February 15, 2003  
Catholic priest abused children at care home
By A Correspondent     The Times
    
A FORMER Catholic priest has been found guilty of sexually abusing two teenagers who were in his care at a children's home in the early 1970s.  Maidstone Crown Court heard that Michael McConville had abused a "position of responsibility" at the St Mary's home in Gravesend, Kent, to form a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl. The court was also told that McConville - a trainee priest at the time - had also indecently assaulted a teenage boy.  McConville, now 51, of Walworth, southeast London, admitted having a sexual relationship with the girl but insisted that it was after she had passed the age of consent. However, a jury of nine women and three men dismissed his version of events and found him guilty on three counts of indecent assault on a girl under the age of 16.  They also found him guilty, by a majority, of one count of indecent assault on a 14-year-old boy, but cleared him of four other counts of sexual abuse. McConville was also cleared of sexually abusing two younger girls at the home.  Another former priest, David Murphy, 56, from Edinburgh, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to eight counts of indecent assault relating to the sexual abuse of children at the home. The men's crimes first came to light in 1994 when a former resident at the home told a Catholic priest what had happened. The two men will be sentenced at a later date.  A church minister who sexually abused five young male inmates at a juvenile detention centre when he worked there as a prison officer has been jailed for eight years. Neville Husband, 65, of Shotley Bridge, Co Durham, was sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court after a jury found him guilty on ten counts of indecent assault and one of buggery. The assaults took place at Medomsley Detention Centre in Co Durham between 1974 and 1984.