Sins of the fathers As a boy, he was abused by the men who were preparing him for the priesthood. Thirty years on, Steve Gilhooley wants the Catholic Church to confess its dark past

Then there were the beatings. Every Monday evening young lads would troop to the rector's room in their pyjamas for a caning. Three red marks on your weekly report card and you would join this pyjama parade. Even good

students - and he was a good student - could earn red marks for anything from their behaviour to their deportment. Their hygiene was judged and sometimes found wanting. Sometimes, on Tuesday mornings, he would be told his name was down for the pyjama parade,

giving him all week to think about it. Pain could be psychological as well as physical.

All of this paled, though, beside what happened at mass one Sunday. He was serving altar for Father Francis Blythe during mass in a tiny box room downstairs from the main chapel. When mass had finished, and he was putting everything away, the priest suddenly put his arms around him. Father Blythe began to tell him what a great kid he was and started kissing and cuddling him, his hands wandering over the boy's body. Only the end of the mass upstairs brought this ordeal to a conclusion.

The child didn't understand what happened, but even at that young age he knew it wasn't right. He also knew he had to serve altar for Father Blythe all week. The next day he bolted out as soon as mass ended and didn't return until after the priest had left. It was only a

temporary solution. The following morning Father Blythe started touching him during the mass itself. The nightmare had just got worse.

Steve Gilhooley is a big man. Tall, plain, stocky, the 39-year-old has an air of solidity to him. He could have been a footballer. He ended up a priest. There are days, you suspect, where he wishes he wasn't. The parish priest for

Currie, Ratho and Balerno in Midlothian has his enemies. He has been a long-term irritant to the conservative elements in the Catholic Church in Scotland. He has raised questions over celibacy, women in the church and what he sees as the church's obsession with sexuality. He ruffled more feathers when he joined the Scottish Socialist Party. This, after all, is a party which advocates abortion and same-sex marriages.

Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for Father Gilhooley's resignation. Most controversially of all, he has spoken out about physical and sexual abuse by priests, a subject the Catholic church in Scotland remains just a little too tight-lipped about. He knows of what he speaks. He was that boy in the box room.

We talk in the front room of his chapel house of Our Lady's Catholic Church in Currie, outside Edinburgh. It's a homely room. The furniture is slightly battered, the upholstery a little worn. The seats around the table we sit at constantly creak and groan. His mongrel pup Kerry runs in and out of the room, a blur of constant action. Father Gilhooley's housekeeper is ill and the priest is thankful for the members of his congregation who have asked if they can help him out, perhaps do some washing for him. ''I've been wearing the same track suit for six weeks. Of course I'm needing washing done.''

He's dressed in checked shirt and jeans. The shirt looks as if it is just out of the packet, the folds still visible. He doesn't wear a collar. ''I don't like clericalism at all,'' he says. He smokes one cigarette after another as he talks, his nicotine-stained fingers playing with his lighter.

We have met to talk about the book, The Pyjama Parade, his account of his experiences as a junior seminarian. The book has attracted vilification and rumours of Vatican disapproval. Its contents seem a world away from the solidity and good humour of the man beside me. Two hours from now he will entertain me with tales of singing The Sash to the Tartan Army in Italy. An hour from now he will be reduced to tears as he remembers what he has gone through.

Gilhooley thought he was going to the ecclesiastical equivalent of Butlins when he first set off for St Mary's

College in Grange over Sands in Cumbria. A priest had come to his school in Loanhead in Midlothian and painted a picture of an idyllic existence of football and canoeing. It was 1974. Gilhooley was 12. His parents didn't want him to go but he badgered them and they agreed. There was, he admits, no real religious motivation. Entering the priesthood was not uppermost in his mind. He was too young. ''You take woodwork at secondary school when you're 12. It doesn't make you a carpenter.''

He first went to the seminary for a come-and-see week. ''I can remember as soon as I stepped out of the car thinking 'This is a mistake'. I remember being picked on for being Scottish. It was the first time I heard the word Jock. It was constant 'Jock bastard this' and 'Jock bastard that' from the other pupils. And even then the religious stuff was far, far too severe.''

That week would have been the end of it. He was all set to tell his parents there was ''no

danger'' that he wanted to go there. But when he returned home he learned his mother was seriously ill. Suddenly his own problems seemed minuscule. ''I was trapped. There was nothing I could do. Going might even have solved a problem for my dad. One less person to worry about. That morning I was going back, packing my bag and crying in the room. Not being able to say to my mum and dad. I didn't want them to worry. My mum had just came home from hospital.''

