Bishop Eamon Casey - Child Abuse Allegations

A recap on Bishop Casey:

The revelation of his having fathered a child was the initial publicly known church scandal, caused a stir at the time because the RC church was lecturing the faithful, most of Ireland, on sexual morality at the time.

However when other clergy were revealed as child abusers, more or less “all was forgiven”, with regard to looking at the perspective of it. We did not know there was anything further to be revealed down the decades.

One of Gay Byrne’s low points was how he treated Bishop Casey’s partner who was mother of his child, on the Late Late Show, painting the Bishop as a saint, and, just about unsaid, herself as a harridan by comparison.

Re his friend, Fr Cleary, I spoke on his radio show once, and got a lift home from the studio, mad driver that he was. I wasn’t surprised about hearing his “housekeeoer” was his partner and that there was a child resulting from the union.

As regards paedophilia, this doesn’t surprise me either because his partner Phyllis was a vulnerable underage girl “shelteting” in a home, and not alone did she have the boy that lived with them, but an older boy too, which she must have given birth to when very young, and he is said to have been fathered by Cleary too. That is statutory rape, and for a mature man, under the guise of being a caring father figure and a man of God, that is in itself a form of paedophilia with a preference for post-puberty children. It’s got some name, I forget atm.

It was my first official consciousness of scandals or mistruths going on among the clergy. However a work colleague had previously spoken about abuses and breaches of trust, widespread sexual activity taking place in the clergy. We thought she might have been exaggerating slightly, but this lady wasn’t given to either lies or exaggeration. I remember then discussing with my own family about the rumours, and it kind of upset my parents a little bit, with a touch of “don’t believe all you hear”.

Except my father was always very wary about authority, since he was sexually abused as a boy by a policeman. When all the revelations came out he was upset at the extent of it.

One time, my mother discussed with my father about boarding school for me as I was an only child and she thought it might be good for my socialisation. We had a good family friend, a Scottish priest who was in the Passionist order, and he’d sometimes be staying at Mount Argus in Dublin, fairly near us. My Dad had been very against the idea of my being sent boarding, and he had a chat with this priest about it. The priest said he was dead against boarding schools as “you can’t trust that things don’t go on, not everyone in charge is a saint”. He had heard about bad things going on.