DENY EVERYTHING

The Life and Crimes of Joseph Marmion SJ

Photo: David Barry, by kind permission

For the new section concerning Andrews and Casey, please scroll down to Chapter 11.

The following is the complete, unedited version of what I wrote in the Rite and Reason column for The Irish Times, 29 October 2023:

Almost twenty years ago I had a book published in which I took a brief detour into memories of my schooldays. I mentioned that Belvedere in the 1970s had been dominated by “a priapic colossus” who abused children sexually, emotionally and physically. I learned much later that the Jesuits prepared a statement to be issued if my revelation prompted media enquiries.

However, what I had to say about Joseph Marmion SJ passed unnoticed and the statement was binned.

I knew that Marmion measured boys of 12 to 14 who were taking part in his Viennese operettas, stark naked and alone in his room. When he was named as an abuser in March 2021 I learned much more: as headmaster of Clongowes he savagely beat boys and, on occasion, masturbated them. On his Belvedere trips to Vienna he was known to  insert a thermometer into boys anuses and to masturbate them. On one occasion a child was brought to sleep in his room and drugged.

Marmion was named in 2021 after a lengthy battle conducted by a former pupil who, in frustration, eventually threatened to go public. The Jesuits had no alternative. Almost a hundred survivors from Belvedere, Clongowes and The Crescent gave testimony in the Restorative Justice Programme organised by the Jesuits. The Jesuit Response was presented as an exhaustive trawl through the Order’s records relating to Marmion, despite omissions and the disappearance of virtually all documents relating to his being confronted in 1977 and his discreet removal from teaching.

A redress scheme was initiated and the Jesuits paid for counselling (from both of which I have benefitted).

I decided to write the story of Joseph Marmion and the result is a short virtual book called Deny Everything: The Life and Crimes of Joseph Marmion SJ which can be read on my Substack.

But while I can tell the story of the man in terms of his childhood, education, formation as a Jesuit, his teaching career and ultimate downfall, there is something missing. Context.

Currently there are 44 Jesuits credibly accused of child sexual abuse, eight of them since 2021. Only two have ever been named: Marmion and his best friend in the Order, Paul Andrews SJ, Rector of Belvedere when he was finally confronted in 1977.

Until the rest have been named, there is no context for the life of Marmion. He operated within an organisation that harboured child abusers, and in the case of Andrews, promoted them. He was not alone, although it may suit those who fear for the reputation of the Jesuits and their schools to present Marmion in isolation.

The enormity of his crimes distracts from how he was protected, in life and after his death. Being the grand-nephew of Dom (now Blessed) Columba Marmion OSB, on track to be the first Jesuit-educated saint, may explain how, Houdini-like, he always escaped his just deserts.

In 2004, the Jesuits could have named him and offered the support to victims that those who have come forward since the 2021 admission have received. The buck stops with the then Provincial, John Dardis SJ, who had been communications director of the Dublin Archdiocese when clerical abuse was constantly in the news. He knew the damage caused by abusive priests.

Fr Dardis now has a global role as General Councillor for Discernment and Apostolic Planning, and Director of Communications at the General Curia of the Society of Jesus in Rome. In March 2024, Dardis delivered a keynote speech at an international gathering of safeguarding delegates in Rome. The title of his address was Key Communications Guidelines in Dealing With Cases of Abuse. Tempting as it is to surmise what these might be, in his view, and given his record in the Marmion affair, we do not have a record of what was said.

His predecessor, Gerry O’Hanlon SJ, would have been aware of several complaints against Jesuits, not least those concerning Marmion, and one from a former Jesuit. Yet he did nothing to acknowledge publicly the abuse. In his submission to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2017 he remarked of the Irish bishops: “I wanted to try to understand…why did good people, with high ideals, fail victims so egregiously?”

Why, indeed? The Jesuits, under successive Provincials, these “men for others”, simply decided to stay silent. They declined to reach out to the many victims they knew to be there. None has been held accountable.

When the Jesuit Response was issued in July 2021 they knew that Paul Andrews SJ had been credibly accused of child sexual abuse. This is not mentioned in that document and we have to ask why? In the current draft narrative record of Marmion’s career, commissioned by the joint past pupils/Jesuit steering group, the phrase “credible accusation” (which has a clear meaning in the Church) has been replaced with “plausible complaint” (which doesn’t).

A former Provincial told one of Marmion’s victims “I wish, once and for all, I could put all the dirty laundry on the table and deal with all of it at the same time.”

There seems to be little chance of that any time soon. Perhaps the boards of management and past pupils’ unions of the Jesuit schools should consider where they stand on the issue. (ends)

INTRODUCTION

During the first few days of September 1977, I was bored. Aged 18, and with weeks to go before I entered Trinity College, Dublin I was missing the companionship of friends, with all of whom I had shared an education at Belvedere. Those who, like me, had left, were scattered around Dublin and beyond, and those who hadn’t had, for the most part, risen from Poetry or fifth year, to Rhetoric at the top of the school. Those who chose to repeat the Leaving Certificate at Belvedere rather than at the Institute of Education on Leeson Street or at Ringsend Tech, were in a small class called, without any intentional irony, Philosophy.

Dublin was smaller in those days, almost claustrophobic. The same could be said of the country at large. There was one legal radio station, one television station. Buses were yellow, the DART was still seven years away. Divorce, abortion, homosexual acts between consenting adult males, the import and sales of condoms were all outlawed. The institutions misleadingly known as mother and baby homes were doing good business.

On the sunny afternoon of Friday, 5 September, I took a number 11 bus into town and wandered into Belvedere as the inmates were being released. Belvedere was, and still is, a kind of island of privilege in North inner city Dublin. Centred on a fine Georgian townhouse dating from 1775, most of its business was conducted in redbrick blocks and in the brutalist 1970s Kerr Wing.

Chatting with some of my newly elevated Rhetorician friends, I noticed, standing in his usual spot, leaning on the low wall by the Junior House steps, Fr Joseph Marmion SJ. The fact that my friends and I had called Marmion The Turd for the previous few years will convey some idea of how much we detested him.

Marmion was surrounded, as usual, by a handful of senior boys whom we, rather unfairly, referred to as his acolytes. He may have been a monster, but he was a charismatic monster for many. His particular favourites we called, even more unfairly, his catamites.

He was relaxed, leaning back casually against the wall engaging in chitchat, almost certainly making disparaging remarks about some of his colleagues as they crossed the schoolyard from the Senior House to Belvedere House.  No doubt he was also taking the opportunity to eye up the little boys who had just arrived in First Grammar, the most junior year in the Senior House.  He had a taste for 13 and 14 year old boys. Nothing had changed.

But change was coming, the very next morning. His career as a teacher would be effectively over, he would be relieved of his rôle as producer, director and, effectively, dictator of the College operetta. His career as a bully, a sadist and predatory paedophile was about to come to an end.

Well, almost. Wings clipped, but as arrogant, narcissistic and self-serving as ever, he would remain on the teaching staff for the rest of that academic year. Outrageous and extraordinary as this may seem now, his immediate dismissal from teaching was considered to put the reputation of the school, and of the Jesuit order, at risk.

It would be too easy, and too convenient for some, to focus on Marmion in isolation. At the time of writing – October 2023 – a total of 44 Irish Jesuits have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse, one being Marmion, another Paul Andrews SJ. It is bizarre that Andrews was not mentioned in The Jesuit Response. It’s a fact that Marmion operated within an organisation that harboured others who shared his proclivities. Context is needed. Until the Jesuits name these men, it is simply not possible to extrapolate the full story. And, until then, it is convenient for the Jesuits to say – in effect – that nobody amongst their number knew what Marmion was up to.

And because Marmion’s sexual exploitation of boys was so egregious, it is all too easy to lose sight of perhaps his greatest crimes: the emotional and often violent physical abuse of boys. He was somebody who should never have been allowed to have contact with children. And the Jesuits knew that from a very early stage in his career. That they failed to act to protect children, at every opportunity, every cue, is beyond shameful.

This is my attempt to tell the story of Joseph Marmion, of those who protected him, even after death, and of some of those whose lives he damaged and, in some cases, destroyed. I have done my best to be fair to all those involved, even to Marmion himself.

Tom Doorley

October 2023

Acknowledgements:

Most of those whose assistance was invaluable in researching this story prefer to remain anonymous. I want to thank Donal Ballance, Joe Douglas, David Barry, Riocard O Tiarnaigh, Roberta Doorley, Mark Byrne, Maurice Dockrell, Saoirse Fox, the Irish Jesuit Provincialate, The Library of Trinity College Dublin, the National Library of Ireland, the Public Records Office Kew, the Imperial War Museum, Liverpool Public Library, Mrs C Barker of St Francis Xavier College Liverpool, Dom Anselm Cramer OSB of Ampleforth Abbey.

Copyright 2023 Tom Doorley

Chapter One: A STORY EMERGES

In March 2021, unaware that the Jesuits were about to reveal that Joseph Marmion SJ was a predatory paedophile and a violent bully, I wrote about him in the Irish Daily Mail, having first mentioned him in a book of mine that was published in 2004. I was prompted to do so after a former teacher at Terenure College was convicted of the sexual abuse of boys. Why, I wondered, had Marmion got away with it?

At the time, I knew only a fraction of what I know of him now and I had spoken with only a handful of people who – in the words of one of them employing grim humour – had passed through his hands. Some of the details related here were not entirely correct but the gist most certainly was. I should stress that his ability as a teacher is disputed; few believe that he was brilliant.

This is what I wrote as the Jesuits prepared to name him:

“On a fine afternoon in June 1977,  I walked out of my school for the last time as a pupil. I had just sat my Leaving Cert economic history exam and I'd been the only candidate. The place was eerily quiet as I headed towards the big iron gates and suddenly saw the outline of the school bully looming towards me, silhouetted against the sunshine.

“This was not a boy; it was a Jesuit priest and a predatory paedophile. During much of the 1970s he had bestrode the school like a priapic colossus and everyone - including, as I know now, many of his fellow priests - lived in fear of him.

“A few years ago, I tried my hand at writing a novel set in a very familiar school, featuring a familiarly monstrous teacher. Aspiring novelists are told to write about what they know. I named this character Father Oliphant, after a long-vanished shop on Drumcondra Road; it sounded vaguely exotic, like his own surname.

“And, although he is long dead, I'm going to call him Father Oliphant here. He had nephews in the school, all of whom were very pleasant and obviously blameless boys, at least one of whom had a very hard time because of his accident of birth.

“Anyway, Oliphant approached and I realised, once again and vividly, that I hated him and that he no longer had any power over me. I looked straight ahead, and walked past in silence.

“"Thomas, I saluted you," I heard from behind me.

“My stomach turned over and my heart started racing. Somehow, I managed to turn around and face him for a moment.

“"I know you did," I said, and walked off.

“I can't remember when I stopped trembling.

“In the wake of the McLean conviction and the revelations about this serial abuser's activities at Terenure College, I said on Twitter that we had had our own monster at Belvedere in my time. Over a dozen people contacted me to share their memories of what had happened to them and to their friends.

“My dismissal of Oliphant on that last day of school felt terrifying at the time, but I was one of the lucky ones. Yes, I ascribe my lasting phobia of reading in public to him and he did write a message in felt-tip on my bare chest in front of the class when I was fifteen. But I got off very lightly. For a long time he seemed vaguely to like me but, not in "that" way. As I got older, I recognised him for what he was: a bully to everyone and a very particular menace to the little boys who formed the "female" chorus in his annual Strauss operettas.

“When anyone who had been at Belvedere in the 1970s read the newspaper reports of McLean measuring young boys, stark naked and alone, for costumes that never fitted properly, we instantly recognised this gambit shared by the two paedophiles.

“Oliphant was large by any standards - his hands, of which he was very proud - were like hams, his head the size of a pumpkin, although mothers would sometimes say that he was a fine looking man. But when you were in First Grammar - first year in the arcane nomenclature of Jesuit schools - he could block out the sun, literally and metaphorically.

“A talented linguist, a brilliant teacher, he was immensely clever, and could call on limitless reserves of charm when he wanted to. In that cynically subversive way that can be so attractive to teenage boys, he would speak slightingly of other teachers and even impute pederastic tendencies to several blameless men, one of who he used refer to as "Mary", often in his presence.

“The testimonies of those men who, when they were twelve or thirteen, underwent Oliphant's costume measuring routine are all essentially the same.

“Conor (not his real name) recalls "He would take you, on your own, up to this room full of old clothes and there was a screen  in the corner. And he'd tell you to strip, underpants and all, and when you were completely bare and feeling really bloody awkward and embarrassed, he'd help you on with a pair of tights - like nylons - and you could see everything through them. And then he'd tell you to stay there, sitting on one of those grey, plastic chairs while he went behind the screen for what seemed like ages. And it was obvious what he was doing there because he'd emerge all sweaty and kind of flustered and tell you, a bit sharply, to get dressed. But I don't think he ever actually touched anyone's genitals. At least, I never heard that."

“Tim (again, not his real name) told me: "The little fellows' chorus was divided in two and to put it bluntly, the pretty kids were chosen to be 'girls' and the plain ones, like, me got to be boys. It was the pretty kids that got measured."

“Conor, again, recalls "It just felt weird, sitting there, starkers. But when you're twelve and you're new to the Senior House, you think, well, maybe this is just normal here. And now I realise he was looking at me from behind that screen while he pleasured himself. I feel sick, to be honest."

“"It was all about power," Luke (not his own name) told me. "I had a good voice in first year and I have this memory of being alone with him doing scales and it was dead quiet, after school. Suddenly he spread his hand out on the table and it was huge. And he said put your hand on top, and I put my tiny hand on his. He didn't say a word but he didn't need to. It was 'I'm big, you're tiny, and I have all the power.'".

“This was a common experience.

“The favoured boys in Oliphant's German classes would be invited to spend a few weeks in August in Vienna. Usually they would be required to go through Confession with him. Darragh (not his real name) recalls: "When I was in first year an older boy told me that if Oliphant asks if you masturbate you say 'I don't know father, but I'll ask my parents.'" Darragh used this ploy and was left firmly alone.

“In Vienna he would tell boys "masturbation is a sin, but not if you do it in your sleep". On the pretext of "checking for a rash" he had Keith (not his real name) strip in his room for a thorough examination. "He said I seemed to have a tight foreskin and that I should try to loosen it. I remember he was wielding a tube of Savlon and I had to think really fast. I said 'wouldn't that be masturbation, Father?' and there was a silence for a minute and he said, yes, maybe I was right."

“It was in Vienna that the most sinister part of the Oliphant saga unfolded. He was constantly alert for any sign of a cough or cold or a temperature, which some, but not all, remember as being checked rectally. Two of the boys on whom he had preyed told friends that on the pretext of some mild or imaginary illness, they were required to sleep in Oliphant's room. They were given "medicine" and have no recollection of the next 36 hours. It seems likely that others went through the same ordeal.

“Keith told me "I'm still amazed that after what I'd experienced, I went back the next year. Somehow it felt better to be in the inner circle, to be approved of, instead of outside, where most people were. It made you feel special, which is, frankly, horrifying".

“Another, who preferred not to talk in detail about his experiences, told me "That bastard couldn't get enough of me. He tried to sleep with me in Vienna."

“On the very rare occasions when a boy dared to challenge what Oliphant was doing - and very, very few had the courage to do so - his response was always the same. "I'll deny everything".

“Whenever a boy was summoned from one of his classes to see the Headmaster he would always say, jokingly, "deny everything".

“Keith told an older boy what had happened to him and the response was, "if that gets out, you'll have to leave the school." And as Keith says, "he was just a kid, but it was terrifying".

“By the start of the Autumn term in 1977, matters were coming to a head for Oliphant. One boy, who had not been abused, reported the conversations he had had with those who had been. One of them was Keith who was summoned by the Headmaster and asked if the story was true.

"And of course, I panicked. I did exactly what he always said. I denied everything".

