In the face of threats, a trainee priest saved his community

Hello Post readers — it’s Jack here. I first wrote about the Eldonian Village in January 2023, and The Post has been reporting on it ever since. In the last three years it has become one of the biggest and furthest-reaching stories we’ve covered. 

In today’s piece, for the first time ever, we tell the story through the eyes of the whistleblower: a trainee priest called Rhys Jones. 

Right from the start, the majority of our Eldonian coverage has been published free of charge. It’s a saga which focuses on one of Liverpool’s poorest communities, a community which hasn't always had a voice. For that reason we’ve chosen to try and get this reporting in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been free to produce. The Post relies entirely on the support of its paying members. It’s only because of them we’re able to publish pieces like this for free. It’s only because of them we exist at all. If you’d like to join them, and support The Post, here’s the button. 

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On a cold day in early March 2023, Rhys Jones began his regular routine. He went to college during the day, part of his traineeship to become a priest, then headed to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral for Mass. He carried his leather hold-all, as he always did. He headed down into the sacristy upon arrival, as he always did. 

But rather than getting changed into his vestments (as he always did) he walked straight through the sacristy and out the downstairs exit into the car park. A 4x4 was waiting for him. “I had no idea where I was going, but I knew I wasn’t going back to Aigburth,” he tells me.

The window view turned from monotonous stretches of motorway to something more bucolic. Ah, Jones figured, we must be in the middle of nowhere. When the car stopped, his suspicions were confirmed. There was a petrol station garage, a garden centre and a small parish church. There was also a Toby Carvery — if you were willing to walk for 40 minutes. He never made the walk. His head wasn’t in the right place for a carvery.

The church’s priest, a man who’d seen plenty in his seven decades alive, was nonetheless baffled to hear that the young trainee would need to use his quiet parish as a sylvan-safe-house for the next few months, as per the advice of Merseyside Police. And that no one could know he was there. 

The priest had a dog, called Job. Over the next two months Jones and Job formed an alliance of convenience. Job needed to be walked. Jones needed some, any, way to kill the empty hours. If you know your Old Testament, you’ll know that God puts Job through the ringer. Rhys Jones did the same. With nothing to do for two months, they just walked — miles of walking through the tedium of Lancastrian landscapes, or to the petrol station garage at midnight for a packet of Haribo through the little hatch. 

I feel slightly guilty, sitting on a grey sofa in the upstairs bedroom at the Mount Carmel church in Toxteth where Jones now resides, surrounded by fat theological tomes and even fatter stacks of legal filings relating to the Eldonian Village, listening to him recount the Olympian feats of countryside traipsing the poor Terrier was subjected to. I feel slightly guilty, because in a roundabout sort of way it was all my fault. 

If the Eldonian Village now represents four years of my life, it’s far bigger than that still for Rhys Jones. The story, as told over numerous Post articles – as in the BBC, Guardian and Times – was of a small, mostly-elderly north Liverpool community who’d found themselves targeted with violence and intimidation after they’d discovered that several plots of land they believed to have owned communally had been flogged to companies registered in Caribbean tax havens, often for as little as £1. What hasn’t been told, until now, is Rhys’s role at the centre of the story from the very start.

I first met him with his grandad Brian in the McDonald’s at the foot of Church Street in the summer of 2022; post-the first threats against him, pre-the time an anonymous caller phoned him to inform him someone attending his church service that night was going to be “fucking shot”. Before long, I was speaking to him so often on the phone, so often in furtive tones, that my then-girlfriend suspected infidelity. I told her it was complicated.

Several months before that meeting, Rhys was asked by Brian to open the Our Lady of Reconciliation Church on Eldon Street for a “residents meeting”. He didn’t know what it was about, nor did he really care. He had enough on his mind as it was, having recently written to Archbishop Malcolm McMahon to express his interest in becoming a priest, with the process of applying for seminary already proving laborious. He did it because his grandad asked him to do it, and he couldn’t say no to his grandad.