14 Bishop Eamonn Casey

Nearly two decades on, Bishop Eamonn Casey’s ‘sins’, or at least the ones he was punished for, suggest themselves as the flaws of a good man. He had knocked up an American woman, Annie Murphy, who had given birth in 1974 to a boy called Peter. All things considered, he was a high-class kind of sinner.

In May 1992, when Peter Murphy was seventeen, it all started to spill out. The Irish Times had been sitting on the story for weeks and eventually went with a partial version of it, mainly an element relating to Casey’s payment of some £70,000, said to have come from a diocesan account, to Annie Murphy’s ‘partner’ as a ‘settlement for Peter’. A couple of days previously, Casey had mysteriously resigned as Bishop of Galway, after the Irish Times made contact with him concerning the information it had gathered. Gradually it emerged: Annie Murphy had been the daughter of an American friend of Casey’s, who had come to Ireland on the run from a broken marriage, and had become ‘involved’ with Casey, who had been Bishop of Kerry at the time.

The Irish people were stunned, and not purely because it was impossible to come to terms with the idea of a bishop having sex. Casey had been no ordinary kind of bishop. In an era of clerical austerity, he had been a breath of fresh air. Roly-poly of both body and spirit, with his mellifluous Kerry accent he caused people to smile when he started to speak. He was known to like big cars and to drive them fast, and to ‘enjoy a glass of wine with his meals’. He would go on The Late Late Show and sing ‘If You’re Irish, Come into the Parlour’ and tell jokes and talk and talk until the cows came home. Gaybo would be rolling around the floor.

If he had not been wearing the purple rig-out, you would never have known Casey was a bishop at all. And yet, he was one of the most attractive figures in a Church that seemed to have forgotten about the necessity to convince people that religion was not entirely an occasion of misery. Casey had been one of the stars of the visit to Ireland of Pope John Paul II in 1979. He also seemed to do much more than other bishops of the kinds of things Christians were supposed to be doing: helping starving Africans and suchlike. As Director of the Catholic Housing Aid Society, he had been responsible for establishing sixty-five branches in the UK, enabling thousands of homeless people to find places to live. As Bishop of Kerry he had taken a special interest in developing services for young people. As chairman of the Catholic Third Word Aid organization Trócaire, he was a constant campaigner on issues affecting the poorest people on earth, frequently excoriating politicians for their failures. He had also been a vocal critic of the Reagan administration’s record in Central America.

For many years, the Irish people had studied Bishop Casey and wondered what he was so happy about, and now they knew. And, although the idea of a bishop having sex was unthinkable, in another sense it fitted perfectly with the undertow of Casey’s character. In one way, it caused people a great deal of existential relief to realize that there had been a perfectly reasonable explanation for Casey’s apparent perpetual good humour. And it also offered people the prospect of relief from their own sins. The idea that a senior bishop had succumbed to the temptation of an American divorcée was something that, deep down, people wanted to celebrate rather than condemn. But this was not a culturally approved response, either in the old world of the Catholic Church or the ‘new’ one led by the Irish Times, so they had to keep it to themselves. Many people grinned inwardly when they thought of Casey and wondered how many other adventures he might have had, but outwardly had to join in the general clamour of cant and humbug in a society only too delighted at this opportunity to prosecute such a monumental example of a senior cleric being caught out doing one thing while preaching another. So, whether because of the woman, the baby, the money or all the above, Casey had to go.

As the years unfolded and the floodgates opened up on revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up, Casey gradually came to look as if he’d been hard done by. What, after all, was Irish society trying to say? That it did not approve of bishops having sex? On the contrary, there began to be a growing demand for married priests, women priests, men and women priest who were married to each other, transvestite priests, transsexual priests and so forth.

What was it? That Irish society could not tolerate bishops having sex while seeming to oppose such activity for others? That it was really, as the Irish Times tried to pretend, about the money? Or, as some of the more pious critics insisted: that the worst thing was Casey’s refusal to leave his position and marry Annie Murphy, or his failure subsequently to develop a relationship with his son. Perhaps, indeed, this latter was Casey’s only real offence, added to Murphy’s claims that he had initially tried to persuade her to give their child up for adoption.

When you rinse it all down, it seems Casey had to go because he had behaved hypocritically. In truth, of course, there is not necessarily always something morally decisive about believing and stating one thing and, in certain circumstances, doing another. On the contrary, the Catholic Church insists that we are all sinners but that sins may be wiped away in the sacrament of confession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavily secularized mass culture of modern Ireland, which calls for more and greater sexual freedoms, is far less forgiving than the tyrant bishops, when it happens to be a bishop who is caught with his trousers down.

Mercy and compassion towards Casey appears to have been the unspoken wish of the Irish people. Casey himself later claimed that he had received 1,500 letters and that only two were critical of him. Why could Eamonn Casey not simply have confessed his sins, conducted his penance in private and got on with his work? Would this not have been the best way of demonstrating how Christianity was supposed to work? In due course, he could have gone on The Late Late and confessed his sins to secular Ireland. God knows, in the years that followed, we could have done with a bishop who could come on television and sing ‘The Foggy Dew’ and tell a yarn or two about what the actress said to the bishop to cause him to fall out of bed.