IRELAND
Irish Central
By NICK BRAMHILL, IrishCentral Staff Writer
Published Monday, August 5, 2013
The son of Bishop Eamon Casey has told of his anger at the way the Catholic Church treated his father following revelations that he had had an affair and fathered a son with American divorcee Annie Murphy.
In an interview in the Irish Times Boston-based Peter Murphy said his father received far more punishment than he deserved from Catholic Church leaders, after he was forced into exile and forbidden from saying in Mass in public ever again.
He said the subsequent paedophile scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church over the past 20 years put into perspective his father’s so-called ‘crime’.
And he also revealed that Casey, 86, who returned home to Ireland in 2006 and is now in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer’s felt lasting pain at being banned from performing Mass publicly because he never lost his devotion to the Church.
He said: “It was ridiculous. I mean, six years’ penance in a foreign country and then the five years he spent in England made it even more egregious and more painful because of how close he was to his goal and all he wanted to was go home and say Mass. Was that so terrible?
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