“Another boy who was questioned told me: "Look, it was good that I probably would have been believed. I know that now. But I was thirteen and I was scared of that bastard and I was scared that I'd get into trouble, that I'd be seen as doing something wrong. So, yes, I said it wasn't true. There was always this sense of menace when he was in the room. Actually there was a sense of menace when he wasn't there. You just had to think of him."

“I used to wonder how it took the school so long to take action but now I think I know. Such was this man's hold over virtually everyone, that boys lied for him. But it seems that the Headmaster had the wisdom to see through this. He placed "Mary" in charge of the opera, with Oliphant reduced to playing the piano. At the end of the academic year, he was sent to Gardiner Street parish as a curate, still uncomfortably close to the school.

“The boys who had accused him were told to report any further bullying or inappropriate behaviour and none, it seems, occurred.

“"He would still stand in the corner of the schoolyard, preening himself, against the Junior House steps," recalls one of those he had abused. "And a few acolytes still stood around him. But everyone knew he was finished. It was around that time that we started calling him The Turd. How's that for revulsion?"

“Keith recalls having to face him every day after being abused.

“"I have vivid memories of him in English class spending a disproportionate deal of time during Macbeth lessons on the theme of Jesuitical casuistry, the irony of which will not be lost on anyone. I do remember a favourite quote of his was actually from King Lear “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” You’re left wondering who were the flies and who the gods in his particular scenario."

“There is no doubt that he destroyed lives. One boy was so badly bullied in class that he could never recite a poem or speak in public. "That man ruined my teens and my twenties. I will tell you what he did to me, but please don't write about it."

“He was violent too. It was said that he had kicked down a door and broken a boy's jaw when he was teaching at Clongowes. And it was rumoured, when he suffered a fracture in the early 1970s, that he had been beaten up one night by four of his former victims from there.

“When I was fifteen I found a first year crying outside the music room and I asked him what had happened. Oliphant had not taken kindly to a remark and had literally thrown him out of the class. He had landed where I found him in a mess of dust and tears. He became a great friend and Oliphant would direct his laser-like stare at us in the yard, but we revelled in it. He hated to see older boys talking with younger ones. He feared what would be revealed about him.

“This friend died young and I recall saying to his mother who, in turn, became a great friend, that I had the gift of these great friendships to thank the monster for.

“It is said that Oliphant caused at least one suicide, several instances of alcoholism, drug abuse leading to homelessness in one case, and, in the words of one survivor, "plenty of mental scars that will never go away. He gloried in cruelty. Do you remember he'd always identify the shy, quiet, vulnerable boy in each class and then he'd regularly say 'go on, get so-and-so' and, God forgive us, we would? And at the time we thought it was just horseplay but God almighty, just think of what that did to people."

“The people with whom I spoke were all survivors, ones that somehow got through the varying degrees, and kinds of abuse. Most of them are conspicuously successful in their fields, high achievers.

“I asked one of them why this was. "Maybe it's because we just couldn't bear to let that fucker win." I'm sure that's true, but I know that some fell by the wayside.

“One old school friend of mine asked me why I was writing this. I said I just wanted these stories told. These events happened the better part of half a century ago but they need to be known.

“"You know he groped my scrotum" he said. "And to her dying day my mother used to say that there's never been a whiff of scandal about the Jesuits! I didn't disabuse her."

“This Jesuit died in 2000, aged 75, shameless to the end.”

I, and those with whom I spoke at the time I was writing this newspaper piece, loathed Marmion. For most of us, it was pure hatred. This is problematic because those of us whose lives he affected when we were children find it hard to acknowledge that Marmion, who we knew physically and in every other sense, as huge, was once a little boy.

There were, of course, those who seemed to like him, at least at the time. Some have spoken of how it felt to be approved by Marmion, to be part of a group that had his imprimatur, in a sense. Some, as Marmion himself recounted, kept in touch with him after they had left school. These people, as far as I can gather, were a very small minority.

And so, I set out to find out as much as I could about his origins.

Chapter Two: THE EARLY YEARS

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told. 

-       Elizabeth Bowen

One thing of which we can be certain is that Joseph Ignatius Hayes Marmion was born in Liverpool on Tuesday, 24 November 1924, the third child of Dr Joseph Aloysius Marmion and Brigid Josephine Marmion, née Hayes. His birth was registered, including the name Hayes which he later dropped, in January 1926.

The Marmion family had moved to Roselands Cottage on Woodlands Road in the Liverpool suburb of Aigburth in 1924. Before that they had been living in Dodge Street, much closer to the city centre and in an area that was far from salubrious.

Given the move to Aigburth a few years later, it seems that Dr Marmion had been casting around for a suitable practice. The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was the first such specialist institution in the world, founded in 1898. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine opened the following year and this is where Dr Marmion had spent some time in post-graduate training. It is possible that he may have worked at the Liverpool institution until an opportunity arose in general practice.

Joseph Marmion senior was the nephew of Dom Columba Marmion OSB, the abbot of the Belgian monastery of Maredsous in Wallonia, a relatively recent Benedictine foundation having been established in 1872. Christened Joseph Aloysius in 1858, the son of an Irish father and French mother, he was educated at Belvedere, and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Portraits show that he shared the same kind of  large somewhat square head with his grand-nephew.

Photo: Abbaye de Maredsous

Dom Columba adopted as his motto magis prodesse quam non praesse, taken from the Rule of St Benedict and meaning “to serve, not to be served”. He died during an influenza epidemic in 1923, aged 64. His spiritual writings were hugely successful and were translated into many languages. He was considered one of the most influential Catholic teachers of his time.

The father of the Joseph Marmion who concerns us here had been born in 1887 at Pomeroy, Co Tyrone and his early childhood was spent in Dungannon where his father, Surgeon Matthew Cordier Marmion, was a Justice of the Peace and practiced as a doctor. The young Joseph Marmion senior was sent to school at his uncle’s abbey of Maredsous in Belgium from which he proceeded to studies in Dublin, almost certainly at the Cecilia Street medical school (the forerunner of the UCD School of Medicine) and became a Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland and of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (LRSCI and LRCPI) at the age of 22 in 1909.

Having qualified, he spent some time in London, where his uncle, yet another Joseph Marmion, was an eye surgeon, and where he had some post-graduate training in tropical medicine. In 1914 he went to South-East Asia as medical officer to the North Borneo Chartered Company which had administered the area and exploited its natural resources since 1881. He probably deliberately planned for such a career – there were plenty of opportunities throughout the Empire for a young doctor.

Within a few months of his arrival in the Malay Archipelago, World War I broke out and Dr Marmion heeded the call of John Redmond – I’m assuming that as an Ulster Catholic he was more likely to have been a Home Ruler than a Unionist but I may be wrong - and returned to Europe to enlist in the Royal Army Medical Corps where he rose to the rank of captain. His son, the late Tom Marmion, has written that his father’s service in the Great War destroyed his health. On active service throughout the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, he seems to have been injured, returning to Ireland to serve with the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Buncrana, Co Donegal. According to his obituary in the Liverpool Echo, “in 1916 he was sent to France at his own request” and was invalided out of the army in 1918. Perhaps he had been appalled at the 1916 uprising and wanted to support the war effort which after all, had started, at least in theory, in an effort to defend small nations such as Belgium where he had been educated.

After his departure from the army, Ireland was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for men who had served as officers in the British forces and this may well have been the spur to his decision to seek a career elsewhere. Clearly a brave man, he was probably in quite poor physical, and possibly mental, shape by the time he arrived in Liverpool three years later at number 40 Dodge Street. He was 34, and recently married to Brigid Hayes. The first of the Marmions’ children, Teresa Honoria, was born there.

The Dodge Street community was a relatively poor one. Ten years before Dr Marmion’s arrival there the Census shows that the residents included a labourer, railway porter, shop assistant, locksmith and, at number 40, a bootmaker born in Dublin.

The family’s move to Roselands Cottage on Woodlands Road was a considerable step up in social terms. This late 19^th century house must have provided an idyllic escape from the inner city grime of Dodge Street. Its privacy and enormous garden stood in sharp contrast to the modest neighbouring redbrick Edwardian terraces. It was acquired from another doctor, presumably along with his practice. Dr Smith had been a bachelor and had lived there alone except for a housekeeper, and the neighbours – in their considerably less extensive properties - included a civil engineer, a head gardener, an insurance clerk, a police sergeant and a house builder.

After the Marmions’ time, the very large garden – a resident gardener is recorded on the 1911 Census -  shrank as houses were built on its grounds, initially on Woodlands Road after the War and finally on its Western boundary on North Sudley Road in the 1970s. Roselands Cottage itself survived, shorn of its gardens, until the 1980s. After it was demolished, two nondescript detached houses were built on the shrunken site, accessed from Elmar Road at the back. The only trace that now survives is a short section of the old garden wall.

The Aigburth neighbourhood was solid and respectable, a half hour’s walk from the city centre and a short stroll from the rus in urbe of Sefton Park which had opened to the public in 1867, with its cricket pitch, tennis courts and Victorian palm house. It would have supported a successful medical practice.

The young Joseph Marmion junior was sent to St Francis Xavier’s College, then located in Salisbury Street just north of the city centre. It had been founded from Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit public school in the north of Lancashire, in 1842. The current archivist at St Francis Xavier’s, now in much leafier Woolton, was unable to find any record of his early school career. The school magazine is not indexed and, she added, “Unless he was very sporty he probably isn’t going to be mentioned in them either.”

Photo: britishlistedbuildings.co.uk

One of the things we know for certain about Marmion is that he despised sport in all its forms.

Dr Joseph A Marmion died on 10 August 1936 at his home and, contrary to his death notice in the local newspapers, was buried at the Cistercian abbey of Mount St Joseph in Co Tipperary. He was 49, and the young Joseph was 11. Although the family lived in the parish of St Thomas More in Aigburth, they worshipped at St Austin’s, Grassendale, two miles from home, and run by the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire.  It was here that his funeral Mass was celebrated. Clearly, Dr Marmion was loyal to the religious order that had educated him in Belgium; the Cistercians of Mount St Joseph are descended, in a sense, from the

Photo: Liverpool Echo

Benedictines. At the time of his death, Glenstal Priory (as it was then) was the only active Benedictine house in Ireland, having been founded from Maredsous. Presumably the spaces in its cemetery, unlike that at Mount St Joseph, were confined to members of the monastic community. Mount St Benedict near Gorey, Co Wexford, had been founded from Downside Abbey in Somerset by the eccentric Dom Francis Sweetman. It was an upmarket boys’ school but closed in 1925, although it remained a daughter house of Downside into the 1970s. (Some of the more difficult members of the Downside community would be sent to be “abbot” there in solitary splendour, served by a housekeeper and butler).

At the time of Dr Marmion’s death, Europe was heading inexorably towards war. Mrs Marmion moved to a Victorian terraced house in Buckingham Avenue, closer to Sefton Park, shortly after her husband’s death, and as the spectre of hostilities loomed.  Liverpool was to become the most bombed British city outside London, and the Marmions’ first home there, at 40 Dodge Street, was destroyed, along with most of its neighbours, on the night of 28 November 1940. The street no longer exists, its rubble lying under a shopping centre and industrial estate built in the 1970s.

Operation Pied Piper, the evacuation of Liverpool children to small towns and villages in rural Lancashire, Shropshire and north Wales had started in September 1939 but Mrs Marmion decided to move the family to her native Ireland. It would appear that the children were sent in advance while she concluded matters in Liverpool:  Joseph to Clongowes Wood College in Co Kildare where he entered Rudiments, or second year, while his sisters and little brother Tom, then only six years of age, went to board in either Dominican College, Cabra or Dominican College, Wicklow. I am unable to say which. From there, Tom would proceed to Glenstal.

Why was Joseph Marmion not sent to Glenstal? The school had opened in 1932 with just seven pupils and it would still have been very small. So, it surely could have accommodated a 13 year old boy? Perhaps it was too expensive or there was considerable urgency in getting Joseph settled into a new school. Perhaps, too, Mrs Marmion was less loyal to the Benedictines than her late husband had been. And, of course, there may have been a Jesuit connection – I am fairly confident that there was, as we shall see later - and Clongowes may have taken an altruistic view of the fatherless Catholic boy from pagan England.

Writing in later life, Tom Marmion remarked that “families often sent their children away to school in those days of difficult travel”, which is not entirely true. Many upper class and upper middle-class families sent their sons away to prep school at the age of seven or even earlier as a matter of course, and it had nothing to do with the difficulties of travel. It was what people like them did. The Marmions differed in social class from their neighbours and the young Marmion was doubtless aware of this from a very early age. It is, perhaps, significant that Joseph Marmion was spoken of, by some fellow Jesuits and many of his pupils, as a snob. The social insecurity caused by his father’s death may have turned him into one.

There can be no doubt that the loss of his father was a traumatic experience for the young Joseph Marmion. Had Dr Marmion lived, had his practice thrived, and given his strong affinity with the Benedictines, his son may well have been sent to Ampleforth. In those days, unlike now, many family doctors could afford the fees at leading public schools. Had he been an Amplefordian he would not have grown up to be the menace he became as an Irish Jesuit. He may have become a Benedictine menace, of course, and we know that Ampleforth has been amply furnished with clerical paedophiles during its history.

Even before Dr Marmion’s early death, family life was probably not easy as he had clearly suffered from ill health for many years. And from his death in 1936 and as the war years approached the family experienced turmoil.

It cannot have been easy for the young Marmion when he arrived at Clongowes Wood College in September 1939, a year later than his schoolfellows, and with a distinctly English accent. For a boy from a modest Liverpool suburb and an urban day school in Everton, Clongowes must have seemed impossibly grand with its long straight avenue of ancient lime trees, medieval castle and extensive imposing buildings.

Clongowes had been Ireland’s leading Catholic boy’s boarding school since its foundation in 1814. In time it would be eclipsed by the parvenu Glenstal, pushing Clongowes into second place in terms of prestige in the minds of those who care about such things.

The young Marmion’s early days at boarding school can hardly have been any fun at all. Now displaced to neutral Ireland and with his friends and, initially at least, his mother, in an England that was at war, this period may have seen the start of the anxiety that would dog him through life.  He appears to have spent his five years at Clongowes staying largely below the radar, something that comes as a surprise considering the largeness of his personality as an adult. However, at least one of his contemporaries spoke of his having been a bully. He seems to have taken no part in sport (indeed, he once threw a rugby trophy into a bin) or drama and is mentioned occasionally as a debater, in which his acerbic wit was clearly developing.

Photo: The Clongownian 1940: J Marmion seated, centre

The recently arrived Marmion “gave a very complete account of Britain’s need for food and raw materials and of how she gives preference to her Colonies’ products,”  according to The Clongownian for 1940. Another report, on the Third Line Debating  Society, states that “J. MARMION, in what was probably the best-written speech of the evening, was very convincing, as he proved that science had destroyed craftsmanship and had made man a machine.”

Judging by his absence from reports of the various boys’ sodalities in The Clongownian, he was not noted for piety but his proficiency in languages is presaged by a Christmas prize for French when he was in First Syntax (or fourth year) in 1941.

In an account of the school’s production of The Gyspy Baron, by his beloved Strauss, and which he was to produce at both the Crescent and Belvedere, he does not appear in the cast list nor amongst the orchestra.

In his Intermediate Certificate, he achieved honours in English, Latin, French and Mathematics, and passes in Irish, Greek, History and Geography. Curiously, Marmion is not listed in the Leaving Certificate results for his Rhetoric year (sixth year in Jesuit parlance) but he must have sat the matriculation examination for the National University of Ireland.

In Rhetoric he wrote a poem entitled A Concert, suggesting that music was something important to him, that moved him, despite not taking part in such activities in school. It appeared in The Clongownian.

The fourth stanza (of 6) reads:

Now mount we to the stars in flights of song,

Now sink we to the depths with mournful groan

And now the tides of music pour along

And now a lonely violin sings – alone.

And once again with swelling roar and strong

The music seems to reach the very Throne

And once again it sinks back whence it rose,

And with untroubled current onwards flows.

