SCOTLAND
Scotsman
By STEPHEN MCGINTY
Published on Tuesday 5 March 2013
CARDINAL Keith O’Brien threatened to report a victim of clerical sexual abuse to the police as a “blackmailer”, according to the man who had been abused.
“Michael X”, who received £42,000 granted by the Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 1990 following his traumatic experiences, said yesterday that when he insisted Father Desmond Lynagh, who had abused him while he was a 14-year-old junior seminarian at Blairs in Aberdeen in the 1970s, should be sent away for counselling and no longer minister to children and young people, the archbishop had threatened him with the police.
In an exclusive interview with The Scotsman, Mr X said: “He then stood up. I remember he was wearing a black soutane with his pectoral cross and he said, ‘Do you know who I am? Nobody tells me what to do. If you go to the police then I will tell then that you are trying to blackmail me’.”
He went on: “I said that if I went to the police then I’d be frightened, but I would tell them that I was trying to force him to keep a sex offender out of circulation. I would tell them what I was doing and I would be ready to go to prison if I had to.”
At the end of the meeting, when Mr X repeated his threat to report Lynagh to the authorities unless he was sent for counselling, he recalled the archbishop “leaned forward towards me and I could feel his breath on my collar and he said, ‘You are just another abused child. No-one will believe you’. I have no reason to exaggerate. That is what he told me”.
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