IRELAND
Irish Independent
Sarah MacDonald
March 14 2017
A 2006 article in the ‘Chicago Tribune’, titled ‘How Catholicism Fell From Grace in Ireland’, points to the Bishop Eamonn Casey scandal as the beginning of the end for the Catholic Church in Ireland.
The revelation in May 1992 that one of the hierarchy’s most high-profile prelates had fathered a son following an affair with an American woman when he was Bishop of Kerry in the 1970s was, up to that point, the worst scandal to hit the Irish Church. It shocked the Irish faithful and resulted in a storm of international media headlines.
When Annie Murphy went public, telling her story to newspapers and famously appearing on the ‘Late Late Show’ with Gay Byrne, there was deep resentment towards her among Catholics. The frosty reception she received from Mr Byrne mirrored the initial attitude of many, who refused to believe that the story was true – until Bishop Casey resigned and fled the country. She was then resented for her role in the downfall of a popular bishop.
Bishop Casey was known within clerical circles to be a disciplinarian where his young priests were concerned. So the revelation that he had been preaching one thing and doing another was the cause of his long 14-year exile – even when worse clerical crimes of child sexual abuse by others were revealed subsequently.
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