By this point in his school career he must have decided to enter the Jesuit Order. By the following September he had joined 14 other Clongownians, four from his own year, in the Novitiate at Emo Court in County Laois.

Mrs Marmion would live on until 19 March 1962, shortly before her son returned to his old school as Prefect of Studies. She re-joined her husband in Mount St Joseph’s in Co Tipperary a little over half a century after he had been buried there.

Appendix to Chapter Two:

The children of Dr Joseph A Marmion and Mrs Brigid Marmion:

Teresa Honoria, known as Noreen, born 1923, qualified as a doctor, lived and worked in Dublin, unmarried, died 2008. She was buried with her parents in Mount St Joseph’s.

Rosaleen Marmion, born 1924, qualified as a doctor, married 1951, in Liverpool, Dr Henri C. Catsarus, and died in Greece, 1994.

Joseph I Marmion, born 1925, Jesuit priest.

Brigid C B Marmion, known as Benedicta, born 1928, married 1960 John Leo Leahy, lived in Terenure.

Thomas, known as Tom, born 1933, married Bernadette, lived in Kilmacud, Dublin, died 28 June 2021.

Chapter Three: BECOMING A JESUIT 1943-1962

A Man for Others?

-     

 

Photo courtesy of Irish Jesuit Provincialate

After the Jesuits finally admitted what Marmion was, the then Provincial, Leonard Moloney SJ, wrote in The Jesuit Response in 2021 “We, who should have protected you, failed you. You, your parents, and families had the right to expect that you would be safe in our care. We failed you in this primary duty and for this I ask your forgiveness. It is my hope that through the restorative processes I, and my Jesuit colleagues, will have the opportunity of making this apology in person. I hope that this response confirms for you the seriousness of our commitment to righting the wrongs and failings of the past.”

The fact is that the Jesuit Order in Ireland failed not just generations of children. They also failed Joseph Marmion in its duty of care. It became apparent, from a very early stage, that he was – at the very least – a troubled person. Warning signals were plainly visible and despite the efforts of several of his superiors, they were ignored.

Why did Marmion want to become a Jesuit? We will never know but can make some informed guesses as to some of the motivating factors. He had had a very unsettled childhood: the loss of his father when he was still a small boy, the coming of War, the vulnerability of his home city to bombing, the family’s uprooting from all that was familiar and the move to Ireland which was, unlike much of Europe, having an “Emergency” rather than a War. He may have sought certainty in religion, the certainty that developed into his extreme conservatism in later life.

We don’t know how much he enjoyed Clongowes; he certainly doesn’t appear to have made much of a mark there but it may have provided a kind of security and a surrogate home. Some Jesuits, conscious of his lack of a father, may have been kind to him. Given that sexual abusers have very often been sexually abused themselves, this may well have happened at Clongowes.

It was a time when many boys, on leaving school, went into training for the priesthood. In a suffocatingly Catholic society, priests were accorded quite unmerited deference and respect. They wielded power and enjoyed considerable status. Then, as now, it provided a sanctuary for boys who knew that they were not attracted to the opposite sex.

In Marmion’s year at school, four boys of the 58 in Rhetoric decided to enter the Jesuit novitiate, including Paul Leonard, the much younger brother of John “Jacko” Leonard SJ, Headmaster of Belvedere, and Paddy Crowe SJ, later a Headmaster of both Clongowes and Belvedere.

Added to this was the cachet of the Jesuits. While most candidates for the seminaries were drawn from the families of small farmers and provincial shopkeepers, the Jesuits recruited almost exclusively from the educated middle classes, especially from schools like Clongowes and Belvedere. Society at large, and some members of the Order, considered the Jesuits to be “a cut above”.

The Jesuits may have had a special interest in the young Marmion on account of his close family relationship to his grand-uncle Dom Columba Marmion who, it was widely thought, was going to be the first saint educated by Jesuits. Dom Columba was officially placed on this trajectory in 1962 and both Marmion, by then Prefect of Studies at Clongowes, and his brother Tom, attended the gruesome business of his exhumation in Maredsous in April 1963. Dom Columba was beatified in 2000 and a celebration was held at Belvedere in honour of this alumnus, at which no mention was made of his grand-nephew’s years at the school. It is supposed that the lengthy process of attaining sainthood will eventually be completed.

We will return to the beatification in due course.

In August 1943, Joseph Marmion, aged 18, was received into the Society of Jesus, straight from Clongowes, by the Provincial, J.R. McMahon SJ, and on 7 September he entered the novitiate at Emo Court in County Laois. In June of that year it was noted by Fr Kelly, the Minister at Clongowes, that “This is a solidly virtuous boy and will, I believe, be a fine man. At present he is, perhaps, inclined to  play the buffoon, and babble over with foolish talk etc – but, I think it is merely boyish effervescence and good humour, which on training will tone down to normality”.

Normality is something that Marmion never attained.

His Prefect of Studies, Fr Barrett, wrote at the same time:  “Joseph has grown rapidly and though not good at games has much physical energy. He has much mental energy besides, and a very quick tongue. He has suffered a bit from the absence of a father’s strong hand, and his energies are a bit undisciplined. He has been known to argue when he should have obeyed, to work at one thing when he should have been at something else, to be noisy and to annoy his companions with his tongue. For all that he is popular with boys and masters. He is not really ‘difficult’ but rather somewhat undisciplined. He is generous and I believe he will respond to treatment. He has improved this year. I consider him aptus.” In other words acceptable to the Society of Jesus as a novice.

Fr Barrett was nothing if not an optimist.

It's significant that there are two mentions of his “tongue” in just one paragraph. He had clearly been honing it with a mordant sarcasm and caustic wit while still a schoolboy. Marmion’s tongue is what many fellow Jesuits, especially his juniors, came to despise. Of course, in a sporty school like Clongowes, boys who did not excel at games (and Marmion does not appear in a single team photograph during his time there) sometimes gain popularity as wits. In his case he seems not to have distinguished between being amusing and actual cruelty. Or he actually enjoyed cruelty even at this early stage in his life.

In the years before he took his first vows in September 1945 he was considered to be “improving” and that he profited “from correction”.  Then, between 1945 and 1948, Marmion moved to Rathfarnham Castle in Dublin, to live with the Jesuit community there while he took an Arts degree at UCD. It rapidly became clear that he was trouble.

A note in his file for 1948 reads:

“Mr. Marmion is hereby warned seriously of the following faults:

1. Lack of religious observance, shown in an habitual carelessness about most of the rules, especially the rule of silence

2. The tone of his correspondence with one of the novices which betrays a deplorable lack of the true spirit of his vocation

3. Repeated admonition has so far resulted in no permanent improvement

He is reminded that unless he sincerely reforms his ways he cannot remain in the Society. As a salutary penance for the above faults, Mr Marmion will spend an hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.”

These comments suggest that Marmion had already decided that he was an exception, one to whom the rules should not apply, that he was somehow special. (Anyone who has read a report from Boris Johnson’s housemaster at Eton will recognise similar themes). The tone of his correspondence with a fellow novice is intriguing. What was it? Did he show disrespect for his superiors? Or was this the kind of “particular friendship” that was outlawed amongst novices? (I have been told he wanted to exchange “snaps”.) One that may have involved a degree of sexual innuendo, the kind of thing that, according to Jesuit colleagues, marked his conversation during his years at Belvedere.

A month after this first warning a letter from the Roman Curia contained the following instruction: “Your Reverence and other Superiors are to be on their guard lest Mr Marmion, a Junior, who ought to be admonished for his failure in religious spirit, should remain for too much longer in that state. If he does not correct himself, stronger remedies will soon have to be applied.”

It is, perhaps, worth remembering that this was the era of Noel Browne’s Health Act 1947, better known as the mother and child scheme, a modest proposal for maternal and child healthcare that was vehemently opposed by both the medical profession and the Roman Catholic church.

Its demolition underlined the fact that the Irish State was in the iron grip of that church. Seán MacBride, the leader of the new Clann na Poblachta party that was to come to power in 1948 on a new republican platform, promising to unite the country and reform politics, wrote to John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin, on the very day he secured a seat in a by-election “I hasten, as my first act to pay my humble respects to Your Grace, and to place myself at Your Grace’s disposal.”

On becoming Taoiseach he wrote, once again by hand, that as his “first official act” he should “place myself entirely at Your Grace’s disposal”.

This was the Ireland in which Marmion was determined to become a Jesuit, even if it would be, to some extent, on his own terms. He would retain a nostalgia for that Ireland and would remain, until his death, an arch-conservative who was appalled by the reforms of Vatican II, something he shared with “Jacko” Leonard SJ, the brother of his classmate.

Hugh Kelly SJ (1886-1974), a highly cultivated man of letters, was Rector of Rathfarnham Castle during Marmion’s time there and Jesuits interviewed in 2021 recalled that he wanted the sharp-tongued, undisciplined young man “out of the Order”. He was clearly an excellent judge of character. However, they said that Marmion seemed to be protected by a wheelchair-bound senior member of community “to whom Joseph Marmion had apparently shown kindness.”

The only member of the Rathfarnham community at this time who matches the description was Jerry, or Jeremiah, Hayes (1896-1976) who had been at Clongowes with John Charles McQuaid, the authoritarian archbishop of Dublin, and who developed severe arthritis in his early 30s, spending the rest of his life as an invalid. He has been described as one of the more approachable senior members of the Rathfarnham community and as having a good relationship with the juniors, some of whom acted as what he called his “charioteers”. These young men would take him out in the castle grounds and in the locality and it's clear that he enjoyed their company.

His surname may be significant. Marmion’s mother was Brigid Hayes. Was Fr Hayes a relation? I have been unable to establish any connection.

A deeply spiritual man who was accustomed to considerable suffering in the days before chronic arthritis was managed in any even vaguely effective way, he may have been impressed by Marmion’s very close family connection to Dom Columba, one of the most noted spiritual writers of his time. The young Marmion’s “kindness” to Fr Hayes may have been spontaneous and genuine but the fact that he would become a master manipulator of people might suggest that he was already polishing this malign skill. In any event, Fr Kelly seems to have been persuaded, albeit with considerable reluctance, to give Marmion yet another chance.

A Jesuit, who was two years behind Marmion, whilst in formation, recalled that he could not understand how he had got away with his behaviours at this time and why he had not been asked to leave. Asked about these behaviours, he said that Marmion was very noisy, loud and pushy. Hearing of a formation report dated January 1949 which stated "extra experiments might develop and mature him", he explained that such “experiments” in the Novitiate meant that you would be sent down to work for a month in the kitchen, the intention being to train you in humility. There is no record of such an “experiment”, nor indeed any indication that Marmion ever learned humility.

From now until 1951 Marmion moved to the Jesuit house at Tullabeg in Co Carlow (known amongst students as “the bog”). It had been founded in 1818 as a boarding preparatory school for boys and from 1858 a senior school was added; St Stanislaus College, as it was known, had closed 1886, the pupils being moved to Clongowes, and the imposing, rather dreary buildings became a “house of formation and studies” for novices and Tertians, or recently ordained Jesuits. It was here that Marmion, having survived Rathfarnham by the skin of his teeth, was sent to study philosophy. These studies completed, he we was sent back to his old school, Clongowes, as a scholastic teacher (i.e. a yet-to-be-ordained member of the Order).

It was here that he would show his first recorded signs of paedophilia. A Jesuit who was a junior boy at Clongowes at this time recalled in 2021 at least one occasion when small boys, covering themselves only in towels, were running along a corridor near the showers and they were trying to avoid Mr Marmion lest he grab their towels. It seems unlikely that this was the only such example of Marmion’s behaviour in the presence of semi-naked young boys.

It is worth remembering that the word “paedophilia” was only coming into use in psychiatry from the early 1950s and while these days it is generally defined as sexual attraction to prepubescent children, Marmion’s disorder would now be called hebophilia where the sexual attraction is to children between the ages of 11 and 14, depending on the onset of puberty.

It's significant that one of his former pupils has said “He lost intertest in me when I came back in September. My voice had broken during the holidays.”

From Clongowes he went to the Crescent in Limerick where he assisted with the Christmas musicals and ran the junior debating society. The late Sir Terry Wogan, in his autobiography “Is This Me?”, quotes from his diary as a boy at the Crescent, recording that it had not been a good day because “Mr Marmion was in a bad mood.”

There is no record of his behaviour, either in the classroom or in private from this time but Terry Wogan’s schoolboy note suggests that he was not always a ray of sunshine.

From the Crescent he proceeded to Frankfurt for theological studies at the Sankt Georgen Hochschule. During his time there it was reported that he had not learned German well, although able, that he was impulsive and inclined to make critical comments, and lacked self-control. So, no change then.

A Jesuit who studied at the same Frankfurt hochschule as Marmion, but in the 1970s, met another priest who had been a contemporary of Marmion’s there, and has reported that when asked what he had been like, the priest replied “He was as I presume he is now,” implying that he had been, at the very least, a difficult personality.

Despite being a difficult and clearly troubled person, Marmion was ordained priest on 31 July 1957 in Frankfurt and then spent the following year at Rathfarnham for his Tertianship, a kind of long retreat during which the newly minted Jesuit rehearses the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. His Tertian Instructor was his old adversary, Hugh Kelly SJ, who had returned from a spell in St Francis Xavier’s, Gardiner Street. There is no record of how they got on together but, now that Marmion was ordained, there was no going back.

According to one of Marmion’s own letters, written more than a decade later, he had a nervous breakdown during this time at Rathfarnham Castle. The euphemism that Marmion used in correspondence with friends to describe his mental state – of anxiety and depression – was “jim jams”, a phrase most of us associate with childrens’ pyjamas, although it seems to have been a 19^th century slang word for delirium tremens or the DTs. In 1969 he wrote to his best friend within the Order – probably Paul Andrews SJ - saying that he had suffered “jim jams” at Rathfarnham and had been treated by a doctor.

Nevertheless, not much more than a year later, the Jesuits saw fit to send him to the Crescent where he remained until 1962 and where he served as choir master, also producing his first operettas.

Then, bizarrely, Marmion was appointed Prefect of Studies at Clongowes, “when I had just recovered [from a nervous breakdown]” as he later recalled. The appointment was not made by the Irish Provincial, as was the usual practice, but by the American “Visitor”, John J McMahon SJ of the New York Province. His other decision, over the head of the Provincial, was to close Tullabeg; neither endeared him to the Irish Jesuit province.

Visitation of this kind has nothing to do with the Feast of the Visitation, when the Virgin Mary, pregnant with Jesus, is supposed to have visited her cousin Elizabeth who was pregnant with John the Baptist. As far as I can gather, a Visitation is an investigation into how Jesuit establishments are performing and may involve recommendations or, indeed, edicts, designed to improve matters. There are domestic visitations, ordered by the Provincial, and those ordered by the Curia which was the kind that McMahon undertook in 1962.

It's important to remember that Marmion’s grand uncle, Dom Columba Marmion, was put on track for sainthood in 1962. This was big news in an overwhelmingly Catholic country and Marmion would have been seen as something of a celebrity amongst the devout.

So much for the facts that can be established. But some anecdotal evidence is worth recounting too.

A former Jesuit has told me that during John J McMahon’s Visitation of Ireland, two Irish Jesuits took him on a trip to the West of Ireland in order to indulge one of his great enthusiasms: fly fishing. The two Jesuits, he says, were Joseph Marmion and William Troddyn. Troddyn was a very keen fisherman and wild fowler but I’ve never heard that Marmion knew one end of a rod from the other. But both men shared a deep conservatism that would soon be outraged by Vatican II.  And it was shared by McMahon who, during his Visitation of Australia (he seems to have been to be the go-to man for Visitations) had been outraged that girls took part in dramatic productions at the otherwise all-boys St Ignatius College in Melbourne. I have imagined this coming up in conversation with Marmion and Troddyn on their fishing trip and Marmion, having dressed boys as girls during his time at the Crescent, wholeheartedly endorsing this view. Where, he might have asked, was the fun in girls?