And anyway there was a pressure he felt from the local Catholic community. People would help his mum and dad out, buy clothes for him because he was going to be a priest. ''They were dead, dead supportive, but they didn't realise that was putting an unreal pressure on me,'' he says. ''You were put on a pedestal. You couldn't go back to your own community and say, 'Ach well, I tried my best. It wasnae for me. I'll be a joiner.' There was shame involved.''

And so he felt he had to return to the oppressive atmosphere of St Mary's College. ''Basically some of the guys there were dysfunctional,'' he tells me. ''They shouldn't have been let near adults, never mind children. We were all very scarred by their notion of religion. I remember one pious priest preaching about the scourging of Christ, talking about the piercing pain as each blow struck home. And we were sitting there thinking: 'Aye, we know about that.' And then he went on about the stripping of the garments. About how, when you're naked you're stripped of your dignity. And we were having to strip every week for them to punish us. Why was it such an obnoxious thing to do to Christ, yet it was a moral necessity to do to us? These bastards didn't make the connection. I still think to this day what kind of warped upbringing they had that they couldn't see that.''

He was not the only victim of Father Blythe. ''I didn't know it at the time but I realised later he was abusing practically every single kid,'' he says. ''He would take one kid out in the car every Saturday - giving the guys sweets and money - and he was horribly abusing the guy. He stopped with me. I made it too difficult for him. If he was going to get any gratification out of me he was going to have to work very, very hard. There were easier victims. I'm not criticising other

students but some were more vulnerable.''

The word evil, is not, Gilhooley feels, too strong for what he went through. Depression and chronic alcoholism were common legacies of St Mary's. He knows of two people who have since committed suicide. ''I would be letting these guys down if I didn't name that as evil, especially as it was done in the name of Christ.''

Gilhooley spent two and a half years at

St Mary's, a nightmare from beginning to end. But worse was yet to come. After St Mary's was closed all the Scottish students were sent to another junior seminary in Scotland - Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire. There life seemed to return to an even keel. ''The rector of that

seminary was very kind and understanding. I learned to trust again. I learned to trust adults.''

Then one night he was called up to the rector's room. ''I bounded up the stairs whistling, went to his room, sat on the chair and he said 'Stand up and come over here,' and I just knew. He told me to unfasten my belt and drop my trousers and pants and the next thing he just grabbed my genitals and said move my head to the right

and to the left and cough and all that bulls**t, pretending it was some kind of medical procedure. That moment damaged me the most.''

That damage materialised in constant fugs of depression through his early twenties. He became petrified of intimacy and could not bear to be hugged, even by his family. He buried the pain, tried to ignore it. This denial continued until his late twenties. Then one night when he was in senior seminary in Drygrange, he blurted out his story to the senior priest. ''I didn't know where that came from. I hadn't sat in my room thinking about it,'' says Gilhooley. Telling the truth was the beginning of the healing process. ''I began to deal with what happened to me.''

A greater test still awaited, though. Telling his parents. Why he had never told them was a question that had haunted him for the best part of two decades. For years he thought it was guilt. ''I knew my parents loved the church. In many ways it was their life. I couldn't be responsible for destroying that.''

Then he watched a video about a child abuse care in the US. It told of a child who for months was silent about what he had experienced before revealing the truth. The boy's father, Gilhooley recalls, was hurt. - ''Why didn't he tell us? We'd have protected him'' - until the psychiatrist said, ''Do you not realise your boy has been protecting you?''

''I broke down at that point,'' says Gilhooley. ''Suddenly a huge part of the jigsaw fell into place and I realised I wasn't a coward. In many ways I was a brave wee boy.'' That realisation still overwhelms him. As he tells me this, tears come to his eyes. For a moment he can't speak and apologises to me, though he has nothing to apologise for. There's an obvious question to be asked here. Given the nightmare of his experiences in the junior seminaries, how was he able to follow a priestly vocation in adult life?

Father Gilhooley admits his inability to function in society could have been a reason for his return to a system where he didn't have to face up to issues of intimacy. If that was the case, the return to senior seminary soon gave him more positive reasons. ''It was priests who had harmed me, but it was priests who healed me. It was the priests and my fellow students at the senior seminary who brought me back to life.''

And, he says, at some level he never lost faith. ''One of the other students said to me 'They stole the church from me'. Now out of all the things they stole from us it's the one thing I've never said. This is my church. No one will steal it from me. This is a church that belongs to us - the punters who come along every Sunday, the punters who try to put the gospel into practice every day of their lives. It's not a social club. I think this post has given me a strength of character and an obstinacy that I will not walk out of this church. I will stay in it and fight for it. If I walk out now I let the man who fondled my genitals win.''

In June Father Francis Blythe was jailed for two and a half years, after he admitted culpability. Gilhooley would have given evidence against him if needed. The horror of his past has not knocked the rebelliousness out of him. ''You can line up the whole world out there against me but if I think I'm right I'm not going to change my viewpoint for the sake of peace and quiet.''

