Hypocrisy of Bishop Casey and Church

WE have seen many attempts this week to remake the legacy of the former bishop of Galway. He did great work for the poor, for emigrants and was a strong advocate for social justice.

Eamonn Casey’s true legacy, however, is that he inadvertently laid bare the rank hypocrisy at the core of the Catholic Church in Ireland. When Annie Murphy told Bishop Casey she was pregnant by him, his response was to attempt to coerce her into having the child adopted.

That she stood up to him and kept their son Peter speaks volumes about her character, yet when their affair became public, it was she who was vilified by the Church and by a great many in society.

Casey was a worldly man, fond of good food, fast cars and fine wines, when Murphy became pregnant. He was no innocent seduced from his vow of chastity by a temptress, yet attempts were made to cast Annie as the Eve to his Adam. With no little irony, she called her memoir Forbidden Fruit.

The bishop then used funds to secretly pay maintenance for his son and that money might never have been repaid had the details not become public.

It is hard, therefore, not to see Casey as anything but a religious equivalent of Charles Haughey: a gregarious charmer with a prodigious appetite for the finer things in life and an outrageous propensity for ‘do as I say, but not as I do’. Both led lives rich in hypocrisy.

He was interred this week in the crypt of Galway Cathedral. Just a few kilometres up the road in Tuam, babies who died of malnutrition or curable diseases were buried in the ground or a septic tank.

Of course, Casey’s indiscretions are minor compared to child-abusing priests but it does not exonerate him fathering a child while preaching chastity, channelling Church funds to pay for his ‘illegitimate’ son, for his very hypocrisy.

Casey eventually paid back the money he took. It would befit the Church to pay their share in relation to the compensation they owe survivors of clerical abuse.