This little break in the West, probably in Waterville where Troddyn regularly visited with rod and flies, became the talk of the Jesuit community in Ireland when McMahon’s two companions were suddenly and – in Marmion’s case at least - completely unexpectedly appointed as Prefects of Studies, Marmion to Clongowes, Troddyn to the Crescent, in July 1962, just a few months after the angling trip.

 They had both made catches.

Billy Troddyn SJ, six years older than Marmion, may have been conservative, like Marmion, and somewhat irascible but he seems to have been much liked by the boys at the Crescent.

His obituary, published in 1984, recalls that “he was deeply disturbed by changes in the Church; departures from the priesthood, especially from the Society, which he loved - distressed him a lot; he was less than enthusiastic about non-clerical dress; was reluctant to concelebrate; did not altogether care for prayer-groups and community meetings; and had very radical solutions for muggers, as also for itinerants and their wandering marauding horses. These latter irritated him intensely by their depredations into lawns and gardens, as he was ever a keen gardener and cultivated many varieties of flowers, shrubs and trees.”

I recall his brother, Peter Troddyn SJ, at Belvedere, as a kind and gentle man who used a small silver machine to roll his own cigarettes.

Marmion was now 36 and had lost his mother in March 1962. Still mentally fragile after his nervous breakdown he was probably starting his lifelong dependency on benzodiazepines, Librium being introduced in 1962 as a tranquilliser, Valium following soon afterwards.

Joseph Marmion SJ was about to unleash a reign of terror at Ireland’s oldest Jesuit school, Clongowes Wood College, where the boys first encountered him at the start of term in September.

Appendix to Chapter Three:

Many of Marmion’s early years in the Jesuits were spent in surroundings of architectural splendour. Emo Court, a neo-classical mansion designed by James Gandon, who was also responsible for the Customs House, King’s Inns and Four Courts in Dublin, was started in 1790 but not completed until the 1860s. Originally the seat of the earls of Portarlington, the house and estate was acquired by the Land Commission in 1920 and subsequently sold to the Jesuits in 1930. Between then and 1969 some 500 Jesuits received their initial training there. The Order sold the house and remaining lands to Mr Cholmeley Harrison who commissioned a thorough restoration and presented it to the State in 1994, living in an apartment there until his death in 2008. Many classical statues were recovered from the lake, having been consigned there when the Jesuits acquired the property. Classical nudity, it seems, was not appropriate for young men starting their life of celibacy, at which most of them succeeded. It is in the care of the Office of Public Works and both the house and the 35 hectares gardens are open to the public.

Rathfarnham Castle, originally the seat of the Loftus family (who later moved to Mount Loftus in Co Wexford, supposedly “the most haunted house in Ireland”, was built for Archbishop Adam Loftus in the late sixteenth century. The 18^th century interiors are in part by Sir William Chambers. The Jesuits bought the castle and the remains of the original estate in 1913 and sold it in 1986. Since 1987 it has been in the care of the Office of Public Works, has been restored and is open to the public.

Crescent College, correctly Sacred Heart College, was established by the Jesuits in the Georgian crescent in the heart of Limerick in the 1860s and became independent of the local diocese by 1870. It was a day school that occupied several fine 18^th century buildings but these had become unsound by the early 1970s and while a move to the recently closed nearby Jesuit boarding school, Mungret College, was considered, it was thought to be too far from the city. In the end, the Crescent became a comprehensive school and moved to Dooradoyle in 1973, becoming the first Jesuit school in Ireland to be co-educational.

Chapter Four: THE CLONGOWES DISASTER 1962-1965

The healthy man does not torture others; generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

-       Carl Jung

The Autumn of 1962 saw both the opening of Vatican II in Rome and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It also saw Joseph Marmion parachuted into Clongowes Wood College with a brief to tidy the place up. This would loom much larger in the lives of the boys who were at school there than such world events. The McMahon Visitation had concluded that discipline was slack and that there was insufficient emphasis on testing and examination results. Marmion would have had a pretty clear idea of what he was required to do.

While the task was no doubt challenging, the appointment brought with it a sense of freedom. Marmion was now in charge as Prefect of Studies (headmaster in Jesuit parlance) at least within the school; the Clongowes community was presided over by the Rector. Marmion now had a large office to himself, a space private enough in which to commit acts of sexual and physical abuse. He was the boss.

Sexual intercourse may have begun in 1963, as Philip Larkin put it, between the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, by which he meant that the spirit of the 1960s didn’t really start at the dawn of the decade. In Ireland, it came even later. Marmion’s reign at Clongowes was in a school that had changed little, if at all, since the 1940s.

However, for the previous eight years, the Prefect of Studies had been Raymond J Lawler SJ (1921-2001) a man who is recalled with great fondness by former pupils and by colleagues. He was noted, I’m told, for his “gentleness”. At Fr Lawler’s funeral - he having died at 80 still working as “spiritual father” to the Third Line - past and present pupils formed a guard of honour as he was carried to his final resting place.

In his obituary we read that “Ray was a man who found God in all things whether playing cards, Scrabble, chess, whether on the golf course, whether teaching, whatever he was doing he was never far from God…The school secretary said: ‘If there were a university degree for gentleness, I think that Father Lawler would have a PhD’.”

It is hard to imagine a more stark contrast than that between Fr Lawler and Marmion who was described by one Jesuit, who was a boy at Clongowes during his headship, as “a savage brute”. And another old boy from this time has said that “Clongowes was a place where love and kindness did not exist”.  Many former pupils speak of a regime of terror based on public humiliation and both public and private violence. The word “thug” is frequently invoked.

When I wrote about Marmion, without naming him, in my book Muck and Merlot in 2004, I recalled that in my time at Belvedere there was a belief amongst the boys that he had been removed from Clongowes because he had broken a boy’s jaw. We were very clear about that, but it was hearsay, of course.

In the Jesuit Response of 2021, we read that there is no record of any boy’s jaw being broken but we do know that one of Marmion’s victims required medical attention after an assault. I suspect this is the origin of the story that was common currency at Belvedere. Whatever about the boy’s jaw, the fact that any child or young person needed to be treated by a doctor after being “punished” by a headmaster, let alone a Jesuit headmaster, is shocking.

Such Jesuit records as survive from this time drip with euphemism and diplomacy. His early months as Prefect of Studies were commented on as follows in an Irish Visitor’s report: “In regard to standards of work in the school, Joseph Marmion…is much more active than his predecessor…. Some thought him too severe in dealing with the boys at the outset but he seems to be maintaining a better balance of late. He… ought to do well if he can overcome a certain ruthlessness and impatience, which betray him at times into roughness of manner and speech”.

The Visitor was clearly taken in, as so many were during his life, by Marmion the charmer, the arch-manipulator. We know now that, if anything, his behaviour got worse and worse until he had to be removed.

One former pupil is quoted in the Jesuit Response as saying “He was noted for beating boys in his office, punishment not being commensurate with the crime. I will always remember a terrible beating I received…. Fr Marmion... laid into me with his pandy bat on the hands, arms, face, back and the backside for what seemed like a lifetime. I had bruises all over... It was not a judicial punishment but an enraged assault and humiliation. I can still remember his face as he did so.”

Is this what was meant by “roughness of manner?  Or being “too severe”? It must have been clear to anyone visiting the school that this was not a happy place. But boys who are abused don’t talk about it. A child who has been beaten without mercy will almost always feel shame; he won’t be inclined to share the experience. All of the boys at Clongowes at this stage would have been terrified of the Prefect of Studies. They knew he was untouchable but they themselves would have felt wholly vulnerable. Were there letters home complaining of ill-treatment (or worse)? It would not surprise me if there were none.

It was commonplace for Marmion to beat boys on the bare buttocks, a procedure that doubtless involved sexual gratification for him and even further humiliation for the child. Pulling down trousers and underpants also provided convenient access to a boy’s genitals.

Marmion had an obsession – a lifelong preoccupation - with masturbation. At Clongowes he asked one boy certain leading questions which were clearly meant to probe his sexual orientation, something that would have been unclear in any event at the age of 14. He asked this child if he fantasised about males or females when he masturbated. The boy, mortified, replied that he didn’t know. Marmion then proceeded to take hold of his penis and masturbated him, saying that this was the way to find out.

Another boy was summoned for a beating and told to pull down his trousers and underpants whereupon the Prefect of Studies grasped his genitals and masturbated him. This was described by the victim as an out of body experience. Marmion commented afterwards that this had been “better than a punishment”.

Another boy was brought by Marmion to his office and given a bar of chocolate. Asked if he knew the facts of life, he said that he did. Not according to so-and-so, said Marmion, naming another boy. Marmion then showed him a series of slides showing semi-naked people and he was asked about various parts of the body. Asked if he had any questions he said no, and fled.

When not engaging in sexual acts with young boys, Marmion enjoyed an orgy of random punishments, threats of expulsion and ridicule. The latter including one quiet and retiring boy being told, on the eve of his Inter Cert, “you will never amount to anything.”

This Old Clongownian’s account of Marmion’s delight in humiliating children represents a thread that runs right through his teaching career:

“Being boys, we had to pretend that we were strong and could take a beating without blubbering. But two boys who struggled academically in this class were beaten every week. It was not enough for Marmion to beat them, he also revelled in humiliating as they invariably cried and Marmion obviously derived huge enjoyment from humiliating them in front of everybody. It also served the purpose of striking fear into the rest of us, as we all knew we could be next.”

One boy has said that he was traumatised at watching a boy being brought to the front of the class and made to cry by Marmion who, at the sight of the child’s tears, redoubled his mockery. Another recalls being beaten by Marmion until he was crying uncontrollably in front of the whole class.

Revelling, as he did, in his ability to make the boys in his care utterly miserable and wretched, Marmion often wallowed in self-pity. He wrote to the Provincial in early 1969, before he was sent to Belvedere: “When I was a tertian I had a nervous breakdown which lasted a year and left me with a terrible dread of getting another. I had more or less recovered when I was sent to Clongowes as Pref. Stud. After two years of that I got another which again lasted a year and left various after-effects. One of these is an utter dread of being on my own or among strangers. I just can’t bear it. When I am in strange situations or under any sort of strain I get the most violent nausea so that I can’t sit still and have to go off for a hike. Even when I visit my own family, or friends, I get attacks of this and it is very embarrassing but they understand.”

If, as he claims, he had a second nervous breakdown while in charge of the boys at Clongowes, why did he not step down, take sick leave, appeal for help? And did none of his fellow Jesuit notice anything was amiss? They may not have been aware of the sexual assaults and may not have appreciated the full extent of the violence he inflicted on pupils, or even his outbreaks of uncontrolled raging fury, but surely someone realised that he was not coping? Or maybe they were afraid of him.

It's clear that the Jesuits failed in their duty of care to a member of the Order, let alone hundreds of children. And I use the word “children” advisedly. Around the time that the Jesuits came clean about Marmion, there was much use of phrases like “young men”. It was not young men crying uncontrollably in front of their classmates, it was not young men being made to ejaculate by the huge hand of a Jesuit priest. It was children.

During his three years at Clongowes as Prefect of Studies, Marmion appears in several photographs in The Clongownian. Some of the boys pictured with him, in their formal ranks, manage to smile; Marmion does not, nor does he scowl; his expression seems to be one of blank sadness.

Indeed, looking at The Clongownian for these years, the Prefect of Studies’ appearances are in inverse proportion to the havoc he was wreaking on young lives. He makes few appearances and merits less than a handful of mentions. He proposes the toast to the guests at College Day in May 1964, welcoming in particular Dr MacQuaid, the Old Clongownian archbishop of Dublin who ruled his archdiocese with a rod or iron between 1940 and 1972.

Photo: The Clongownian 1964

Marmion is conspicuously absent from a photograph of the huge group that had gathered for Union Day in 1965 but he is credited with having played “LP records” of The Gypsy Baron for a group of boys who were going to see it performed by the Dublin Grand Opera Society.

By this time the Provincial would have decided to remove Marmion from Clongowes at the end of his third year there; perhaps the stories of violence and hints of impropriety eventually hit home. The McMahon Visitation had caused some distress amongst the Jesuits, not least his order to close Tullabeg. His other decision, the appointment of Marmion to Clongowes, had ended in disaster and this may have been the source of some satisfaction. A letter dated just before the revelations of September 1977 refers to his being “appointed as Prefect of Studies by the then visitor, Fr. MacMahon. He was in that office for three years but the problems of his personality gave rise to considerable difficulties for others. One informant who knows him well sums up his difficulties in being an undeveloped adolescent.”

Despite these considerable difficulties and the horrendous ones for “others”, he was moved back to the Crescent where he took up a teaching post at the start of the 1965/6 academic year and was given a whole new group of young boys on whom to prey and to humiliate. Clongowes’ motto is aeterna non caduca. It certainly felt like an eternity to many of those who were in what passed for its care.

The valediction in The Clongownian 1966 seems euphemistic, diplomatic and guarded:

“Father Marmion is another who left us last summer. We thank him for his tremendous interest in Clongowes and devotion to its boys, manifested in the most genuine way – by endless hard work and availability. It is said that the last light to be extinguished in the Vatican is that in the Pope’s own study. Certainly the last one to go out in Clongowes – and the last strain of music to die away – has been almost always in Father Joe’s office. We wish him every happiness in his return to the Crescent which, we know, has long been a rival to Clongowes for first place in his heart.”

When I quoted this to a fellow Old Belvederian he said “There’s a conspicuous assumption that he had a heart. I never saw a shred of evidence.”

During Marmion’s first term back in Limerick, he would have read in the papers that Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had marked the conclusion of Vatican II with a sermon at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral. “No change will worry the tranquillity of your Christian lives,” McQuaid told the congregation. If he meant what he said, he was delusional. Huge changes were coming and Joseph Marmion would spend the rest of his life convinced that most of them were simply wrong.

When I was writing the above, I recalled an incident during my own brief teaching career at St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham. I asked a bright 12 year old boy to stay after class because I wanted to ask him why his work had declined over the previous few weeks. He was sitting at his desk, head hung over his copybook as I told him that I was disappointed in his recent decline. And as I spoke to him, quite gently, I noticed blots appearing on his Latin prep – these were the days of fountain pens – and I suddenly realised, with horror, that he was crying and his tears were falling on to the page.

I felt utterly wretched, changed my tune and my tone and tried to cheer him up. He wiped his eyes, managed a smile, and I went off feeling terrible. That was the only time I ever made a boy cry and it was not witnessed by his classmates. I still feel bad about it.

Chapter Five: THE CRESCENT: EXIT A SNOB?

Joseph Marmion was probably well into his dependency on benzodiazepines when he returned to the Crescent after his three disastrous years at the helm in Clongowes. Jesuit colleagues recall his use of Valium (diazepam), a drug that was introduced in 1963. Possible side effects of diazepam include an increase in sex drive and, ironically, depression and anxiety.

The two young Jesuits who had taken Fr McMahon, the American “Visitor” on a fishing trip and managed to land two headships were now reunited, with Fr Troddyn as Marmion’s boss. Always uncomfortable with authority, this must have been unsettling for Marmion.

However, if Marmion had anything even vaguely resembling a happy place, it seems to have been the Crescent. He had been there as a scholastic in the early 1950s and more recently before being plucked from Limerick as Prefect of Studies at Clongowes.

If it was his happy place, it certainly wasn’t for his pupils, some of whom have spoken of the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation that attended Marmion. While other teachers might be cross, they recall, none of them could instil fear like he could. One Old Crescentian told friends, many years after leaving school, that he had been raped by Marmion.

According to The Jesuit Response of 2021, Old Crescentians told how “Marmion would punish pupils by requiring them to complete a ‘duck walk’ which involved walking across a room multiple times on their hunkers. A similar punishment was to have a student crawl up and down a room on hands and knees in front of other pupils. ‘Another of Marmion’s punishments was to have the boy made to stand on top of a desk/chair and stand on one leg with his arm in the air. You might have to shout out the window what you had done wrong, or hold stacks of books in the air”.