In the last few years Father Gilhooley has emerged as a fighter. He is ready to speak up for a vision of the church that is sometimes at odds with that of Catholicism's hierarchy. He says he preaches from the gutter up, not the pulpit down. Celibacy will, he believes, disappear before long. ''That is going to change. Ten years ago there were over 200 priests in the diocese. Now there's about 100. In ten years there'll be under 50. Is the Church going to wait until I'm parish priest of Central region before they decide that actually we've got a wee problem?''

His decision to join the Scottish Socialists led to calls for his resignation. ''The right-wing of the Church scream abortion and same-sex

marriage. Do people seriously think I joined the SSP because they allow same-sex marriages?''

This outspokeness comes at a cost. In the past Gilhooley has had his car vandalised and his garden ruined. One night two blocks of wood bound up in cloth and doused in petrol were left at his door. There was even what seemed to be a plastic explosive attached to his car at one point. He doesn't know who is ready to attack him or why, but the threats won't stop him.

The Pyjama Parade is not, he says, an attack on the Church. It began as a private recording of his experiences. Then he saw it as a chance to offer support for others who had been abused. ''I hope out of the darkness of my past maybe something good can come of this for other people and the Church. I can't just leave this as meaningless pain. I'm not out to chuck bricks at the Church. I want people to look at the structure that allowed these things to happen. For the Church to acknowledge that these things happened, that they're sorry for denying they happened, that they're sorry for their lack of courage and to allow the healing process to begin. The reaction to me saying these things has almost been 'Shut up. The protestants will laugh at us,' when in fact the opposite is true.

''The Church was sending out millennium packs - bright new future and all that stuff. Well, I say I'm not moving into any new millennium until we face the past. It is false to move into a future that's built on silence and denial.''

For Father Steve Gilhooley silence is not an option. n

The Pyjama Parade by Steve Gilhooley is published by Lomond Books on October 11 at (pounds) 10

Gilhooley: the pariah priest

Father Steve Gilhooley has long been a figure of controversy in the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland. Even before his decision to join the Scottish Socialist Party last month he has in the past questioned the church's insistence on priestly celibacy, the status of women in the church - ''Is it just guys who were created in the image of God?'' - and challenged the late Cardinal Winning's position in the debate over Section 28.

Some have seen him as a pure controversialist. This is a man,

after all, who has admitted that he once urinated down the eighteenth hole at St Andrews, and used

The Sash as his mobile's ringing tone. He was also the first man to record an episode of Late Call in a pub. For Gilhooley, though, such revelations speak more of a sense of humour than a taste for publicity.

Inevitably, though, his outspokeness has irritated and angered elements in the church. When news of his decision to join the Scottish Socialist Party emerged last month a fellow priest, Father John Morrison, called for his resignation, saying: ''The primary role of a parish priest is to minister to his flock and he can't do that if

he divides them on questions of politics.''

Morrison's call was backed by Catholic Truth, a publication aimed at challenging what it sees as a ''widespread dissent from Catholic teaching''.

It said: ''By his continual public dissent for every single Catholic teaching Father Gilhooley is bringing out into the open that there are now far too many alleged Catholics who, like him, are Catholic in name only.''

But Gilhooley has dismissed Catholic Truth as '' a nasty wee magazine''.

''The whole magazine is about 'kick Gilhooley out','' he says. ''I can't cross the road but I do it wrongly or I'm doing it to upset Rome.''

His decision to join the Scottish Socialist Party owes much, he says, to his admiration for Tommy Sheridan. He talks at length about what he sees as Sheridan's decency and integrity. ''Nobody goes to prison when all you've got to do is pay a fine,'' he argues. ''I want to be on that side and say this is what we should all be like and what a great society we could have.''

Nor is he a lone voice in the church in this regard, he says. He recalls recently attending a funeral in Glasgow and meeting a couple of priests who revealed that they had voted for the SSP in the last election.

''These are not ignorant people,'' says Gilhooley. ''These

are people who I think are at the coal face, mapping the human costs of the policies that we've followed in this country over the last decades and I think they perceived in the Scottish Socialists something good.''

His decision prompted Catholic leaders to warn that they will monitor his public statements in future (''Gestapo'' tactics, according to Gilhooley), while one Catholic clergyman told The Herald: ''Father Gilhooley is in danger of becoming the poor man's Bishop Richard Holloway.''

The church has not yet commented on The Pyjama Parade, but news of its

publication did prompt a letter from Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, the Vatican's prefect of the congregation for the clergy, to Gilhooley's archbishop,

Keith O'Brien, urging him to ''discipline'' the priest for writing the book.