By David Love
TWO businessman have told how they “lived in fear” of a Catholic priest who had used corporal punishment against them and other pupils at a Highland boarding school, a court has heard.
Hong Kong-based Paul Curran, 50, told a jury that he dreamt of being “haunted and hunted” by 83-year-old Father Benedict Seed for the five years he attended Fort Augustus Abbey.
He said that beatings were so routine that Father Seed’s moto was: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ He described one incident where he was belted with a leather tawse, when he was aged 14 or 15, after being dragged from his bed leaving his hands and wrists bleeding, swollen and bruised.
Mr Curran, who is alleged to have been attacked between 1980 and 1982, added during evidence at Inverness Sheriff Court: “It was not corporal punishment, but an attack carried out in a physical rage.”
Mr Seed denies assaulting eight of his pupils over a 14 year period, one with a spiked golf shoe and another with a hockey stick on his genitals to their injury.
The incidents are alleged to have happened between June 1974 and July 1988 when former Abbey pupil Father Benedict, was a chemistry teacher and headmaster at the Catholic facility on the shores of Loch Ness.
Mr Seed, from Brora, Sutherland, whose real first name is Thomas, is accused of assaulting a man who was aged between 12 and 13 in 1977 and 1978. He is claimed to have thrown him to the ground before striking him repeatedly on the head, shouting and screaming at him.
Mr Seed is also alleged to have told the boy to bend over a desk while another pupil held him down before caning him.
In another case, between 1977 and 1979, he is alleged to have assaulted a boy aged between 12 and 14 by forcing him to stip to his underpants and striking him with a belt, cane and a spiked golf shoe.
He is also alleged to have caned an 11-year-old boy aged 11, on the body with a cane.
In other incidents he struck a boy’s bare bottom with a ruler and hit another with a tawse and on the bottom.
Mr Seed is also alleged to have pulled another boy from his bed before carrying out an attack on him with a hockey stick.
In one alleged incident between 1974 and 1976, he caused a boy to fall down stairs. He denies all of the charges.
Mr Curran told fiscal depute Roderick Urquhart who asked how often corporal punishment was used at the Abbey: “Extensively. It was St Benedict who first coined the phrase ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’ “I lived in fear of this man for most of my time at school. He would haunt my dreams.”
Company director, Michael Mungavin told how he was caned by the priest after he was among three boys who tried to throw a fellow pupil into the school’s outdoor pool and banged his head. Mr Mungavin said: “He was explosive and impulsive. I was ordered to his study, told to lean over a chair and I had four strikes on my buttocks with a bamboo cane.” The trial continues.
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