NOS came to an abrupt and dramatic end in 1995 when a former member approached Stephen Lowe, then archdeacon of Sheffield, to warn him the movement had become a cult in which Brain was abusing his congregation.
Lowe, who later became a bishop, had been an enthusiastic supporter of NOS and waved away concerns from fellow clergy as early as 1992.
But the archdeacon told the court he had noticed Brain – who was ordained in the cassock worn by Robert de Niro in the 1986 film The Mission – becoming “something of a messianic” figure.
On hearing the whistleblowers’s account that Brain’s followers had been “putting him to bed with sexual favours,” he told the court he confronted the NOS leader.
In response to claims he had had sexual relationships with up to 40 women in NOS, Brain is said to have told Lowe: “I thought it was more.”
The Church of England sent Brain to a psychiatrist, who he told he had been “obsessed with sex since the age of 10,” according to a report disclosed as evidence in his trials.
Brain resigned shortly before the broadcast of BBC documentary in 1995 in which he said: “For a priest in a church setting, I would have to say I was involved in improper sexual conduct with a number of women”.
Though the scandal devastated the NOS community and made for lurid headlines in the country’s newspapers, for some it had not come out of the blue.
During one of the trials, the court heard that, years before allegations against Brain became public, one St Thomas’s staff member had been shot down in a meeting for questioning whether it was “appropriate” for “scantily young women” to be seen coming and going from the priest’s family home.
Mark Stibbe, the church’s curate, told the trial he had also warned Lowe that Brain was growing unaccountable and NOS was heading for “disaster”. The archdeacon was said to have replied: “We don’t conduct witch hunts in the Sheffield diocese.”
As the scandal faded from newspaper front pages, Brain changed his name and disappeared from the public eye. He was running a design consultancy in Wilmslow, Cheshire, when in 2021 former NOS members first contacted South Yorkshire Police.
In the 1995 documentary, then Bishop of Sheffield David Lunn had said: “If people want to set up an investigation, good luck to them. I don’t think it would serve any useful purpose. I think we know what happened.”
Following Brain’s convictions three decades later, the Diocese of Sheffield struck a very different tone, announcing an independent safeguarding review into “institutional failures”.
“What happened was an appalling abuse of power and leadership that should never have occurred,” said the Right Reverend Dr Pete Wilcox.
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