Revelations about Eamonn Casey point yet again to the gross hypocrisy of the Bishops.
These are mostly elderly males who think they have every right to pronounce on other people’s sexuality and gender.
Today one of their main targets is trans people. They regularly issue encyclicals to tell us they have a special line to God – and He gives them the right to tell us all about natural gender roles and proper sexuality.
Eamonn Casey was the Bishop of Galway who, along with the priest Michael Cleary, was one of the main organisers of a Papal visit to Ireland by John Paul II in 1979.
At the time, the Catholic Bishops were attempting to hold back ‘the floodgates’ of change. So, they backed right-wing forces who were opposed to divorce and abortion. Significantly, figures like former Fuhrer of the National Party, Justin Barret, began their political careers in Youth Defence – an organisation that physically attacked pro-choice supporters.
The Bishops used the pulpits of church masses to warn their ‘flock’ that they had to vote for an 8th amendment to the Irish constitution that gave a foetus the same ‘right to life’ as a grown woman. They then went on to back up right-wing forces who staged a successful campaign to block divorce in 1986.
This offensive began to fall apart when the first set of revelations began to emerge about the lives that Casey and Cleary were leading,
These paragons of virtue had fathered children – which they publicly denied.
The situation was so bad that when Annie Murphy, the mother of Casey’s son, appeared on the Late Late Show, she was met with a patronising remark that ‘Casey was a good man’. Her retort to Gay Byrne that ‘I am not so bad myself as you would like to think’ became famous.
At the time, it was thought that Bishops like Casey were hypocrites because they pretended to be celibate.
But now we hear a far darker side to their behaviour. According to his own niece, Patricia Donovan, Casey raped her regularly from the age of five.
The horrible reality is that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church contains many sick misogynists. They have repeatedly covered up for each other and even had the arrogance to once claim that they should not be subject to civil law but only to ecclesiastical courts.
Casey has died but the revelations show that the Bishops have absolutely no right to speak about a ‘moral life’.
The small Irish far right was spawned from the anti-abortion movement. It is good to be reminded that behind their talk of a God-designed natural order lies the reality of the behaviour of the likes of Casey.
