IRELAND
The Sunday Times
‘Young people of Ireland, I love you,” called out Pope John Paul II to the hundreds of thousands who had gathered in Galway in October 1979. The crowd at Ballybrit racecourse responded effusively, singing and cheering. It was a glorious moment for the man who had made it all happen: Bishop Eamon Casey.
Standing in the rain for hours waiting for the Pope’s helicopter to appear through the clouds, the young people had been entertained by two of the country’s best-known clerics. The ebullient Casey, bishop of Galway, and Fr Michael Cleary, the singing priest, whipped the crowd up into an ecumenical frenzy with jubilant song and prayer.
On that October day, Casey and Cleary were only the support act, but in the early 1990s they would upstage and eclipse the entire Catholic Church in Ireland. The revelation that both had fathered children precipitated a crisis in the church from which it has never fully recovered.
In 1992, after Annie Murphy, an American divorcee, revealed the details of her affair with Casey and the existence of their son, Peter, the bishop resigned from his post and fled Ireland. Although he has returned intermittently, the church seems happier for him to stay away. It is his very ebullience, which proved so invaluable on that wet October day, that it fears.
Posted by kshaw at December 3, 2005 08:18 PM