LEGACY OF HYPOCRISY
Bishop Casey’s double standards on sex and morality crushed the Church’s oppressive hold on this country
THE funeral of Bishop Eamonn Casey last Thursday exposed something in the psyche of both the Catholic Church and the Irish state that goes some significant way towards explaining the culture that gave us the Tuam babies scandal.
There were warm tributes to Bishop Casey’s work on the national and international scene as a staunch defender of the rights of the poor and oppressed. His Trojan efforts on behalf of indigent Irish emigrants in london was rightly emphasised, as was the great physical courage he displayed when the funeral Mass of Archbishop Oscar Romero was machinegunned by government soldiers in El salvador in 1980.
The ghosts of Annie and Peter Murphy were acknowledged and the Church’s sympathy was offered to them. Nevertheless, it was also mentioned that the fact that Bishop Casey had fathered a son had in itself caused profound upset for the Church and its people. The chief celebrant, Bishop Brendan Kelly, asserted the view that, ‘Yes, we are all sinners, but irresponsibility, infidelity and sin are particularly shocking in the lives of those who preach the Gospel.’
It was what Bishop Kelly said next, though, that reveals the thought process that has infused this country since independence and has blighted its development: ‘In 1992 Bishop Eamonn resigned and left the country. He expressed his sorrow many times, apologised and asked for forgiveness,’ he said. And, one might ask, what could be wrong with that statement?
The answer is: plenty. Bishop Casey did not simply resign and leave the country. He was made resign and banished from the country by a cruel and callous Church. That one of its main preachers had sinned could just about be tolerated, but only if that sinner was far away and out of sight. Casey didn’t leave Ireland by choice. He was forced out. He was removed because he was an embarrassment to the Church.
Never mind the fact that Casey, despite his love of the trappings of being a powerful bishop, had a social conscience and tried to do something to help the lives of the poor and oppressed both at home and abroad.
If the sin had just been about money, that could have been explained away by the Church. If Casey had been using diocesan funds for practically any other purpose except for the use of raising his own child, he would have been seen as kind-hearted and well meaning: the classic embodiment of the real humanity of the Church.
The fact that Casey’s sin was about sex could not be explained away. And at its heart, that is because the Catholic Church has always been obsessed with sex – and nowhere more so than in Ireland. Casey himself was no stranger to fulminating from the pulpit about the evils of sex outside of marriage and preaching the joys of chastity. Once his hypocrisy had been exposed, he had to be removed from the country.
Casey’s sins were relatively minor compared to what the Church was hiding, particularly in relation to the sexual abuse some of its priests were committing. But what Casey’s actions did do was to crush the imperiousness of the Church in a country intoxicated by its slavish acquiescence to the clergy.
The banishment of Casey to a life of loneliness in Ecuador was the Church’s way of trying to excise him from the consciousness of the Irish people. The same thought process permeated the idea of the mother and baby home so prevalent all across the state.
The attitude of the Church and the state was to keep the so-called fallen women away from the cleanliving population. Unmarried mothers were forced by the thousands into Magdalene laundries, a product of the 19th Century, although the last one didn’t close until 1996.
Mother and baby homes, though, were a fully fledged Irish idea and were officially endorsed by both Church and state in 1927 as a solution to that most awful of words, illegitimacy. The industrial school system flourished as a way of removing poor children from their parents, who were often seen by official state inspectors as having doubtful morals.
Children in these schools were nourished neither physically nor intellectually. Rather they were beaten – and classrooms became repositories not of learning but of punishment. But all of this was out of sight, and the faithful could go to listen to Casey and his ilk preach of the evils of the flesh and feel good about themselves.
It was when Casey himself breached this sexual morality that the edifice crumbled. The Church solution was to get him out of the country, but the genie was well and truly out of the bottle. Casey was perhaps the worst thing that happened to the Church but the revelations of his indiscretions opened up Irish society for the better.