It is 10 years since The Irish Times revealed Bishop Eamonn Casey had fathered a son. And what a decade it has been for the Catholic church in Ireland. A series of far worse scandals - and the way the church has dealt with them- has shaken its foundations, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent
A good friend came to mind this week. The World Cup always brings her back. That, and the revelations emanating from Maynooth, made me think of her these past days. What would she have made of all that has emerged about the Catholic Church since she died in October 1990?
We were of different generations. She was the mother of a friend and colleague from those years. She was from the west, of old-style Fine Gael stock; she was quietly devout and great fun.
And as I was of Fianna Fáil stock, our exchanges were robust and occasionally rapier, inspired above all by the pleasure of the clash. She was an old-fashioned idealist, of the good-humoured kind. Just say the words "Charlie Haughey" and she was off.
Driving through the streets of Dublin that afternoon in 1990, we listened on the car radio to the Romania/Ireland penalty shoot-out. And continued through a city insane with joy on the way home. We were returning from Beaumont hospital, where we had just been told an operation on her brain tumour was not successful. She was too young to die, but it may have been a blessing.
It is hard to know how she would have coped with what we have come to know was really going on in our world during those - and earlier - years. Corruption in Fianna Fáil would not have surprised her, but she would have been shocked to realise it could also have happened in her own party.
However, what has emerged about the Catholic Church since then would have hit at the core of her being. A wise woman in matters of human frailty, even she would have found so much of what has emerged very hard to take.
She loved children and would have found the notion of children being sexually abused, by priests, quite simply beyond belief. And the notion that children in religious-run institutions were systematically sexually abused would have been beyond the limits of her imagination.
So much has changed in such a short time.
It is a little more than 10 years since Bishop Eamonn Casey went into exile after revelations in 1992 that he had an 18-year-old son. These have been 10 long years where the Catholic Church in Ireland is concerned. And, as used to be said about the Irish economy back in the 1980s, with every passing day it looks as though "things will get worse before they get better".
The Ireland that Bishop Casey left in May 1992 was indeed a foreign country. Albert Reynolds had been Taoiseach for just three months and his government was still in "a temporary little arrangement" with the PDs. The minister for health, Dr John O'Connell, was delicately preparing a Bill to allow contraceptives to be sold over the counter, and there were nervous whispers about another divorce referendum.
The usual suspects were outraged on both counts.
Had they seen what lay ahead, one can only wonder how even they would have responded. Would their loyalty to Mother Church über alles remain intact? Could they have believed the Catholic Church would lose a divorce referendum in 1996? Or that the Church's support for European enlargement in 2001 could not stop its defeat in a referendum? Or that the Church would also be defeated on an abortion referendum in 2002?
They would have found it utterly unbelievable that a president of St Patrick's seminary at Maynooth would have to leave his job prematurely amid allegations of sex abuse. Would they have dismissed as anti-Catholic propaganda all those stories of systematic child sex abuse by priests in parishes and brothers in religious-run institutions? And how would they have reconciled all these revelations of vilest corruption during the 1980s, and earlier, with the weekly Mass attendance figures of 87 per cent in 1983, for instance?
Was it all about keeping up appearances in a society dominated by whited sepulchres and broods of vipers? It seems so.
As the truth began to emerge this past 10 years, attendance at weekly Mass began to drop. By 1994, it was 77 per cent, down 10 per cent in as many years. By 1998, it had dropped to 60 per cent, a fall of 17 per cent in four years. There has been no survey on weekly Mass attendance since that last Prime Time one in 1998, but an Irish Times/MRBI poll in 2000 showed that just 40 per cent believed it was very important to attend Mass on Sundays - and only 14 per cent of people aged 18-24 believed it very important to do so. Local evidence suggests that in some urban working-class areas, as few as 2 per cent now attend weekly Mass. And there, as everywhere, the congregations are predominantly elderly.
Then we have the ageing, dwindling numbers of clergy. According to a survey published last year, the numbers of religious (order priests, brothers, nuns) in Ireland has dropped from 23,308 in 1981 to 13,393. And of that figure, nearly half are retired and two-thirds are over 60. Only 59 religious in Ireland are under the age of 29.
