LONDON (ENGLAND)
Catholic News Service
December 13, 2018
By Simon Caldwell
An English cardinal has told an inquiry into child abuse of his shock at learning that a vicar general of his former archdiocese tried to help two pedophile priests escape to the United States.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse revealed for the first time that Msgr. Daniel Leonard, a former vicar general of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, ordered a priest to tip off Father Samuel Penney that he was about to be arrested and to give him cash to flee to the United States.
It also revealed that Msgr. Leonard, who is now deceased, provided Father James Robinson with a good character reference so he could transfer to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, even though the priest was facing allegations of child abuse in the U.K.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster said: “This comes as a shock to me that such a course of action could have been in the mind of the then vicar general.
“It is shocking. If I understand things correctly, it is criminal intent,” said Cardinal Nichols, president of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, at the Dec. 13 hearing in London.
The cardinal, who served as archbishop of Birmingham from 2000 to 2009, said Msgr. Leonard was in a nursing home when he took over as archbishop, and he met him only once. Cardinal Nichols said he found a “much-diminished old man who was clearly incapable of remembering much.”
Father Gerard Doyle, a parish priest in Stone, England, said in the early 1990s that he received a call from Msgr. Leonard, who instructed him to dress in plain clothes and visit Father Penney at the Gracewell Institute, Birmingham, where he was undergoing therapy following child abuse allegations.
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