A PRIEST and former teacher was jailed for 10 years yesterday for sexually assaulting two teenage boys over five years.

Father Frederick Linale first showered the boys with gifts and then pestered them with threatening calls, the Old Bailey was told.

``You abused your position as a priest and pastor and betrayed their trust,'' Judge Graham Boal told 59-year-old Linale. ``I am driven to the conclusion you constitute a real danger to impressionable and vulnerable young men.

Linale had led a deceitful double life for years and kept a diary of his ``sordid'' activities written in Latin and Greek. He called himself the British archbishop of the Old Roman Catholic Church and won the trust of people in Penge, south London.

But while accepting awards for special service to the community, he kept pornographic videos at his home - and was a customer of a Soho gay shop.

Linale met his first victim through an advertisement in the Church Times, and formed an ``odd, obsessive relationship'' with him, said Ms Sally Bennett-Jenkins, prosecuting. The 16-year-old was sent details about the Old Roman Catholic Church and met Linale in hotels in and near Felixstowe, Suffolk.

Once he plied the youth with brandy and started caressing him.

He ordained the boy as a priest in his church, although it was a sham. The ordination had a price. When left alone with Linale, the youth was again indecently assaulted.

When the boy tried to get away from the priest's influence, his family started being plagued by nuisance calls.

Linale's second victim was 12 when he first met him. He was given money, clothes and expensive gifts. ``Linale paid him for having sexually assaulted him,'' said the prosecution.

Child B was also vulnerable. He came from a single-parent family and his mother had cancer. His brother was terminally ill suffering from the HIV virus.

When the boy was sent to a boarding school, Linale instructed a private detective - paid for by church funds - to track him down. He then made nuisance calls to him.

Linale, of Our Lady's Priory, Beckenham, South-east London, had denied five indecent assaults, attempted buggery and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

He said that he was recognised by the Old Roman Catholic Church as Archbishop of the British Isles.

A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Media Office in London said the ORCC broke away from Rome in the 18th century after bishops in Holland disagreed with Papal reform.