Pious old men the REAL sinners in Casey affair

IWAS in Sydney when I heard about Bishop Eamonn Casey’s death last week and recalled phantom sightings of him in Australia when he went missing 25 years ago. Looking back, I spent too many nights in hotels that had seen better days searching for him across the United Sates after the Annie Murphy scandal broke in 1992.

It was surreal: a Prince of the Church was the media’s ‘most wanted’ with a price on his head and ‘on the run’ from journalist bounty hunters like me.

I followed every false tip-off and bum steer for nearly a year but the Catholic Church is an old hand at hiding its embarrassments and I never caught up with him.

And, in retrospect, following his trail of tears from Florida to Ecuador to Mexico, was an early education in human frailty.

He was tracked down and photographed in a market in Cuernavaca, Mexico. And the low, early-morning sun backlighting his light cotton trousers made for an unlikely Princess Diana-style picture.

But I did meet Ms Murphy in Connecticut, and her son Peter in New York; both spoke about Eamonn Casey, the man, with affection – but they were hostile to his religious calling.

Ms Murphy drank in the same pub as I did in Ranelagh, when she was Bishop Casey’s secret lover in 1974. And 18 years later in the US, she told me that she had been head over heels in love with him in Ireland, and he was just as taken with her.

His cowardice and hypocritical refusal to be a proper father to their son Peter hurt her deeply, she told me. And 18 years after the birth she was wont to tell the world about Bishop Casey’s cant.

It was the beginning of the end for Catholicism’s moral authority – and its iron grip on Irish civil society.

Bishop Casey’s heterosexual dalliance had broken a solemn vow of chastity and it resulted in grim consequences for him and for Ms Murphy.

He drove fast cars, appreciated expensive claret and performed Irish ballads – but the Annie Murphy scandal added the final line to his ‘wine, women and song’ reputation.

For many in Ireland, Ms Murphy – a confused young woman to whom Bishop Casey had a duty of care – was the scarlet woman who lured a saintly priest to her bed.

But it was a relationship between two consenting adults. And in retrospect, the hierarchy’s appalling hypocrisy and cruelty to Bishop Casey when the Church was about to be consumed by horrors of clerical child sex abuse, was pure spite. Other prelates appeared more concerned about Bishop Casey’s monogamous relationship with Ms Murphy than they were about other clergymen using children as sex toys.

They never forgave him and the gregarious bishop was silenced and held up as an example of the indelible shame that befalls anyone who causes scandal for the Irish Church.

It was cruel and unjust for Bishop Casey to be treated as a moral leper by a hierarchy whose apologies to the victims of clerical child abuse were offered so hesitantly.

Bishop Casey, an unfailingly kind man, was a traditionalist as well as a hypocrite.

But he was a gifted organiser whose work with the homeless in London in the 1950s and 1960s is still recalled by grateful politicians.

Yes, the Kerry-born bishop did appear as a warm-up act for Pope John Paul with Fr Michael Cleary in Galway – and he played the ‘character’ too often on the Late Late Show. He was a man of his time who looked faintly ridiculous back then – but 25 years has put his internationally acclaimed scandal in perspective.

He deserved better than being cast into exile by unforgiving and arrogant old men needing a sinner to highlight their own piety. ‘I WAS there’ is the most potent attention-grabber for any story – and I was in Malaysia as the aftermath of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam played out.

The plot was beyond Jason Bourne – a cruel North Korean dictator orders the murder of his half-brother in an exotic tropical country. But lest we forget: Kim Jong-nam was a real person whose killing was captured in real time by CCTV.

And that grisly spectacle is proof positive that dictator Kim Jong-un believes he can do anything, any time to anybody, anywhere.

Here’s the rub: North Korea could not exist with China’s support. And its power-crazed young dictator is a nuisance and an embarrassment for China.

But Beijing has decided that a volatile nuclear dictatorship is a better neighbour than a reunited Korea with nuclear savvy US troops billeted there. IF YOU want to know why Donald Trump was elected president read Hillbilly Elegy, a mighty book that explains why rust-belt America voted for him. JD Vance’s US bestseller explains how their political leaders betrayed the Scots-Irish, the poor white trash of the rust belt.

I also learned that the term ‘hillbilly’ came to describe the Scots-Irish; Ulster Protestants called themselves ‘Billy boys’ and they settled on high ground in the Appalachian Mountains to defend their homesteads. THERE were pleas for restraint in Australia on St Patrick’s night as the expatriate Irish painted the country green – although some were disappointed that our Government didn’t send a Cabinet minister. Minister of State David Stanton was in Perth and Indonesia, while junior minister Patrick O’Donovan visited the east coast of Australia and New Zealand.