While womanising ex-bishop Eamonn Casey was attending first Communions as a Catholic curate in England in 2001 – the year Limerick diocese received an allegation that he had sexually abused a child – another man of the cloth was enhancing the church’s battered image. For weeks on end Fr Aidan Troy walked Belfast’s Ardoyne Road with children too scared to go alone to Holy Cross primary school through a gauntlet of whistling, jeering, missile-throwing loyalist protesters. The daily barrage of bile began to dissipate after the Passionist priest invited a Presbyterian minister to join him and the children in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the school gates.
The sight of Troy with his black robe defiantly fluttering in the tensed air became etched in the iconography of the troubled North. It joined film footage of Fr Edward Daly waving a white hanky in Derry on Bloody Sunday and of the peacemaking Redemptorist Fr Alec Reid praying the last rites over a dying soldier in Andersonstown. Pope John Paul II himself intervened to try to end the IRA’s hunger strike.
Now, thanks to Casey and his fellow princes of the church, their power to exert influence for the greater good is dead and gone. It’s with Casey in the crypt of Galway cathedral.
Proof, were it needed, was supplied by the rioting against accommodation for Ukrainian war refugees in Coolock last weekend. Men wearing balaclavas hurled bricks, bottles, chunks of pavement and petrol bombs in scenes reminiscent of the Troubles. Compounding the impression was the ubiquity of the Irish flag, appropriated after Sinn Féin/IRA loosened its grip on it by factions who egregiously presume to speak for Ireland.
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There is one glaring difference, though – this time, the slap of the episcopal crosier has lost its sting. That is the damage Ireland’s Catholic bishops have done, not only to their church but to their country too. Where once the priest was a respected public figure in a crisis, self-appointed supremacists now fill the role.
While individual bishops have criticised the far-right, how can the institution presume to speak with any moral authority or even an ounce of humanity to quell the rioting when its own behaviour has been abominable?
It has perpetrated untruths, whether by omission or “mental reservation”, placed children within reach of predators by moving sex-abusing priests around their diocesan boards of snakes-and-ladders, and closed ranks to protect Casey, its very own red-hatted paedophile accused by his niece of raping her when she was five. Conveniently for him the 2001 allegation by another person got “lost” when it was sent to Arundel & Brighton, the English diocese where Casey continued to have access to children, according to the RTÉ/Mail on Sunday documentary Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets.
It beggars belief that the hierarchy was oblivious that four individuals had accused Casey of child sexual abuse when 11 bishops concelebrated his funeral Mass in 2017. Is it possible not one bishop knew he was accused of molesting children in the dioceses of Kerry, Galway and Limerick, or that payments of €40,000 and €100,000 were made to two of his accusers, or that he had been stripped of his public ministry a decade before his death? Is it possible the pope is not a Catholic?
“Love thy neighbour,” preached a man called Jesus Christ. Whatever one’s religious beliefs it’s a message desperately in need of repeating when asylum seekers’ tents are ripped from them and burned or thrown in the Liffey and xenophobic signs are displayed on a public road stating “get the smell bags out”.
More than one in every three recent arrivals seeking asylum is Palestinian. Imagine the horror of having escaped discrimination, killings and land confiscation only to find yourself facing knife-wielding strangers in the Irish night yelling at you to go back to where you came from.
Some prominent Ireland-for-the-Irish agitators flaunt their orthodox Catholicism. We have seen videos of them saying the rosary in a procession up Grafton Street and attending an open-air Mass after an “exorcism” of the Dáil performed by a priest from the fundamentalist order, the Society of St Pius Resistance.
Some disparate racist groups have their origins in Catholic-linked campaigns. One such is Clann Éireann, led by Justin Barrett, an erstwhile leader of Youth Defence, whose self-published book, The National Way Forward, espouses the creation of a “Catholic republic”. In a country where the bishops’ sway over the populace has been severely diminished, their failure to publicly rebuke racists who give God a bad name is doubly damaging.
Yet they deemed themselves fit to issue a collective statement about the family and care referendums in March, warning that the proposal to recognise “durable relationships” as foundational families would “weaken the incentive for young people to marry”.
The hypocrisy that celibate men running an institution steeped in the scandal of child abuse would preach family values is only matched by their duplicity in keeping the Vatican’s censure of Casey a secret. What, one wonders, poses the greater threat – two people who love one another choosing to live together or a paedophile on the prowl at their family’s door?
The Catholic Church has many priests and nuns who do Christian work. Fr John Joe Duffy wrapped his arms around his community in Creeslough, Co Donegal, when a gas explosion killed 10 men, women and children in October 2022. Sister Stan (Kennedy) founded Focus Ireland to provide accommodation for the homeless, as well as the Immigrant Council of Ireland. Fr Oliver O’Reilly had the courage to condemn “the paymaster” from the altar of his church in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan after the abduction and torture of Kevin Lunney, the then boss of Quinn Industrial Holdings.
Other clerics have been treated odiously by their Church. Fr Seán Fagan, a Marist theologian, had all copies of his books on morality bought up and destroyed upon Vatican instructions. He died with his heart broken. No bishop attended his funeral.
Redemptorist Tony Flannery has been publicly banned from ministry by the Vatican for the crime of questioning women’s exclusion from the priesthood.
This week’s revelations about Casey have re-inflamed public anger with the institutional church. If the hierarchy has any chance of having its voice heeded again it should start atoning by denouncing racist agitators who – like Donald Trump – have hijacked God for their agenda.