Albie contacted the police to report that he had also been sexually abused by the priest. He was referred to a detective sergeant who told him he ‘couldn’t do much’. He then got in touch with a firm of solicitors, who obtained a modest sum in compensation for him, which he gave away. ‘It was being believed that mattered’ he says. The church made the payment on condition that he would not take the matter any further.
Albie believes that seeing the newspaper article was a significant turning point that helped him deal with some of the impacts of the abuse, but he is still troubled by what he describes as the ‘Catholic mafia’ that exercises considerable control over many people’s lives. He found out some years later that another local priest knew that Father O’Sullivan was an abuser and he says ‘The denial gets to me … they are lying to the congregation and lying to themselves’.
He says of child sexual abuse ‘You’re never going to stop it’, but he thinks that ending the rule of celibacy for priests and never letting them be alone with children could help prevent some abuse.
In recent years, Albie has told his children and some friends about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child.