A CATHOLIC priest alleged to have sexually abused boys living in care was caught by his cleaner, a court heard.

Tony McSweeney, 68, was Father at St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Eastwood Road North, Eastwood, when his housekeeper Julia Woodyatt discovered videotapes of child abuse and sex toys at his home, Southwark Crown Court heard.

McSweeney is charged with molesting three youngsters at Grafton Close Children’s Home in Hounslow, West London in the Seventies and Eighties.

Father McSweeney was originally charged alongside children’s home manager John Stingemore, 72, who died weeks before the trial was due to start.

Ms Woodyatt told the court she initially went to the Catholic church for help, but was fobbed off.

She said she was cleaning the presbytery in 1998 when she saw a video with a warning sticker on. She thought it was pornography and didn’t think anything of it or the articles she found in his side drawer as she put his laundry away.

But she added: “Then, looking for a place to put his shirts – there was a chest of drawers next to the TV and video – opened the second drawer down and it was full of those black tapes with blue tape across them. I closed the drawer and left.”

It was her father, who is a policeman, who encouraged her to check the films.

She said: “At the time Tony McSweeney was doing a funeral and I decided to just switch the TV and video on and look at the tape that was in there. I don’t think I can have seen more than eight or ten seconds of it.

“It was a film of two adolescent boys... probably between the age of 14 and 16.”

She telephoned police, but got cold feet when they said she would have to be named.

She also tried to speak to the church for help.

She said: “It was basically inferred I had misjudged maybe the age of the boys on the video, they told me they were aware Tony McSweeney was homosexual.”

The priest was moved from the church some months later without explanation.

It was alleged McSweeney used his long-term friendship with John Stingemore to sexually abuse boys in the Hounslow care home.

Father McSweeney, who now lives in Pease Pottage, West Sussex, denies four counts of indecent assault, two of which were on a boy under the age of 16, and one count of taking an indecent photograph of a child.

He denies three further counts of making indecent images of children between 2012 and 2013.

The trial continues.