A Jesuit who was taught by Marmion at this time at the Crescent recalled how a boy had been summoned to the top of the classroom after making a minor error. He was told to roll up his trouser leg whereupon Marmion slapped his thigh with the full force of his enormous hand. The boy’s leg immediately swelled up and he was unable to unroll his trousers. He says that everyone in the class was embarrassed at what had happened.

Marmion may have liked the Crescent but a story has often been told of how a heavy schoolbag was dropped down a stairwell aimed at his head. It missed. The boys present at the time were questioned, presumably by Fr Troddyn, the Prefect of Studies, but they seem to have applied Marmion’s oft-proclaimed maxim of “deny everything” and the matter was closed. This incident doesn’t sound like a schoolboy jape to me; it sounds more like revenge sought by children whose natural sense of justice has been outraged.

Having become accustomed to beating boys as Prefect of Studies, Marmion did the same at the Crescent although he had no authority to do so. In Jesuit schools it was never permitted for teachers to use a leather strap in the classroom. This punishment was reserved to the Prefect of Studies, on the basis that children could be hit, but not in the heat of the moment. It is astonishing that Marmion got away with this. Perhaps he tried to justify his actions on the basis that he had been a Prefect of Studies.

Marmion continued to produce operettas in which small boys were dressed in wigs and dresses, and made up to look like “girls”, a custom that we know now would have been wholeheartedly endorsed by Fr McMahon who had appointed him to Clongowes. One Jesuit who was at school at the Crescent in the latter half of the 1960s, as an older boy, recalls Marmion taking one of the small boys downstairs and remaining there alone with him for an inordinately long time, giving plenty of time for abuse to occur.

Another old boy has told how he participated in Marmion’s operettas but when he entered Rhetoric, or sixth year, he declined to be involved in that year’s production. Marmion proceeded to victimise him at every opportunity, including taking one his English essays and reading it aloud to the class while ridiculing it and its author. This is one of many examples of Marmion’s petulant, vindictive and – in a man now in his  40s – childish behaviour.

The Jesuit Response of 2021 mentions “an incident in which an appalling and unjustified punishment was inflicted upon [a boy] leading to a complaint by his father to Fr Troddyn SJ who was at that time Prefect of Studies... Fr Troddyn required Joseph Marmion to apologise to the pupil and to his parents for his conduct.”

One man, who attended the Crescent very briefly, was brought to the school on a Sunday to be measured for his opera costume. He recalls how he was made to wear tights and to sit on Marmion’s lap. He knew it was “wrong” but did not mention anything to his parents. This was as Marmion’s time in the Crescent was coming to an end, during the academic year of 1968/9.

As the end of the decade drew near, it was decided that the Jesuits could not justify continuing to run two secondary schools in Limerick, the Crescent for day boys in the city centre, and Mungret College, a boarding school, at Raheen near Clarina, beyond the suburbs. Mungret closed in 1974 and it was decided, not without controversy nor internal divisions, that the Crescent should move to Dooradoyle and become a comprehensive school, even a co-educational one (if only partly at first).

There is considerable evidence that Marmion was implacably opposed to this development when it was first mooted in the late 1960s. Co-education would remove any reason to dress pubescent and pre-pubescent boys as “girls” and, in any case, he had spent his whole life in all-male communities.

The man charged with the task of creating the new school at Dooradoyle was Old Crescentian Fr Thomas J Morrissey SJ (1929-) and although he had never lived in community with Marmion, he was clear that he didn’t want him in the new school. He knew that Marmion was a vocal opponent of the new school and that he was a divisive figure. He is also recorded as being aware of him being “harsh” and having favourites, and having been surprised at his appointment to Clongowes in 1962. “Fr Morrissey had felt at the outset that that was unlikely to prove a successful appointment given his personality,” according to The Jesuit Response.

There is a strong suggestion, too, that as a conservative in all matters, he would have baulked at the notion of a non-fee-paying, non-selective school, regardless of the sex of the pupils. Such establishments were even more unusual in Ireland than they are now and well outside his experience.

In the Visitation report for 1969, there is a reference to the plans for a comprehensive school being opposed by a vocal and “small minority within the community”. The provincial notes that “this summer I will remove two of the men” to whom this refers. And so, Marmion was removed.

Several Old Crescentians maintain that Fr Troddyn knew about Marmion’s bullying and emotionally abusive behaviour. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine him being ignorant of it, given that he had made Marmion apologise to a boy who had been harshly treated. But according to The Jesuit Response, there is no suggestion that Marmion was removed from the Crescent because of unacceptable treatment of the boys.

The powers-that-were could live with that. But they couldn’t deal with Marmion being a bitterly divisive influence within the community as it embarked on a brave new project at the dawn of the 1970s. It is not clear how he took the Provincial’s decision to deploy him elsewhere, but his divisive influence would be transplanted to fertile ground in the community at Belvedere in Dublin. He arrived there in time for the start of the Autumn term in 1969.

And so did I.

Chapter Six: THE MOVE TO BELVEDERE

“The child is right," she announced firmly.
Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong.” 

-Mary Norton, The Borrowers

As the 1960s fizzled out, Belvedere College, Dublin was crumbling, and in more senses than one. Founded by the Jesuits in 1832, just around the corner in Hardwicke Street, it moved to the neo-classical splendour of Belvedere House, the town house of the earls of Belvedere, in 1841. Started in 1775 under Robert West, the building was completed in 1786 by the second earl, George Rochfort, and under the architect Michael Stapleton, at the vast cost of 24,000 pounds.

Initially boys were taught beneath magnificent stucco work which often featured classical scenes considered too racy for adolescents. They were covered in order to preserve the modesty of the naked figures.

Neighbouring houses were acquired, including the town residence of the Catholic earls of Fingall and the core of the Senior House was built in the late nineteenth century, extended in the 1920s. An ugly and charmless 1970s block, known as the Kerr Wing, named after the Rector who welcomed Marmion, replaced the damp and decrepit Victorian theatre in which James Joyce had appeared in a production of F. Anstey’s Vice Versa, an experience described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 2004 the Dargan Moloney Science and Technology Block opened on the site of the cloistered tuck shop and Junior House lavatories, Temple Graham yard and the Georgian house known to generations of Belvederians as Number Nine, riddled with dry rot for decades. This complex contains the O’Reilly Theatre, named in honour of old boy Sir Anthony O’Reilly.

In 1969, the school comprised the redbrick Senior House, the 1950s Junior House that had replaced several Georgian houses, and the mouldering theatre in which PE lessons were held. In the centre stood Belvedere House, home of the Jesuit community. One Jesuit has described Belvedere House at this time as “a nest of vipers”. It was certainly a divided nest, dominated by an old guard of conservatives who were still struggling with the reforms of Vatican II, and with a minority of younger, more progressive men who tended to find the atmosphere depressing, oppressive and far from welcoming.

The old guard – led by the statuesque and booming “Jacko” Leonard – took the new arrival from Limerick to their bosom. He had left the forward-looking Crescent and landed in a fee-paying, selective school dominated by conservative Jesuits. A Visitation report in the early 1970s describes the community as “one of the most closed…to new thinking and new needs.”

The Jesuit Response says that fellow members of the Order recall that Marmion’s “personality was deployed destructively within the Belvedere Community during those years. The primary expression of his destructiveness lay in his subversive language and an undermining “humour”.”

Curiously, although he is recorded as presiding over the Poetry Debating Society in 1970, the editorial of The Belvederian makes no mention of him among the arrivals and departures of that academic year. The following year, it corrects another omission, but not this.

When Marmion arrived at Belvedere, the Rector was responsible for both school and community. By the early 1970s, the rôles were separated and then, in 1974, another extraordinary decision about Marmion was made, this time by the Irish Provincial, Cecil McGarry SJ (1929-2009). He appointed him Consultor in the Jesuit community in Belvedere House. In other words, Marmion was the Provincial’s “man” in the community. Marmion would report to the Provincial as he saw fit. It is hard to imagine a less reliable and more partisan witness. McGarry had entered the Novitiate at Emo the year after Marmion in 1946. He would have known him very well, warts and all.

So, although he was apparently a rank-and-file Jesuit at Belvedere, Marmion held a position of considerable influence. And as the 1970s progressed, his behaviour became more brazen. He seems to have been convinced that he could get away with anything he liked. And one thing that he liked as much as practising casual cruelty was the pubescent male body.

He taught French, German, English and music, the latter comprising singing lessons for the youngest boys in the Senior House.

At New Year 1971, shortly before decimal currency replaced pounds, shillings and pence, he produced his first operetta (such productions usually being described, rather grandly, as operas) at Belvedere, although A Night in Venice, with music by Johann Strauss, was actually performed in the auditorium of a nearby boy’s school. Belvedere’s own theatre had been condemned as a dangerous building by this stage and was awaiting demolition. The preparation for the opera included playing a tape recording of Marmion’s previous production at the Crescent.

His account of A Night in Venice in The Belvederian 1971 is characteristically upbeat and witty. “There are of course, two species of schoolboy:” he wrote, “those who are interested in taking part in the school operetta, and those who are not. The former are a very charming and talented group, endowed with generosity and discernment. They will certainly do very well in after-life, as bishops, stock-brokers and pillars of the community. The other group will inevitably turn out badly. Indeed, some of them are probably already known to the police. And it serves them right.”

The leading man was played by the 16-year old Jim Culleton, now a Jesuit. J. Dardis, later to be Provincial of the Order, is one of the chorus of “gentlemen”.

By the Summer of 1972, Marmion was taking his first Belvedere trip to Vienna. “Fr Marmion was our travel agent, guide, interpreter, teacher, musical advisor, spiritual guide and general manager,” a member of the group reported in the school annual. Presumably the spiritual guidance involved a heavy emphasis on masturbation, Marmion’s specialist subject in the confessional and elsewhere.

The opera this year was Carl Zeller’s The Birdseller, another Viennese affair, presented just a couple of weeks before Bloody Sunday in Derry. Marmion in his report on the production took the opportunity to take a swipe at the earlier tradition of performing Gilbert & Sullivan.

There seems to have been no return to Vienna in 1973 except in musical form with a production of The Beggar Student by Carl Millöcker, the first performance coinciding precisely with Ireland’s accession to the EEC. Marmion recounts that “A wonderful dressmaker was another “find”; she made a set of very pretty dirndls”. Who this was we will never know as he doesn’t bother to mention her by name.

In 1974, the year of the Sunningdale Agreement, there was a return to Strauss with The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief and the first signs of the competition that Marmion so resented when Gerry Haugh had III Syntax I present The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew in the Audio-Visual Room.

1975, the year of the Herrema kidnapping and the death of de Valera, saw Strauss again, this time with The Gypsy Baron. That year’s Belvederian was a peculiarly emaciated affair with no room for Marmion’s account of the production. Competition, however, increased, with Gerry Haugh’s production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer, this time drawing from several years in the school.

The following year, which would be remembered for its heatwave and drought, Mr Haugh was even more ambitious when he tackled Shakespeare’s Richard III while Marmion presented Prince Methusalem – Strauss again – on the final night of which the new Fr Charlie Byrne Trophy was presented to Donal Ballance of the stage team. This was in memory of the man who had produced countless Gilbert & Sullivan operettas at Belvedere and was presented by Andrew Smyth OB who spoke nostalgically of those happy days. Marmion scowled throughout.

Marmion’s last opera under his complete control, came in January 1977 and was, once again,  A Night in Venice, suggesting, perhaps, that the Viennese canon was becoming exhausted. Could Belvedere operettas survive without the talents of various leavers, he wondered in his very brief account of the production. “For the answer to this question,” he wrote, “if there is one, see next year’s Belvederian, if there is one.” Had there been any justice, there would have been no operetta in which Marmion had any part, but this was not to be.

Meanwhile, Marmion’s jealousy of Gerry Haugh (or “Mary” as he now called him when talking to boys) was reaching boiling point, despite the assistance Mr Haugh always gave during the operas. Mr Haugh presented no fewer than three plays that year. His time was about to come. Boys who took part in Mr Haugh’s recently formed Belvedere College Dramatic Society were not welcome in Marmion’s operettas. And I was one of them.

Everybody knew about Marmion’s temper, his bullying, the pleasure he took in demeaning boys in front of their peers, and his physical violence. Most of us knew that he “measured” small boys for the opera costumes stark naked and in the privacy of his own room. Many boys knew that he was inclined to touch boys’ genitals as he did so, because it had happened to them. Everybody knew that these same costumes rarely fitted properly and that the small boys would be made up to look like girls.

What very few of us knew was that Marmion was perpetrating serious sexual assaults on Belvedere boys in the privacy of a different room, safely distant from the school and Jesuit eyes, in Vienna. And it was not talked about. Events that occurred on Marmion’s next trip to Vienna, in the Summer of 1977, would change all that.

Interlude: A BOY’S OWN STORY

One of those upon whom Marmion preyed at Belvedere wrote the following account in an attempt to make sense of what had happened to him.

The priest rose from the stool and shuffled the sheet music that lay on top of the piano, peering over his glasses, looking for the pages he needed. The music room had chilled quickly in the December afternoon after the boys had departed from their singing practice. The room was silent except for the ticking of the ancient wall-clock and the rustling of paper as the priest sorted his music. He found the sheet he was looking for and stuffed it into a folder before closing the piano lid. He turned to the young boy who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room and, in a detached and thin tone of voice, said: “Alright, follow me.”

The music room plunged into darkness as he switched off the lights and they both stepped down into the mosaic-tiled corridor opposite the school chapel, the chapel where James Joyce had once listened fearfully to the hell-invoking preaching of another Jesuit. They walked out into the yard, an incongruous pair, the priest tall and huge and striding in his chalky black cassock, his shock of white hair and the black cassock wings flying behind him, the small boy six feet behind trying to keep up without running as they crossed to the Junior School building where the priest had his living quarters.

The priest had a bit of a reputation in the school, a charismatic but eccentric man whose organizational and creative talents enabled the transformation of a gaggle of tuneless teenagers into a praiseworthy opera production every January. A better than average teacher who graded Christmas exam papers by throwing them up the main staircase of the school and then allocating grades based on how far down the stairs they had slid. A priest who was known by the boys for his seven-minute masses and often irreverent and prurient humour. A petulant and spiteful colleague when crossed who was renowned for his biting sarcasm and ability to humiliate without pity. A silver jubilarian of the Society of Jesus whose granduncle, a famous Cistercian monk, was almost certainly bound for sainthood. He’d always been a bit edgy and prone to violent outburst, well-known for it in the other Jesuit schools he’d taught at, but everyone had always avoided picking a fight with him or cautioning him for his frequent irreligious behaviour. Back in 1943, he’d been a rebellious and exuberant student when he went straight into the priesthood from school, and those responsible for his training hadn’t really succeeded in extinguishing those unpriestly qualities. There were many who were baffled by his ability to shed criticism and remonstration and punishments like so many discarded skins.

The priest and the boy crossed the courtyard climbed the front steps of the Junior School and walked up the four flights of stairs to the priest’s bedroom. The young boy was a bit intimidated by the whole thing. It was the first time he had ever been alone with this huge priest and, though he didn’t really fear him, the proximity of this priest about whom his parents spoke so reverently and admiringly, the great man who had chosen their son to be in the school opera production, was a little unnerving. Earlier, when he had been instructed by the priest to stay behind for a costume fitting, he was excited that it was all finally becoming real, that the opera was becoming real, that all the singing practice had some purpose. The boy, in his first few months at this prestigious school, was determined to not disappoint anyone. In particular, he was determined to not disappoint this great man.

The priest unlocked the door to the bed-sitting room, and as they entered the boy’s nose was assaulted by the musty room, the smell a strange mix of mildewed clothing and fetid air. A bed sat in the corner by a window that looked out on the schoolyard and a rack of brightly coloured peasant opera costumes flanked the other side of the window. The priest dumped his folder of music on the bed and turned to the young boy.

