Greener grass?

[musicus]

This thread has wandered far from where it started even by the standards of this board.

Ouch
Nonetheless, thank you for bringing us back to the topic with such an interesting and amusing post.

[Southern Comfort]

Dom Fabian Duggan and his brother Aidan were both monks of Fort Augustus, and both taught in the abbey school and at Carlekemp, which appears to have been the preparatory school. It seems that they were both Australian in origin, which would explain their subsequent return to that country. The reason that Aidan Duggan left the Abbey appears to involve cases of sexual abuse, and some have assumed that Fabian and Aidan were actually the same monk, exiled from the monastery to his country of origin.

They do, however, appear to have been two brothers, both of whom seem to have returned to Australia in the 1970s. Fabian is currently listed among the retired clergy of the Archdiocese of Sydney, though at the time he wrote various articles for the AD2000 website he is described as being in the Wagga Wagga diocese; so his life pilgrimage may not yet have ended. Draw your own conclusions.

Fort Augustus Abbey closed down in 1998 in the wake of the closure of the abbey school five years earlier. The Abbey complex has since then been turned into luxury apartments in the heart of the Scottish highlands.

In the wake of the BBC Scotland programme about abuse by monks of Fort Augustus Abbey last week, here is a clarification of the above statement I made last September.

It has been known for a long time that Dom Aidan Duggan died in October 2004. He was one of the abuser-monks at Fort Augustus, and subsequently abused others after his return to Australia as a result of which a court case was mounted against the Archdiocese of Sydney.

What has not until now been clear is whether Dom Fabian Duggan, the author of "Holy light on earth's horizon" was actually the same person as Aidan. I am happy to report definitively that this is not the case. Fr Fabian is apparently still alive, since his name appears on the sick list in this weekend's parish bulletin for St Anthony's Parish, Picton, New South Wales.

[musicus]

Thanks for clearing that up, SC.