Pope Francis has personally pleaded for the forgiveness of three Irishmen sexually abused at a training college for priests in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s.
Jim Kirby, from Glasheen in Cork city, who was among eight survivors who had a private audience in Rome with the pontiff on Monday, said they were “incredibly emotional” after the meeting.
“The pope said to us ‘we ask your forgiveness’,” Mr Kirby told The Irish Times. “It was quite amazingd, he very much listened to us and spoke to us in Italian afterwards, which was translated for us. It was very sincere.”
The retired Aer Lingus manager, who now lives in Surrey, told Pope Francis about his ordeal at the hands of two paedophile priests while he was a child at St Peter Claver College in Mirfield, West Yorkshire.
The seminary was run by the Comboni Order, formerly the Verona Fathers, who have never acknowledged what happened to the men while they were studying there, despite paying 11 of them a combined total of £120,000 compensation in 2014.
“I told Pope Francis I have come through the other side now, what it did to me and that I couldn’t tell anyone about it as a youngster,” said Mr Kirby (71).
“I couldn’t share it with my parents – no way – that I went through three years of horrific abuse from one priest and intermittent abuse by another priest at Mirfield. I kept it to myself. It was only later on in life I got into thinking about it, and I got very down and depressed and I binge drank for many years..
“If you’ve never been abused I can never explain it all.. the humiliation, thinking sometimes perhaps it was my fault, did I cause it? All those terribly mixed thoughts in your head – that is the cruelty of it.”
Mr Kirby said Pope Francis vowed to contact Fr Tesfaye Tadesse Gebresilasie, superior general of the Comboni Order, to ask why he had not made any effort to speak with them.
The meeting in the library of the Apostolic Palace, during which Pope Francis was in a wheelchair, lasted for an hour and a half. Each of the men recounted their own personal experiences after decades of being ignored by church authorities.
“As we were going out, Pope Francis said to us: ‘I have a tough job here. You have to pray for me.’ He said that in English,” said Mr Kirby.
Another of the Irish victims who traveled to the Vatican for the meeting was Charlie McLaughlin, of Moville, Co Donegal, while a third man was Frank Barnes from Finglas, Dublin.
Mr Kirby, whose father served in the Irish Army, stationed at Collins Barracks, and whose mother is from Derry, did not detail his own harrowing ordeal of molestation, though he has given testimony to the UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
“I didn’t think it was necessary for me to go into the specifics. My feeling was that I wanted to tell him about my own efforts to speak to the [Comboni] order directly, to ask them to meet with us as a group, and that they turned us down, that we can’t go any further with it. I asked him to tell them to give us our peace of mind by acknowledging what happened.
“We are not after money, that doesn’t even come into it. We already settled out of court. I want to move on from this and I can’t until the order meets with us, sits down face to face and says we believe you. I’m quite sure after today I feel very confident that [Pope Francis] will do something.”
Mr Kirby said he also wanted assurances that the order, which has 3,000 missionaries in 36 countries, has effective safeguards in place to ensure children elsewhere in the world will not endure the suffering he went through.
“We are not approaching this with any anger. We just want to talk. We are not looking for money, which I think is the bottom line, what they are afraid of. We won’t humiliate them either. We just want them to be good Christians.”
Bishop of Leeds Marcus Stock, who apologised for the first time on behalf of the Catholic Church to the survivors, and Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, accompanied the men on the papal visit.
West Yorkshire Police launched an investigation into historical sex abuse at the seminary, but said it was hampered as two named suspects were dead, and a third who is still alive in Italy could not be extradited because of ill health.
Monday’s meeting with Pope Francis followed recent meetings with Archbishop of Malta Charles Scicluna, who has led investigations into clerical sex abuse for the Holy See.