IRELAND
The Irish Catholic

by Michael Kelly
March 16, 2017

It’s hard to get across to younger generations today the enormity of the scandal that was the revelation in 1992 that Bishop Eamonn Casey had secretly fathered a child years earlier.

One got a sense of the impact this week by the fact that the country’s largest-selling daily newspaper The Irish Independent carried a special eight-page supplement to mark Bishop Casey’s death after a long illness on March 13.

There’s something strangely fitting that Bishop Casey – a man who spent so much of his time and energy advocating for the rights of young Irish people forced to emigrate out of economic necessity – died in the week of St Patrick’s Day. Today, a new generation of Irish chaplains is working with Irish communities in far-flung parts of the world, particularly in the US where the so-called ‘undocumented’…