“Take all your clothes off and stand against that wall” he said, pointing to the wall adjacent to the door. Taken aback, the boy hesitated briefly and then slowly and evermore reluctantly removed his school blazer, his tie, shirt and pants and stood uncomfortably in his underwear and stockings. The boy watched the priest’s back as the he riffled through the rack of dresses and then turned to him holding a cloth measuring tape in one hand and what looked like a pair of tights in the other. As the priest turned, his face went from detached and white to annoyed and dark, and in a voice tinged with irritation, he said: “Everything off, I told you to take everything off.”

Now startled and painfully uncomfortable, the boy removed his underpants and socks and stood naked and fearful against the wall, the chill of the room causing goosepimples to rise on his skin. Nakedness in front of anyone apart from a family doctor was just not a thing for a 13-year-old in Ireland of 1973. Not even his mother or father would have contemplated seeing their son naked at any time since his Holy Communion, so to be naked in front of anyone at this point in his life, let alone an authority figure of the magnitude of this priest, was now not only greatly intimidating but well on the way to terrifying.

The priest knelt in front of the boy, the measuring tape and the nylons still in his hands. His head was level with the boy’s head and less than six inches separated the priest’s bald spot from the boy’s forehead The boy was acutely aware of the priest’s musty body odour and a waft of bad breath emanated from the priest’s heavy breathing. He felt his foot being lifted and placed into the tights, then the other, and then he felt the priest’s rough hands against his legs as the tights were pulled and rolled up until they reached his waist. He was aware of the priest’s bald spot below his chin and the fumbling of hands behind his back as the tape measure was pulled tight around his buttocks. His testicles were cupped in one of those huge hands while the other lifted his penis. And as the manipulation continued, the questions came. The questions about erections, about masturbation, about ejaculation, about impure thoughts, about sexual hygiene, all of which terms were completely unknown to this thirteen-year-old whose awareness of sexuality was devoid of any comprehension.

“Do you masturbate, boy?” The priest is looking not at the boy’s eyes but at the boy’s groin.

“What is masturbate, Father?” The boy thinks he has heard the word before in a rude context but doesn’t want to give a wrong answer. He is beyond uncomfortable at what is happening. He sees the priest as though out of the wrong end of a telescope, as though he is watching what is happening from a distance.

“Does your penis get hard?” The priest’s breath is heavy and short, almost panting.

“I don’t understand, Father.” The boy has heard of ‘stiff mickeys’ furtively giggled from other boys but has no idea what it means. Ignorance seems to be the best policy here.

The priest cupped the boy’s scrotum and penis through the loose nylons with one hand and then touched the boy’s penis with his other. “Does this ever get hard?”

“I don’t think so, Father.” The boy is now terrified by what is happening.

The hand cupping the scrotum and penis remained in place while the other went to the boy’s anus, a finger probing between the cheeks, pushing at the nylons. Suddenly, the door to the boy’s right was knocked on and opened almost at the same time and a head and a hand appeared round the door.

“Hello, Joe....ah, you’re busy, I’ll come back later”

“It’s OK, Jim, I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

The other man closed the door and left and the priest got to his feet. He pulled a costume dress from the rack and threw it at the boy.

“Put that on and if it’s too tight, tell me.”

The boy awkwardly climbed into the bright peasant dress and pulled the straps over his shoulders. The ancient, misshapen costume, the victim of too many years of school plays and body sizes, felt like a sack on his body.

“It fits well, Father.”

“Good, now get dressed and be off with you. Tell your parents that you will be in the opera chorus and that you are to be one of the village peasant girls.”

“Yes, Father.”

The boy gets dressed quickly, extraordinarily relieved he is being allowed to leave at last and thinking only of the freedom of the street outside.

Chapter Seven: VIENNA – DER MONSTER VON BELVEDERE

Headline in the Austrian newspaper Kurier, 2021

Photo: David Barry, by kind permission

Marmion took his first group of Belvedere boys on what was to become an annual school trip to Vienna in the Summer of 1971.^[1] They stayed in a religious hostel known as the Kolpinghaus , where he had a private apartment, and the usual daily schedule was as follows. In the mornings, there would be German lessons with Marmion and a Viennese man called Karl Hörmann, a friend of his who “was always around the place.” It seems unlikely that this was the Karl Hörmann who was an academic theologian at the University of Vienna.^[2]

Afternoons were free and boys were encouraged to return in time for Mass before supper. On occasion, Marmion would invite particularly favoured pupils to dine alone with him at a restaurant and then go on to see an operetta. The sexual abuse that happened in Vienna has been described by one who was there as more brazen and more “genitally focussed” than at school.

Benedictine institutions form a thread that runs through the extended Marmion story and one of them would be where the beginning of the end of his teaching career would occur. On a hot day in August 1977, Marmion took his Vienna group on a 90 minute train journey to see the Benedictine Abbey at Melk, founded in the eleventh century and featuring one of the most important examples of baroque architecture in Europe. Standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking the town and the river Danube, it is celebrated for its marble hall and for the abbey church that features a remarkable trompe d’oeil painting within its dome. Melk is mentioned in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and features in Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s account of his walk across 1930s Europe, A Time of Gifts.

Seeing the trompe d’oeil ceiling  close up involves a steep climb to a narrow gallery. “There were too many of us to all go up at the one time, so Marmion headed off with the first lot and the rest of us sat outside on the steps in the sun,” says one person who was there on the day. “We got chatting and someone – I can’t remember who it was – let slip something about what had happened to him in Marmion’s room and suddenly everyone – well almost everyone - was saying oh did that happen to you too? It was amazing. We all knew what Marmion had done to us but we never talked about it, and now we were discovering that we were not alone.”

“There was a sense of relief, I suppose,” he says. “And the atmosphere changed. When Marmion came back he must have noticed that something was up. But as far as I remember there was no talk of doing anything about it. On the other hand, nothing was going to be the same again. I suppose we had a kind of weapon, we had a sort of defence now. But there was no plan. It was between ourselves.”

Another member of the same Vienna group recalls “It was obvious that Marmion… you know… fancied me. I’d been up during the night with a tummy bug but I was fine in the morning. But one guy… oh, you know, the kind of lick-arse whose tongue is always hanging out in the presence of any authority figure… he told Marmion that I’d been sick. The bastard.”

“This was the kind of opportunity that Marmion loved and straight away he brought me to his room. He made me strip, completely, and then he ‘checked’ every inch of my body. Then he told me to get into bed – his bed – and wait. After quite a while he came back – he must have been getting rid of the others - and it was obvious right away he wanted to get hold of my penis and suddenly I was looking around for a weapon. I was frantic to get away and I didn’t let him lay a finger on me. And eventually he backed off. He knew that he really needed me for the opera that year. He didn’t want to risk losing me.”

Other boys didn’t escape Marmion’s lustful clutches. Many would have their pants pulled down and told to cough while Marmion held their testicles. Usually they would  have their temperatures taken rectally. He was constantly detecting non-existent symptoms, often a spurious rash.

One member of a Vienna group recalled, in the Restorative Justice process, his experience: “He took me to a fancy restaurant…(where I had my first glass of wine), a theatre show, and then back to his room… There, under the guise of a ‘medical exam’, he pulled down my pants, touched my penis (retracting the foreskin), inserted a rectal thermometer in my anus, and fondled my buttocks. He also inquired about my sexual experience to date…”

Another person who was similarly abused says: “He always operated as if what he was doing was the most natural thing in the world. He was in charge. You did as you were told.” It’s important to remember that these boys were, for the most part, 13 or 14 years old at the time.

Here are the words of someone who participated in the Restorative Justice programme. The thing was, “don’t get sick. If you got sick, you got brought to his room. Was I brought to his room, examined and masturbated? Yes.”

Sometimes boys who got “sick” were given “medicine”, apparently a sedative of some kind, and taken to sleep in Marmion’s room while they “recovered”.

On the 1977 trip when this happened to one of the group two of his friends waited until Marmion went out and then rescued him, groggy and unable to remember what had happened, from a camp bed in Marmion’s bed room.

As we have already seen, Marmion became dependent on benzodiazepine drugs to deal with anxiety, almost certainly by the time he arrived at Belvedere. By 1977, the latest addition to this class of drug was lorazepam, sold under the brand name Ativan and prescribed as an anxiolytic. Lorazepam, licenced in Ireland and the UK before receiving approval in the US, is also noted for inducing amnesia when used in high doses.

Photo: Kurier, Wien

In Vienna, many boys were masturbated; some were “massaged” in the bath. Apart from inserting a thermometer into boys anuses, there have been no accounts to date of Marmion engaging in actual penetrative sex with boys. But Vienna offered Marmion opportunities for sexual predation that he had not enjoyed since he had been Prefect of Studies at Clongowes. Here he was fully in charge of boys who were very young and far from home. There was no danger of being interrupted by a Jesuit colleague, even one who was his friend and who knew what he was up to. There was much less need for caution.

September 1977 dawned breezy and on the cool side. Jack Lynch had recently replaced Liam Cosgrave as Taoiseach, RTE’s single channel television output still included The Riordans, Quicksilver, Hall’s Pictorial Weekly and Wanderly Wagon, and within days Marc Bolan of T-Rex would be killed in a car crash in London. Boys and teachers returned to Belvedere on the first of the month.

The first intervention in the Marmion affair may have been made by Riocard O Tiarnaigh, a well-liked teacher of Irish. This is disputed. His son, also Riocard, who was in First Syntax at the time, has given me his account of what happened.

That something dreadfully untoward concerning Marmion had happened on
the summer tour to Vienna was THE BIG NEWS for the boys starting
fourth year in the first week of September 1977. This was particularly the
case with the boys in 1S1 and 1S2, as together in a double class we
had Marmion daily for German. Plus he taught 1S2 French and was their
"form master". I'm not exactly sure if that is the correct
terminology. At any rate, for them he was something along the lines of
spiritual director. The boys, who had gone on the tour to Vienna that
summer came primarily, if not exclusively, from those two classes.

As soon as I got in the first day of that academic year, I was picking up on the stories
going around among my classmates. I never spoke to the person, who was
the main victim on the tour [who appeared to have been drugged] about what had happened, although I soon found out who it was. That was common knowledge. I also didn't speak directly to the boys, who rescued him from Marmion's private quarters, although it wasn't long before I became aware of their identities too.
I listened with shock and disgust to all the talk for a day or two,
before deciding to pass on what I had heard, to my dad. I didn't have
to delay or think long about broaching the subject with him, as we had
an excellent, if at times fiery, relationship, and I knew he should
know and would want to know.

I remember telling him about it driving home in the car after school.
I would say it was the Tuesday at the earliest and the Thursday at the
latest. As I would likely have had a rugby match on the Wednesday. He went to the headmaster's office the very next day, which is where he passed on the information, I had given him, to Noel Barber. That would make it the Friday, when he
spoke to the headmaster. He told me the same afternoon after school,
as we were travelling home together in the car, how the meeting had
gone.

I remember my dad not being impressed with Barber's dismissive
reaction, that this information, coming from me, was "mere childish
tittle-tattle", or words to that effect. To this my dad made the
point, that I wouldn't have come to him with this information in the
first place, if I didn't think there was something to it, and that he
trusted my judgement. It's possible Barber was already in a state of
alarm and/or panic and was brushing off my dad, because he was already
in damage-limitation mode. It is also possible that it was from my
dad that he was informed for the first time of the happenings in
Vienna.”

[This account is disputed. Fr Barber was in a state of shock and his first instinct was to dismiss the story. This may also explain why he says that he has no recollection of the conversation with Mr O Tiarnaigh, although he accepts that it must have happened.]

Des Traynor^[3], close associate of Charlie Haughey (by now rehabilitated after the Arms Trial, and newly appointed as Minister for Health), joint managing director of the Guinness Mahon merchant bank and a Belvedere parent, was about to make a very important phone call. The catharsis of Melk had, as we have seen, loosened tongues and one of his sons, who had been on the Vienna trip in 1976, had heard, like many in the school, that Marmion’s behaviour in 1977 had been “worse than ever.” Des Traynor was told about the Vienna scandal by his son and he then contacted, through an intermediary, Paul Andrews SJ (1927-2012) as Rector of Belvedere. The intermediary knew Andrews; Traynor did not. I suspect that this happened in late August.

Contrary to the account given in The Jesuit Response, I have been reliably told that Andrews, arguably Marmion’s oldest and closest friend in the Order, after some time told the intermediary that he had looked into the matter but that there was nothing he could do. The intermediary reported back to Traynor that Andrews, unable to “do anything”, had suggested approaching Fr Barber.

It seems incredible that Andrews later believed that he had been contacted by Traynor in the Spring of 1978. His tardiness in acting suggests that he either didn’t take the matter seriously or was seeking to protect his friend, kicked for touch and eventually summoned the headmaster, Noel Barber SJ^[4]. He could, of course, argue that Fr Barber was in charge of the school and that it was a school matter. Andrews, himself, presided over the Jesuit community in Belvedere House and it seems not to have bothered him unduly that a member of that community was being accused of sexual assaults on young boys. But there is more to the story than that.

^[1] It is unclear if there was a Vienna trip in 1973

^[2] Karl Hörmann 1915-2004

^[3]  James Desmond Traynor (1931-1994) was nicknamed “Charlie’s bag man” due to his long-term friendship with Charles J Haughey. While he managed offshore accounts for clients, he paid all his personal taxes and kept all of his money in Ireland.

ˇ^[4] Noel Barber SJ, an Old Belvederian, was appointed assistant headmaster of Belvedere College in 1971 and headmaster in 1973, succeeding Bob McGoran SJ.

Chapter Eight: MARMION CONFRONTED

“Deny everything” – Joseph Marmion SJ to every boy called out of his class to see the headmaster.

Fr Noel Barber SJ with Marmion in 1974

Photo: David Barry, by kind permission

At this stage it’s not surprising that many of those involved in what might have been Marmion’s downfall have a somewhat hazy memory of what happened when. So, let’s be clear, the fallout from the conversations in Melk concluded within the first fortnight in September 1977 as we shall see.

With the Rector refusing to act, Des Traynor requested a meeting with the headmaster, Fr Barber. This took place on a very busy day for all concerned, the first Saturday of term.

Fr Noel Barber has said that he received a phone call from the Rector, Fr Paul Andrews, on a Saturday morning at some time in early September 1977. In the light of later events, this call must have been made on 6 September 1977. The Rector wanted to see him in order to warn him of what was coming. Des Traynor’s meeting with Fr Barber may have been before or very shortly after this.

When they met, in Andrews’ office, Fr Barber was told that the Rector had received a phone call from someone who was not a Belvedere parent but who said that he had been asked by someone who had a son in the school to contact him as Rector. This parent, Andrews said, had heard his son “speaking on the phone” about Marmion’s inappropriate behaviour while in Vienna.

Fr Barber’s recollection is that Andrews said that the allegation involved touching boys’ genitals while in Vienna and possibly also in connection with the school opera. Andrews appears to have been Marmion’s “particular friend”^[5]when in training; it must have taken a lot out of him to be so direct and specific in this conversation.

It was agreed that the Rector, as head of the Jesuit community would speak to Marmion straight away and then to the Provincial. So why had he claimed that there was nothing he could do? When Andrews had spoken to Marmion, Fr Barber would do the same as headmaster.

In his meeting with Des Traynor, Fr Barber asked if he could talk to his son and Traynor agreed. This happened on the following Monday.

Fr Barber wanted to arrange a meeting with Marmion for later that day in order to discuss his questionable behaviour with boys, but, forewarned, Marmion tried to pre-empt him by approaching him in one of the common areas in Belvedere House. Fr Barber suggested that they should walk and talk and, as they did so, Marmion described what he had done in Vienna in terms that strongly suggested to Fr Barber that the information contained in the phone call to Andrews was true.

So, had he touched boys genitals in Vienna? Yes, he had, said Marmion, but then made the utterly outlandish claim that he had done so solely in the context of teaching boys about personal hygiene. One imagines Fr Barber’s chin hitting the ground at this point. Marmion was then brazen enough to claim that he had never acted improperly, despite having just admitted to handling the penises of 13 and 14 year old boys.

Then he dropped the real bombshell.

