A VERY SPECIAL SCHOOL
Chapter 11: A SPECIAL SCHOOL
Whoso shall offend one of these little ones… it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
Paul Andrews SJ (1927-2018) would be an unsettling figure were he merely a Jesuit paedophile who had occasional access to children during his career. However, we was a child psychologist who abused children who, it can be strongly argued, were even more vulnerable than most of Marmion’s victims at Belvedere.
The Jesuits have known about Andrews’ abusive behaviour since at least 1991. In the narrative account of Marmion’s life as a Jesuit, commissioned jointly by the Jesuits and the past-pupils steering committee, which is still in draft form at the time of writing (January 2024), reference is made to a complaint against Andrews made in 1991 and then repeated in 1994. This, it seems, refers to abuse in a non-school context.
“… he wore his learning lightly and what he knew and what he could achieve through his education was essentially in aid of the pastoral ministry to which he had dedicated his life.”
- From the eulogy at the funeral mass of
Fr Paul Andrews SJ
I gather that the Jesuits are anxious to ensure that the narrative document, when published, will mention Andrews’ credible accusation of abuse only insofar as it may relate to Marmion and how he was dealt with by the Order.
I assume that this is because they are still hiding other accusations against Andrews. Two of which I am aware concern his time at Gonzaga and one at St Declan’s Special School in Ballsbridge.
St Declan’s was established in 1958 by Fr Dermot Casey SJ as a primary school for children, boys and girls, who had mild emotional or educational problems that hindered their progress through mainstream schools. I can now reveal that Casey, who resigned from St Declan’s in 1977, was yet another Jesuit paedophile. It has been suggested to me that the Jesuits knew about Casey’s sexual abuse of children since that time; I have been unable to confirm this. He continued to work with children in guidance centres in both Limerick and Clane for a further 4 years while living in the Jesuit community at Clongowes.
According to Paul Andrews’ biography on jesuitarchives.ie, he was Director of St Declan’s between 1976 (when he became Rector of Belvedere) and 1992. Andrews remained a director of St Declan’s until 2000 and became chairman of the board in 1992. So, not only was he allowed to remain a director after the complaint, he was promoted. He continued to work with children until the original complaint was repeated – twice – by the parents of the child in question who had noticed that he was still obviously in good standing and was still in direct contact with children.
From 1992 until 1999 Andrews was Consultor, that is an advisor to the Provincial, again being promoted despite the complaint against him. And in that role he may have been asked to advise on how accusations of child sexual abuse against other Jesuits should be handled. He remained in this role until 1994 when he was asked to withdraw from work with children.
The following year, it was decided that the complaint amounted to a credible accusation of child sexual abuse and the matter was referred to the Garda and a file was prepared for the DPP. In the event, the DPP decided not to prosecute. I have been told that the Garda believed the Jesuits’ poor handling of the complaint contributed to this decision.
Incredibly, Andrews was now allowed to return to work with children, as if the DPP’s decision not to prosecute - despite the credible accusation still standing - somehow exonerated him.
Andrews, of course, knew about Marmion’s crimes. He remained silent and thus Marmion was never reported to the Garda during his lifetime.
At Andrews’ funeral mass, Bruce Bradley SJ commented that, during his professional life as a child psychologist, “in St Declan’s and in private practice Paul served about 10,000 individual clients.” A chilling thought.
In a video interview (now deleted by the Jesuits) he refers to those children and “all those files, they were burnt in Manresa, the chalet fire.....easier than shredding."
In the same video he was asked about celibacy. “I discovered halfway through…at some stage with a medical report they measured my testosterone - (stares hard at female interviewer) - which is a measure of sexual urgency, of libido. They found I was at the top of the scale, almost off it. (laughs) I found that quite concerning. They thought we were a lot of under-sexed nincompoops…but - (stares hard at interviewer) - it’s not true.”
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He was an excellent community man, a self-sacrificing worker - and utterly selfless.
- Obituary of Fr Dermot Casey SJ
Andrews’ mentor, in a sense, was Dermot Casey SJ (1911-1997), who founded St Declan’s Special School in 1958 in a large Victorian house on Northumberland Road in Ballsbridge. He graduated from UCD in science and studied for his PhD in psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris immediately before World War II.
“He belonged to the great period inaugurated seventy-five years ago by Fr. John Fahy when the Irish Province was en plein essor, what with its populous scholasticates, good religious observance and generous idealism.”
- Obituary of Fr Dermot Casey SJ
Casey’s modus operandi was to take boys out of class – it’s not clear if girls too were abused – and have them sit on his knee while he put his hand down their trousers and handled their genitals, making them erect, sometimes inserting his finger into the anus.
I understand that the Jesuits have received “multiple” complaints about Casey and that they are considering a response similar to that employed in relation to Joseph Marmion. One can only hope that they will not take so long in naming his as a predatory paedophile within their ranks.
It seems likely that there are dozens, probably hundreds of stories yet to be told. It also seems likely that the successive Jesuit Provincials from the 1970s to the present day, and all in between, have been sitting sitting on multiple complaints and failing to say in public what they need to say: We admit that there are almost 4 dozen Jesuits against whom credible accusations have been made since 1975. We were reluctant to respond to the request to name Fr Joseph Marmion SJ as a paedophile in 2019. As with Fr Marmion, we have known for many years that Fr Dermot Casey SJ and Fr Paul Andrews SJ abused especially vulnerable children. It is now our intention to name all credibly accused Jesuits without delay so that we can start to make amends and offer help to those who have suffered so egregiously at the hands of our fellow priests.
I am not optimistic that the Jesuits will take this course but I would be more than happy to be surprised.
I was interested to find that Casey was seen as an expert in dealing with “scruples” an affliction that affects obsessionally devout Catholics. In his book on the subject he wrote:
“A scruple is then an exaggerated, unreasonable fear of sinning where there is in reality no sin. This groundless fear of sinning causes doubt and trouble of mind. The scrupulous person becomes a prey to continual fear of sin, past, present and future, in the most innocuous circumstances. He is afflicted with endless doubt and mental anguish, causing a confusion of his judgment with regard to what is lawful and what is forbidden, between what is trivial and what is serious. His morbid fear of doing wrong only obscures his judgment and multiplies his doubts, and these in turn increase his fear, so that he comes to take alarm from quite insignificant and unreasonable motives.”
I have to wonder if Casey was troubled with “scruples” about his daily sexual assaults on little children and if he eventually managed to convince himself that this was “no sin”. If so, the word that immediately springs to mind is Jesuitical. He certainly doesn’t appear to have been “afflicted with endless doubt and mental anguish”. He was insatiable.
Since writing the above I have been contacted by a number of Casey’s victims and I understand that some twenty of them (both male and female) have made complaints to the Jesuits in Ireland. Several sources have indicated that the Jesuits will make a statement about both Casey and Andrews in the next few weeks and that they expect many more to come forward. I hope to be able to tell the stories of people who were abused by both of these men and I would welcome approaches by email and in strictest confidence.
Several people who came into contact with Casey as children have told me that he would insist on kissing little boys on the lips, while touching their genitals, as they sat on his lap. That this was a man, a psychologist, who was supposed to be helping children overcome their difficulties, but instead inflicted lifelong mental scars on them beggars belief. But it is true.