SCOTLAND
Daily Mail
Drunken parties at the seminary, crushes on young ‘pups’ and a gay mafia accused of bringing down Britain’s top Catholic
By Guy Adams
Almost invariably, it was late at night by the time the parties started. After dinner and prayers, the residents of St Andrew’s College would gather around candlelit tables in the refectory or head upstairs to the billiard room to talk, drink and laugh into the wee hours.
The tight-knit group, mostly in their early 20s, had been drawn to the 19th-century baronial mansion near the village of Drygrange, a stone’s throw from the River Tweed, on the Scottish borders, by a calling. They wanted to devote their lives to serving God as priests in the Catholic Church.
St Andrew’s was a seminary 30 miles south-east of Edinburgh, where at any time several dozen young men were being prepared for the priesthood. They spent their days studying, praying, meditating, debating theology and learning how to run a parish.
In their six years at the secluded institution, the future priests made lifelong friendships and formed intimate cliques.
They even shared a common language: dinner was ‘rat pie’, communal bathrooms were ‘jakes’ and younger colleagues ‘pups’. On religious holidays, copious amounts of beer and wine (but never spirits) were served from lunchtime onwards. The raucous parties that ensued, bringing merriment to every tower and turret of the redbrick building, were known as ‘ragers’.
Sometimes, as with many an event involving too much alcohol, a ‘rager’ would end badly. And it’s one such occasion, said to have occurred at St Andrew’s 33 years ago, that this week brought scandal to the highest echelons of the Catholic Church.
On Monday, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, 74-year-old Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Britain’s most senior cleric, shocked the nation’s five million Catholics by announcing his sudden resignation.
The news came 24 hours after a Sunday newspaper revealed that three priests and a former priest have filed an official complaint accusing him of various counts of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, stretching back more than three decades. Perhaps the most colourful alleged incident occurred at St Andrew’s in the spring of 1980.
A 20-year-old, who had joined the seminary two years earlier, claims that O’Brien, then 42, made a drunken attempt to seduce him.
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