“I didn’t even have an erection,” he protested to the headmaster. Fr Barber was rarely, in my experience, at a loss for words but he must have been when he heard this. In the language of The Jesuit Response – no doubt heavily vetted by legal advisors – it is stated that Fr Barber believed that Marmion “was using boys for his own sexual gratification”.

It was agreed that Fr Barber would interview members of the Vienna group and this process began when the school reconvened on the following Monday, 8 September 1977. Fr Barber’s recollection of what happened then, as related in The Jesuit Response, is surprisingly vague considering the seismic nature of what was going on. Some members of that group have a clearer memory of what was involved.

According to one of them, “The figure that sticks in my head is 43. I think 43 of us were interviewed by Barber in his office. The Provincial was there too, I can still see where they were sitting. And notes were taken, rather like a doctor taking notes during a consultation.”

While the Provincial was present for some interviews, it is unlikely that he attended all of them. And it is likely that 6 or at most 10 boys were interviewed.

Another member of the group has a similar recollection and recalls being told not to be afraid to tell the truth. He adds “when Des Traynor contacted Andrews, Andrews did nothing and then when Mr Traynor put the screws on, Andrews kicked it all over to Barber…” Des Traynor did not “put the screws on” although this was commonly believed; he merely relayed what his son had told him, and stressed that he believed his son.

It seems that the first boy to be interviewed was Des Traynor’s son. He recalls that this took place in Belvedere House (which was considerate of Fr Barber; the headmaster’s office had disciplinary significance for boys). He recalls a strong sense of being “believed”.

Fr Barber’s recollection is that he reported the substance of what the boys said in their interviews to Andrews and he understood that Andrews was relaying this information – of which he cannot remember the details – to the Provincial. I believe that this is a rather optimistic view of Andrews who was almost certainly still trying to protect his friend.

Sometime previously, and not at Belvedere, Andrews had been accused of inappropriate behaviour with a child and had been exonerated (how so is unclear); he is said to have been very defensive of anyone who found himself in a similar situation. In more recent times, at least one credible accusation of child sexual abuse by Andrews has been made by a former pupil of St Declan’s, the special school in which he worked. This is one of many such accusations against at least 44 Irish Jesuits, living and dead, at the time of writing.

Fr Barber, according to The Jesuit Response, rapidly came to the conclusion that Marmion had to be removed from the school immediately. He recalls that Marmion came to him – clearly after he had realised that making up incredible and ludicrous excuses was not going to work – in a distressed and tearful state, convinced that he would be expelled from the Order. This was immediately before he was to see the Provincial. It is interesting to reflect that Marmion was eventually made to cry, in the presence of one his juniors in the Jesuits, by a group of young boys.

The Provincial at this time was Paddy Doyle SJ (1922-2008) who served in the role between 1975 and 1981. He succeeded Cecil McGarry SJ who was something of a radical despite having made the conservative Marmion is Consultor within the Belvedere Jesuit community. Doyle’s Provincialate has been described as involving “calmer waters.” One wonders how McGarry would have reacted to the Marmion affair.

The meeting with the Provincial turned out to be beyond Marmion’s wildest hopes. And although no record – as usual – survives, it’s clear that the  outcome was everything that Marmion could have hoped for. We must remember that the information about Marmion’s transgressions had been supplied to Doyle by a man who we know to have been his closest friend amongst the Jesuits and who we now know to have sexually abused at least one child. Once again, there is no record of what Andrews told Doyle.

 The Provincial wrote to Marmion on 14 September 1977, little more than a week since the first of the Vienna boys had been interviewed, concluding “I have been thinking and praying about this whole situation since we met, and will be particularly concerned to work with you over the coming months towards a good plan for the future.”

The plan involved Marmion being let off the hook. The reputation of Belvedere and of the Jesuits had to be protected. While Fr Barber had felt that Marmion must leave the school immediately he appears to have been over-ruled by the Provincial. However, there is disputed evidence that some parents of the Vienna group felt that Marmion’s sudden disappearance would attract attention and that there was a risk that the children could be traumatised once again.

When Fr Barber next met Des Traynor, probably in mid-September, he was told that removing Marmion could be problematic and that questions would be asked. Fr Barber asked what Traynor wanted to happen and he replied that he wanted Marmion to have absolutely no unsupervised access to children and the headmaster agreed.

So, while it now seems extraordinary that Marmion was not removed at once in September 1977, the decision to let him remain for the rest of the academic year seems to have suited everybody. But it was traumatic for the children who had to sit through his classes having given graphic evidence against him.

Marmion was required to relinquish all but the musical direction of the opera for that year. This aside, the opera was handed over to Gerry Haugh who was asked to take on the task by Fr Barber. He was not told why this decision had been made but Fr Barber said to him, by way of context, “we don’t like bullies”. The opera in question was called The Merry War and Gerry Haugh told me that “there was nothing at all merry about it.” He may have been in overall charge, but Marmion did nothing to conceal his fury at being diminished.

After Marmion died, Mr Haugh was asked to retrieve the scores of all his productions from Marmion’s quarters in Gardiner Street so that they could be placed in the school archive. “It was grim,” he told me in 2006. “And really very sad. His coat was on a hook on the door just as he had left it when he had walked out for the last time. And the marginal notes were quite deranged. Things like “they don’t appreciate my genius!” scrawled on the libretto…” He was aware from the late 1970s of precisely why Marmion was ultimately removed from the school, having been told by a number of his former pupils.

But back to the main story: on the brink of finding himself put out of the Order, he had escaped his rightful fate. Fr Houdini SJ. He remained, and still remains, a Jesuit priest in good standing.

So what saved his skin? Nobody can say for certain but there is a widespread belief amongst those he abused (and amongst some Jesuits) that grand-uncle Columba proved, once more, to be a most useful ally. Add to that his friend, Paul Andrews SJ, who shared his perversion, batting for him; and a Provincial who was either poorly informed, criminally negligent or simply not prepared to confront evil when it was staring him in the face. And into this heady mix we must add Marmion’s mastery of manipulation. At any rate, evil went unpunished. Indeed, thanks to the spinelessness of the Jesuit Order in Ireland over decades, it triumphed.

It triumphed in the sense that Marmion died, apparently without a stain on his character, almost a quarter of a century after he had been found to be a brutal bully, a savage thug, and a sexual abuser of little boys.

And in 2001, the following obituary appeared in The Clongownian, written by Conor Harper SJ who some of us at Belvedere used to refer to as “Marmion’s representative on earth”. It speaks for itself..

FATHER JOSEPH MARMION SJ

Joseph Ignatius Marmion was born in Liverpool on 24th November 1925. He received his early education in the local Jesuit school, St Francis Xavier's. During the war years he came to Clongowes. From the beginning Joe's talent and wit radiated for all to witness - but it was also accompanied by a strong will which was often uncompromising. In friendship he was loyal and true and he expected as much in return. He was deeply hurt by what he judged to be betrayal or disloyalty by those whom he considered to be his friends. And he kept these qualities throughout his life.

On 7th September 1943 Joe entered the Novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Emo. He followed the routine studies of the Jesuit formative years. Wherever he went (and he travelled a lot!) Joe made a lasting impression and he was often remembered by a myriad of hilarious episodes. The years of Jesuit formation in Ireland and in Germany were brightened for many by his sense of fun and laughter. Routine Jesuit life could resonate with merriment. Joe's style was unique and he was never comfortable in being constrained to adapt to any preconceived mould. He was always a congenial companion in congenial company where his innate charm, intelligence and wit could be given full rein.

This strength of character also brought him (and others) suffering and distress. He could never compromise on many of his strongly-held convictions and this often led to painful conflict with those whose equally strong views differed from his own. Joe could be impatient to the point of intolerance on these occasions. He was merciless in condemning what he considered to be falsehood and hypocrisy.

Joe loved travel and making voyages of discovery. Germany, France, Greece and, of course, his beloved Vienna (indeed the whole of Austria) all brought out in him the delight of discovering new worlds and new friends. He was ordained in Frankfurt on 31st July 1957.

His years in Ireland were a mixture of achievement and pain. He loved his years as scholastic and priest in the Crescent (1952-1954, 1959-1962, and 1965-1969) where his genius and talent had good scope. Throughout his life he always retained a special affection for Limerick and Crescent College.

Joe was Prefect of Studies in Clongowes from 1962-65. These were less than happy years for him, as for some others. He inherited a difficult situation that was not of his making and, even in his own judgement, he was not the most suitable person to deal with the very complex difficulties. If there was any one period of his life when Joe was deeply unhappy, it was this time in his beloved Clongowes.

When he was in Belvedere (1969-78) he made many important contributions. He revived the musical tradition of the College Opera, which had effectively died out after the halcyon Gilbert and Sullivan years. Many will remember the many operatic delights that Joe offered from Johann Strauss and the Viennese operas. He restored The Opera to its prized position as one of the major highlights of the Belvedere school calendar. When implored by some Old Belvederians to bring back Gilbert and Sullivan, Joe was adamant:  "No Gilbert! No Sullivan! No fear!"

Those who knew Joe best were always aware that he was not a man of short measures! At his best he was generous, warm-hearted, loyal and true. But, being a real human being, he also had some faults. He could be devastating in his disapproval. He took no hostages to fortune. If Joe disagreed with you, you always knew it at the earliest opportunity. He could do no other. Honour and personal integrity demanded such a course of action. No matter what the cost. But all those who knew him best were well aware of his great generosity and genuine concern.

In 1978 Joe took a year's sabbatical in Paris where he studied Scripture and Cathechetics. On his return to Dublin the following year he started giving Bible classes. He entitled his course: The Real Bible for Real People! He was also in demand for retreats and he even found some time to write.

It was during his final years of ministry as Chaplain to St Vincent's Private Hospital (1990-2000) that Joe really came into his own, as a pastor and a priest. He loved the pastoral ministry in the hospital and he was, in turn, greatly loved by the staff and patients.

His final illness took a heavy toll on his strength and energies. Despite his failing health he insisted on making a final effort to be present at the Beatification of his granduncle, Dom Columba Marmion. He deeply valued his personal meeting with Pope John Paul.

Joe died in St. Vincent's Private Hospital on 15th November 2000 where he was surrounded by his loving family, colleagues and friends. The end was as he would have wished. May he now rest in God's peace.

CH SJ

^[5] “Particular friendships” amongst Jesuit novices were strictly forbidden. In correspondence, Marmion referred to having a “PF”. Andrews entered the novitiate at Emo exactly a year after Marmion. He has been referred to as Marmion’s “best friend in the Order”.

Chapter Nine: MARMION’S REWARD

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

-       Albert Einstein

Photo courtesy of Irish Jesuit Provincialate

Joseph Marmion SJ, predatory paedophile, sadist, bully, was also a survivor. Throughout his career in the Jesuit order, he always seemed to have luck – or the support of his superiors – on his side. As we have seen, having been revealed to – at the very least – his friend the Rector, the Headmaster, the Provincial and many of the boys in the school, as a man who sexually abused children, he continued teaching at Belvedere for the academic year 1977-78. Then, the Jesuits sent him on “sabbatical” to Paris, not exactly a hardship posting. This period was spent with the Jesuit community at 42 Rue de Grenelle where he no doubt enthusiastically observed – one hopes from a distance – the young boys at the Lycée Saint Thomas-Aquin, right next-door, General de Gaulle’s alma mater.

Around the time that he was being confronted with his crimes, Marmion was being considered for “profession”. The Jesuits never rush into anything and this promotion to what to lay eyes appears to be the top layer of the Order, takes time.

The Jesuit response states that shortly before Marmion was  found to be a child abuser, the Provincial, Paddy Doyle, SJ wrote to Father General, Pedro Arrupe SJ, concerning a number of candidates to be considered for admission to Profession.  In relation to Joseph Marmion, he said:

“Fr Joseph Marmion presents a complicated picture when being considered for Profession. As the informants show, there are diverse views regarding his suitability.  All would agree that he has been an extremely hardworking, dedicated, and mainly successful teacher during his 18 years in the Colleges.  He has contributed much in the extra-curricular field by his talent for music and the direction of Operas.  He was appointed as Prefect of Studies by the then visitor, Fr. MacMahon.  He was in that office for three years but the problems of his personality gave rise to considerable difficulties for others.  One informant who knows him well sums up his difficulties in being an undeveloped adolescent.”

On the 12^th September 1977 Father General wrote to Father Provincial in the following terms, demonstrating that the Jesuits had serious doubts about Marmion:

“For reasons emerging from the informations and from judgments of Consultors, I do not think that Father J. Marmion…. can be promoted at the present time.”

The Jesuit Response says that “Searches have been made in the Jesuit archives in Rome and they did not identify any “informations”. Searches have also been made in the Irish archives and no copies of the “informations” appear to have been retained or have been located.  This letter appears to have crossed with correspondence from Fr. Provincial sent on the 17^th September 1977.

On the 17th September 1977, Fr. Paddy Doyle wrote again to Father General removing the name of Joseph Marmion from the list of candidates for admission to Profession.  His letter noted as follows:

“In my recent submission of names for possible Profession, I showed some doubt concerning Fr. Joseph Marmion.  This doubt has now become a certainty that he would not be suitable for Profession.  I have to take action concerning his work in the school and probably will be removing him entirely from school work at the end of the current year.  I will write about the relevant details in another context.”

On 27^th September 1977 Father General responded in the following terms:  

“Regarding the case of Joseph Marmion’s proposal for Profession, I had already made the decision ‘non promovendus’ before your letter arrived”. 

Had Father General heard something? Something that had not been communicated to him by the Irish Provincial? Why, otherwise, would he have made the decision before having a final opinion from Fr Doyle?

After Paris, he returned to Dublin where he was posted to the Jesuit Church of Saint Francis Xavier on Gardiner Street, a few minute’s stroll from Belvedere. Around this time he was appointed as a temporary curate in the parish of Rathnew in Co Wicklow where, naturally, he would have had access to children. In April 1980 he returned to Gardiner Street and briefly worked as temporary chaplain to St Vincent’s Private Hospital before taking a rôle in adult education that involved evening lectures at Belvedere. Around this time he sought permission to work in a parish in Austria but there is no record of what happened in response. A decade later, in 1990, he was back as chaplain to St Vincent’s Private Hospital – he always preferred the private sector – a permanent appointment this time. He remained in this position until retirement, on the grounds of ill health, in 1999. He suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with cancer shortly afterwards, dying in November 2000. Not long before he died, he was part of a large group of Irish Jesuits who travelled to Rome for the beatification of his grand-uncle. I have been told that his fellow priests “did their level best to keep him out of the photographs” and that his brother, Tom, was most displeased at how he had been treated. Marmion had a private audience with Pope John Paul II. It is customary for an official photographer to record such meetings but no photograph can be found in the Vatican archives.

Four years later I had a book published, a mish-mash of memoir, opinion and essays. In it, in the course of describing my upbringing and education, I touched on the Marmion element in my experience of Belvedere. This is part of what I wrote in 2004:

In my time at Belvedere the senior school was ostensibly run by a series of headmasters, all of them decent men who meant well. It became apparent, however, as I got older that the real power was wielded by someone else: a rank-and-file Jesuit (if you can imagine such a thing) who, the story went, had been removed from Clongowes after he had broken a boy’s jaw.

There was even a suggestion that he had broken the jaws of several boys, but this may have been inspired by the French text he used in class, a little tale entitled “Sept d’Un Coup”, or “Seven with One Blow”. He was a huge man, with ham-like fists and a head the size of a Hallowe’en pumpkin; he exuded a curiously seductive combination of charm, intelligence and sheer menace. A bully, a sadist, a brilliant teacher, a highly talented man, he was also an active paedophile. His influence was everywhere. In that cynically subversive way that can be so appealing to teenage boys, he would speak slightingly of other teachers and even impute pederastic tendencies to several blameless colleagues. Anyone who was made a prefect had to have his seal of approval.

Every year he produced a Strauss operetta, and I still find it astounding that nobody seemed to think that there was something fundamentally skin-creeping about having – to take just one example – a first-form boy in a long dress and blonde wig singing “Pink Champagne” in a pre- pubescent treble.

