The ‘Problem of Evil’ was one of the more difficult questions asked by the monks at Ampleforth college when I was a pupil there. How, we were asked, does one reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and ever-loving God with the reality of widespread evil in the world we inhabit?
What we students hadn’t realised while we were pondering this question was that the monastery had its own way of dealing with the problem of evil. When it came to monks and teachers exploiting the most vulnerable people in their care, the previous course of action at Ampleforth was to quietly ship these child abusers off to a distant parish.
In 2018, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that in the second half of the last century:
‘The overriding concern in both Ampleforth (and its southern counterpart Downside) was to avoid contact with the local authority or the police at all costs, regardless of the seriousness of the alleged abuse or actual knowledge of its occurrence.’
The inquiry’s conclusions were devastating and last week it was announced by the Department for Education that Ampleforth would no longer be allowed to enrol new students, effectively forcing the school to begin closing down.
