ENGLAND
The Guardian
February 16, 2018
By Jenny Turner
As a child, Bernard was repeatedly abused by a Catholic priest. Now an Oxford literary scholar, he has written a remarkable account of the damage done
Starting in 1987, when he was 11 years old, Stephen Bernard was sexually abused by Canon Thomas “Dermod” Fogarty, the priest who was, supposedly, helping him with his French and Latin. This was in Midhurst, Sussex, in the diocese of Arundel and Brighton, then headed by Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the future leader in England of the Roman Catholic church. A few years ago, reading about Murphy-O’Connor’s reaction to other cases of abuse in the 80s, Bernard “wanted to die” – he’d already been in hospital more than once after previous suicide attempts – but decided, this time, to go to the police.
The deaths of Fogarty in 2012 and Murphy-O’Connor in 2017 presumably have a lot to do with the timing of this book.
Bernard, who is now in his early 40s, is a scholar of 18th-century English literature, a former research fellow at University College, Oxford, and the editor of authoritative works about the Tonsons, the foremost publishers of the late 17th and early 18th century, and the plays of Nicholas Rowe. He continues to live and work in Oxford, and his memoir unfolds over a single day in January 2016 at the Bodleian library, where he’s trying to finish an article for the Times Literary Supplement.
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