Time to invite Bishop Casey to return home

The former Bishop of Galway, Dr Eamon Casey, will be spending his sixth successive Christmas abroad this year, following his resignation in May 1992. The question exercising many minds is where will he spend Christmas 1998?

His contract with the American missionary Society of St James the Apostle, in Ecuador, ends next summer. He could extend it, although since he will be 71 in April, some wonder about the wisdom of that. It is known that he would like eventually to retire to Ireland and that, while uncomplaining, he has been homesick for years. Friends of his say that what income he has is spent on phone calls to Ireland.

Within the Irish church leadership there are still some who would not exactly welcome him home with open arms, but none of them would now oppose his return. Among them are many who would see it as nothing less than what compassion demands. The Vatican would prefer that he stayed away. It is not believed to be a rigid position, and could change if it was clear people in Ireland had no problem with having Dr Casey back. Once that is demonstrably clear, there would now be no resistance to Dr Casey's return at any level in the Church.

The Ireland Dr Casey left in May 1992 was a very different place. We were so much "younger" then. Albert Reynolds was Taoiseach three months and in "a temporary little arrangement" with the PDs.

The Minister for Health, Dr John O'Connell, was delicately preparing a Bill to allow contraceptives be sold in public places, and there were nervous whispers about another divorce referendum. The usual suspects were outraged on both matters.

It was a context in which the notion of an Irish Catholic bishop having a son was truly shocking. That such a bishop should have taken money from diocesan accounts to pay for his son's education would have been met with incredulity. We know better now. We know so much more about low standards in high places. We have had Brendan Smyth, and other paedophile cases involving priests. We have heard about horrors in orphanages, involving nuns and brothers. We know Father Michael Cleary lived with a woman, with whom he had two sons, while railing on the radio against the evils of pre-marital sex.

We know bishops can be alcoholics, that they can recover, and that their colleagues have a tendency to resort to euphemism when "explaining" frailty among their brothers. We have even suspected that the bishops have occasionally been more concerned with protecting themselves, their ministers, their reputations, and that of the Church than with consoling the damaged.

In that emerging context, the errors of Dr Casey's ways almost diminish into insignificance. So he fell in love with a beautiful young woman and broke his celibacy vows. So! We question celibacy. He stood by his son, paid for his upkeep, and it was while trying to fund his education it all fell apart. Had he taken the easy route, and denied his son to begin with, he would still be Bishop of Galway. It seems perverse that for so doing he has felt compelled to endure six years of exile, while not one of those who destroyed so many young lives has yet served an equivalent jail sentence. Some now will.

Let us recall some of the good that he did. A Radharc documentary, made in the 1960s and screened on RTE last August, about his work among the homeless in London, reminded us of the impatient dynamism of the young Limerick priest who helped set up Shelter, a national organisation to house the homeless in Britain. It evolved from schemes he had engineered to house the homeless Irish in London. He had always been actively concerned about the emigrant Irish, and on the back of what he set up in Britain and the US, the Irish Catholic church still ministers to its far-flung flock. There was his work for Trocaire. Through his gregarious personality, it became one of the most successful and best known charities in Ireland, and continues to be so. On the foundations he built, it does an immense amount of good work throughout the disadvantaged world.

There was his radical concern for Central America, which led to his courageous refusal to meet Ronald Reagan when the then US president visited Galway in 1984. It was an unpopular stance within the Irish establishment at the time, but one he took to highlight abuses of American foreign policy, which contributed so much to the misery of Central America.

He was a frequent visitor there. He could have died there when representing the Irish bishops at the murdered Archbishop Romero's funeral. Sixty-five people were shot dead during that funeral Mass when the cathedral was attacked by Nicaraguan military.

There was his work for the west of Ireland, which continued after his departure and culminated in March this year with the establishment of the Western Development Commission. It was his dynamism, along with that of Bishop John Kirby of Clonfert, which sparked the western bishops to get together and do something about their dying province, while everyone else merely lamented.

The other side of that driven activist was a sometimes loud personality with a tendency to bully, a taste for fast cars, diverting company and good cheer. He did not endear himself to some, not least those of his brother bishops whose style would be to step back where he would plunge on, and who would have regarded the notion of appearing on The Late Late Show, singing, as utter vulgarity.

He was different to them in other ways too. His route to the Bishops' Conference in 1969 (when he became Bishop of Kerry) may have been via the same nuncio, Dr Gaetano Alibrandi, but he had not taken the scholastic road there. The extent of his pastoral work and his experience among ordinary people set him apart. He was something of a rara avis among his colleagues on the Irish hierarchy, both in substance and in style. He made many of them feel uncomfortable. He still does. They worry that he won't be able to keep his mouth shut if he does come home. That he won't settle quietly into an obscure retirement. He probably won't be able to. He is too enthusiastic, too gregarious, too fond of the company of humankind. But everyone would get used to that too, and fear of embarrassment will give way in time to something more sanguine.

He is older than most of the other Irish bishops now. (He remains a bishop, though without a diocese.) In 1951 he was ordained to the priesthood with three members of the current Irish Bishops' Conference. They are the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Connell, the Bishop of Killala, Dr Finnegan, and the Bishop of Kilmore, Dr MacKiernan. Of all the Irish bishops only the 73year-old Dr Brooks, Bishop of Dromore, is older than members of that group.

Dr Casey has suffered enough. We should let him know that we want him to come home. Otherwise the good he has done will be interred with his bones, under the soil of some alien rain forest.

Then many among us will beat our breasts in remorse that we did nothing to assure him he didn't have to spend his latter years remote from his own. Let this be the last Christmas he feels he should spend out of Ireland.