This remarkable Jesuit insisted on measuring the members of the junior chorus for their costumes: Individually, stark naked, and in the privacy of his own room. Favoured pupils were taken on a summer trip to Vienna where accounts vary as to what kind of sexual assaults took place. I don’t think there was a boy in the school who was unaware of what this charismatic monster was getting up to; I have no doubt that many of his fellow Jesuits knew, too. We used to refer to “Tales from the Vienna Woods”. Yet this man was let continue for many years in direct – and I mean very, direct – contact with boys whose parents felt they were providing their sons with the best education they could afford. Eventually he was moved to parish duties, but only after a group of parents... had refused to yield and forced matters to a head. These days, I would like to think, he would have received a custodial sentence.

Some years before this deeply disturbing man died he officiated at the funeral mass of the father of one of my old school friends. I had no idea who he was – this much frailer figure – as he emerged onto the altar in St Francis Xavier’s in Gardiner Street. But when he spoke in that deceptively gentle voice. I felt the same sinking sensation as would assail me when he called me up to the front of French class for some form of humiliation. And I had never been one of his physical victims.

This man’s legacy is varied. I know people who became nervous wrecks, some laughed it off, some refused to acknowledge what happened to them, at least one has been in therapy for years.

As for me, I have been left with an innate distrust of authority figures and a visceral loathing of the humiliation of human beings in whatever form. In that sense he was, perhaps, a valuable part of my education.

A few years ago I received a letter from a group of classmates who were seeking funds for a new building project at Belvedere. They pointed out that this was an opportunity to give something back to the school that had “given us so much”. I’m afraid I wrote a rather terse reply.

It was a passage that I wrote without much thought, just from instinct and  what I had heard as a boy and later. But I did hear, almost two decades later, from someone who had been senior to me at school and who went on to have an exceptionally distinguished career, that in recent years he had asked Noel Barber SJ what the “Marmion business was all about” and was told “Oh, it’s all in Tom Doorley’s book” or words to that effect. His memory of the conversation may have been defective or incomplete but I was relieved to hear that I had, at least, got the gist of the story – of which I know so more today – essentially correct in 2004.

Some five weeks before the publication of my book, a story appeared in the Sunday Business Post on 5 September 2004, reporting that the Jesuit Order had received €15 million as the result of a land sale. In the piece, the then Provincial, John Dardis SJ, is quoted as saying that five cases of abuse by Jesuits had been settled for a total of €850,000 and that the Jesuits would remain available to anyone else who felt they had been hurt. Had the Jesuits some forewarning of what I would say? I suspect they had. And was this a rather cack-handed way of dealing with it in advance? I suspect it was.

Donal Ballance has remarked that it strikes him as a “remarkable coincidence that the Jesuits, after 26 years of complete silence about the Marmion scandal, would choose to make a public utterance about sexual abuse just five weeks before the publication of a book detailing Marmion’s abuses.”

What happened after my book was published and the unnamed Marmion’s tendencies had been made public, is shocking. The Jesuit Response says that at a “meeting on 10 November 2004 certain actions were agreed both internally and externally. The internal actions included contact with family members, Jesuit members of the Province, and staff… External actions involved the preparation of a draft statement. It was also suggested that Fr Humphreys would seek to check out what was known about the factual issues arising from the book extract”.

The preparation of the statement would seem to have been undertaken by the Order’s lawyers.

The Response continues “It was agreed that Fr Dardis would contact Tom Doorley through an intermediary. In the event the intermediary did not feel that a meeting would be appropriate and none took place.”

In fact what seems to have happened is that Gerry Haugh, my friend and former teacher, was asked to contact me and he, who knew the truth about Marmion, refused to do so. Around this time I phoned him to say that an extract from my book would appear in The Irish Times and that I mentioned him in the passage. “Don’t forget I’ve given my life to that place,” he said. I reassured him about what would appear in the paper.

It was then that the job of contacting me seems to have been passed to Noel Barber SJ. We left a number of phone messages for each other and eventually our efforts to have a chat – which I would have welcomed – petered out. In one of his messages,  Fr Barber expressed concern that Marmion’s victims should get what help they needed. And he made a very kind comment about a completely unrelated passage in the book. I am satisfied that Fr Barber did his best in these circumstances and he is, I believe, the only Jesuit to emerge from this sorry story with considerable credit. The ultimate responsibility lies with John Dardis, SJ, then Provincial. Fr Dardis has never made contact with me.

Why an “intermediary” claimed that contact would be inappropriate, I don’t know. Perhaps this is a reference to Gerry Haugh’s refusal to act as such. He certainly would have regarded it as inappropriate. The matter was never mentioned between us before his untimely death in 2011.

In the first years of the new Millennium, before my book appeared, at least two Old Belvederians made contact with the Jesuit order to say that they had been sexually abused by Marmion. At least one of them was one of the children interviewed by Noel Barber SJ in September 1977 and he may have followed Marmion’s dictum of “deny everything” at the time; now, he wanted to be totally clear as to what had been done to him.

In September 2002, the Jesuits wrote to An Garda Siochana to say that they knew a recently deceased member of their Order, Joseph Marmion SJ, was the subject of allegations of child sexual abuse.

So, by the time my book was published and Marmion’s abuse – to some extent – was in the public domain, the Jesuits had had personal testimonies as to what he had been up to. As to what I said in the book it seems strange that “Fr Humphreys would seek to check out what was known about the factual issues arising from the book extract.”

They knew the key factual issue, that Marmion sexually, physically and emotionally abused children. But, having prepared their statement, they waited to see how the media would react and when the media didn’t, they maintained a shameful silence. This is shocking, a deliberate cover-up. Dozens of Marmion’s victims could have been helped, or at least acknowledged, almost two decades before they were afforded such consideration

The buck stopped with the Provincial, John Dardis SJ. One of my contacts asked him why the statement had not been issued. I am told that he replied simply, “I don’t know.” The Jesuits, who I imagine had bought a disproportionate number of copies of my book, felt that they could breathe easy, unlike many of those whose lives had been blighted by their late colleague.

As I say, it would appear that the Jesuits had wind of my claim before the publication of the book, hence I suspect, the story in the Sunday Business Post in September. Manuscripts are seen by a lot of people before they appear in book form, so the information may have leaked in this way. It was far too early for review copies to be implicated.

When I learned of this, many years later, I recalled having a sense that the Jesuits – or perhaps certain members of the Old Belvedere Union – have extensive and useful contacts upon which they can call. As a friend of mine jovially commented “their testicles are everywhere”.  That sense dawned on me one morning in the RTE Radio Centre as I was about to appear on Pat Kenny’s radio show to talk about the book. Literally with my hand on the second of the two heavy sound-proofed doors to the studio, I was told “We won’t talk about the Belvedere stuff, okay? And don’t tell Pat I said that”.

I was surprised but such is the nature of live radio that I was soon distracted by Pat Kenny’s questions about the rest of the contents. He had clearly been given a very good briefing on what was in it, with one exception. And so, he didn’t bring it up and neither did I. But I did wonder who was responsible for this intervention, and why it was made.  And I still do.

Chapter Ten: PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH

Jesuitical: practicing casuistry or equivocation; using subtle or oversubtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.

When the Jesuits finally decided that they had to reveal what they knew about Joseph Marmion – and they took their time about it - there was an interesting use of language. There was a reluctance – a refusal even - to use the word “child” or “boy” when writing about what Marmion had done to the defenceless who had been supposed to be in their care.

My classmate Donal Ballance had made a formal request in February 2019 to have Marmion’s name and crimes published. This was refused in April 2019. He made it clear that he was not going to let go of the issue and at the end of May 2019, Leonard Moloney SJ, the then Provincial, wrote to him to say that he was very sorry about what had been inflicted on him “as a very young man”. He added that he was looking into who would be the “right person in Marmion’s family” to contact.

Donal responded saying that he didn’t think it appropriate that the Marmion family be contacted before anyone else, and that he had not been a young man at the time of the abuse. He had been a child, a little boy.

In October 2019 he and Moloney met in Toronto and in the course of a 3 hour discussion, the Provincial expressed a desire to “air all the dirty laundry” but refused to commit to moving  the request to do just that forward. It was abundantly clear that there was resistance within the Order and within the Jesuit schools.

In February 2020, Donal received an official notification from Leonard Moloney SJ saying that he will not “at this time, make a communication into a public forum’. Moloney then immediately claimed that there was “no wall of protection” around Marmion and added “we do not guard his name or status”. Which is beyond bizarre as this is exactly what they were doing.

His reason for refusing the request is explained as follows: ‘As we discussed in Toronto, I am concerned for other victims and for their families. At this stage, I have spoken to many. Each of them has asked me not to put Joseph Marmion’s name into a large public forum. This is one important part of the rationale to this decision…”

I, too, have spoken to many, and none of them made this request. Nor do they know of anyone else who did. Moloney, on being challenged as to the veracity of this claim, eventually admitted to Donal Ballance that this was “less than the truth”. Donal’s own belief is that this was a deliberate lie, designed to hide the truth.

On 6 March 2020, Donal Ballance wrote to John Dardis SJ, now in the General Curia of Jesuits in Rome, and the Provincial who had kept the collective Jesuit head down in 2004, seeking his assistance. Dardis asked if he could share his letter with the Jesuit Assistant for Western Europe, Victor Assouad SJ who writes to Donal saying that the matter would be better dealt with locally and advising him to contact Leonard Moloney SJ once more.

Donal responded, copying Dardis, to say that after two refusals by Moloney he has no intention of leaving the matter there and that he feels he has no option but to publish his own story on social media and on as many Jesuit school alumni sites globally as possible. There is a rapid response from Dardis, asking Donal to leave the matter with him. It took five more months to finalise this plan.

It is clear to me that the Jesuits realised they could not retain control of the Marmion scandal by continuing to suppress it. The story would come out, whatever they did.

The statement was released on 3^rd March 2021, two days after I had written about Marmion in the Irish Daily Mail. I had had no idea that the announcement was imminent and learned of it the day before, in an email from the Jesuits’ director of communications, Pat Coyle.

On 4 July 2021, The Jesuit Response was published, with an introduction by Leonard Moloney SJ. In it he says that “when asked to publish Joseph Marmion’s name I resisted, partly because other voices advised against such a step but also out of fear of the consequences. I know that some of my Jesuit companions still share that fear as to where the publishing of his name may lead. In September 1977 it was fear of scandal that resulted in a particular set of choices that were so damaging to you as victims: today, fear can no longer be allowed to hold back the emergence of the truth”.  

Not surprisingly, there is no mention of his previous claim that he had been asked by survivors not to publish Marmion’s name.

It is clear that the Jesuits had known for many years that Paul Andrews SJ was a paedophile, yet this is not mentioned in The Jesuit Response. The significance of this, as Andrews was not not just Rector in September 1977 but Also Marmion’s best friend in Order, is obvious.

The publication of The Jesuit Response coincided with the announcement that a restorative justice programme was to be initiated under two experts, Catherine O’Connell and Barbara Walshe. While there was a general welcome to this move, there have been complaints that these facilitators were chosen and appointed by the Jesuits. My own view, for what it’s worth, is that they did a good job in listening to those whose lives had been affected by Joseph Marmion SJ, both former pupils and Jesuit colleagues and summarising what they had learned.

As for Leonard Moloney SJ, it strikes me that he deserves some credit for finally admitting what Marmion was and naming him publicly. This admission had to be dragged out of the Jesuits and it is clear that Moloney had to deal with powerful interests within his own organisation. That organisation resisted Donal Ballance’s request until the bitter end. Unlike some earlier Provincials, Leonard Moloney eventually did the right and decent thing, albeit when it had become clear that there was no real choice in the matter.

When the Jesuit Response appeared and the restorative justice programme was initiated, a steering committee of past pupils, all of them from Belvedere, was constituted. It is unclear to me how this came about. In the event, the group – from which there have been two resignations – included several people whose lives had been negatively affected by Marmion, some of them members of the Old Belvedere Union. Donal Balance, who has demanded nothing less the full truth about the Marmion scandal, was one of those who resigned in protest at some of the committee’s actions.

The Jesuits, with the agreement of the steering committee, have commissioned a member of that committee, to write an historical account of the Marmion scandal.

This document has yet to be published.

The names of the 42 Jesuits in the Irish Province, other than Marmion and Andrews, who have been credibly accused of child sexual abuse, have also yet to be published.

Joseph Marmion SJ, like Pope Francis, remains a Jesuit in good standing.

The Jesuits failed at every turn to deal with Marmion, until 1977, and even then, he remained in the Order. It was clear from the time he was in the Novitiate at Emo that he was trouble; in time, and especially after his 3 years in charge of boys at Clongowes, it became starkly obvious that he should never be let have contact with children. His sexual abuse may have been secret, unknown to most of his colleagues and to his superiors - it is in the nature of boys not to talk about such experiences - but the rest of his character was as plain as a pikestaff.

The failures continued after his removal from the classroom. The Jesuits had the opportunity to help Marmion’s victims when most of them were in their forties. Marriages, careers, even lives could have been saved. The help that Marmion’s victims so badly needed was not given until 2021 and then only when the Jesuits had been dragged, metaphorically, kicking and screaming, to confess what they had known for decades.

In this whole sorry affair, Marmion’s crimes were not the only ones.

---

POSTSCRIPT

After publishing the above I was sent these comments by someone who, like myself, was taught by Marmion. He makes some very interesting points…

I read your book on Substack with interest. It pulls together much of what was fragmented before and in a very coherent fashion. This is great work, Tom. What follows are a few comments as they structure me.

Some time ago, I took more than a passing interest in narcissism, scapegoating (The Irish Times had a great article on this) and related topics. This was motivated by experience I had separate from Belvedere although some of your writing and my own experience of Marmion's bullying seems to exemplify it.

A couple of points first. From my research and experience, I rather doubt Marmion's claim to having had a nervous breakdown. Narcissists are very capable of faking mental illness (or other illness) especially if the fragility of ego is at stake. They don't take easily to introspection and having to face up to themselves. Having to spend a year under the strictures of a strict disciplinarian who had already seen through him and having to report to same on his introspections would be something that a narcissist like Marmion would do his best to escape.

Another unusual feature was the point that sedatives increase the sexual drive. While intoxicants of all kinds frequently dissolve inhibitions, over time benzodiazepine use is known to reduce libido, if anything. Marmion may either have been dependent on them or used them to overcome specific stimuli. They are still used for phobias such as fear of flying or claustrophobia. Back then, addicts of sedatives were supplied by GPs. Much less likely today. In any case, he was able to save up enough to knock out his victims in Vienna.

Of course, the thought has struck me that Marmion might have used such drugs as "Dutch courage" to in effect facilitate his abusing boys. He may have manipulated the doctors too and actually had no clinical reason for requiring them.

An issue that strikes me is the way certain environments appear to foster delinquent or criminal behaviour. Fear often plays a role in the supporting of abusers and bullies. Your writing brings this out. Some psychologists also talk about collective narcissism, a kind of belonging to a group which might be led by a narcissist in chief. An "in-group." Some have spoken about the Nazis in this light (or perhaps the core of the Nazi Party). Marmion may already have had a powerful in-group within the order that revolved around conservatism and his venerated relative.

Some might argue that rather than being a narcissist, Marmion might be better described as being significantly along the psychopathy spectrum. The latter type can be highly manipulative and can thrive very well in hierarchical structures. That said, those at the further extents of the psychopathy spectrum are less than likely to appreciate music let alone make music a significant part of their lives (incidentally, the vast majority of psychopaths are not the murdering, torturing serial rapists of popular fiction - see O'Hare "Snakes in Suits for a better account by an expert).

Personally, I think Marmion is best described as a narcissist if for no other reason than he seemed to exhibit fear. Fear of being thrown out of the order, for instance. No psychopath significantly along the spectrum would exhibit such fear. Unless he was pretending, of course!

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Chapter 11: A (VERY) 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, he 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 (now deleted) 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 after 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.”

-        

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.