Where diocesan priests are concerned, in 1970 their number in Ireland was 3,944. In 1996, that figure was 3,638, a drop of just over 306 over the 26-year period. Currently there are 3,592 diocesan priests on the island, 616 of whom are retired, sick, on study leave or abroad.
But it is when you look at figures for entrants to the seminaries that an indication of the crisis ahead becomes apparent. In 1970, there were 164 such entrants; by 1996, there were just 52, and last year, just 30. This decline seems set to continue. Since 1986, the trend has been down, down, down, almost halving between 1994 and 1995 - the year of Father Brendan Smyth.
This proves, if proof were needed, that ongoing Catholic Church scandals are having a major effect on vocations and weekly Mass attendance. That Prime Time poll in 1998 also showed that 73 per cent believed the scandals had "damaged the Church's authority a lot", with fewer than one in 10 saying they felt no damage had been done.
The scandals are also costing the Church. The Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) signed an agreement just this week to part with €128 million in an agreement with the State to help in compensating victims of abuse in institutions run by 18 religious orders. Many feel the State has been over generous to the orders, who are indemnified as a result against further claims under the relevant Act. An estimated total cost is €200-€500 million.
No figures have been collated by the Church for amounts paid out by dioceses in abuse settlements. Figures for the Dublin archdiocese are estimated at a around €250,000. Though there are no signs that the Irish Church is yet being pushed down the road to bankruptcy through compensation claims, as is happening in some US dioceses, it is still comparatively early days.
Ten years on, the state of the Irish Catholic Church is far from happy. The idea of an Irish Catholic bishop having a son seems such a comparatively minor matter. We have supped so full of such real horrors. We know so much more now. We are older than that now.
Who could have believed things could change so rapidly? So fast that, in 1997, a priest would incur such odium that he had to be buried at night?
The report in The Irish Times of August 27th 1997 read: "The convicted paedophile, Brendan Smyth (70), was buried yesterday in a pre-dawn ceremony at his order's Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan. The lights from a hearse were used to light up the graveside as the coffin was lowered at about 4.15 a.m. The funeral was attended by seven Norbertine priests and some local people." Father Smyth's burial followed a requiem Mass in the abbey at 3.30 a.m.
By October 2000 (the most recent date for which figures are available), a total of 48 priests and brothers had been convicted on charges of child sex abuse on the island of Ireland, with a further 20 then pending.
Unlike Bishop Casey, none has faced exile (except for those brief periods when Father Brendan Smyth served in Scotland and the US, where no one was told of his proclivities). Neither have they been told that they should "get lost", as Cardinal Connell said Bishop Casey should on Eamon Dunphy's Last Word programme in December 1997.
Bishop Casey's proposed return to Ireland was vigorously and successfully opposed by Cardinal Connell at meetings of the bishops. In London, Cardinal Basil Hume also vigorously opposed his return to the diocese of Westminster. Bishop Casey was eventually "taken in" by the then archbishop (now Cardinal) Cormac Murphy O'Connor of the diocese of Arundel in southern England, where Bishop Casey (75) still lives.
Despite recent reports to the contrary, there is absolutely no indication that Bishop Casey might be allowed to return to live in Ireland. Last year, his golden jubilee as a priest was ignored by the Church, while Cardinals Connell and Daly were both fêted in Rome to mark their 50th and 60th anniversaries as priests, respectively.
The church authorities' resolution of firmness where Eamonn Casey is concerned is not reflected in their handling of abuse victims' complaints generally. Whether it be the Diocese of Ferns, the Archdiocese of Dublin or St Patrick's College Maynooth, there has been an explicit tardiness in their willingness to address complaints openly and honestly.
A perfect illustration of this was the experience of Marie Collins when she approached the Dublin Archdiocese in 1995 to tell them about her abuse as a child in the early 1960s by Father Paul McGennis. She was continually fobbed off and never received full co-operation from the archdiocese for the Garda inquiry, even after the archdiocese had told her McGennis had admitted his guilt. He was allowed to continue in his parish for five months after her complaint.
In the Diocese of Ferns, it took huge public outcry following the showing of the BBC documentary Suing the Pope last March for the Church authorities to set about seriously dealing with the complaints of abuse victims there, which, in some instances, go back almost 20 years.
In Maynooth, it took the Church authorities eight years to disclose details of the circumstances in which Monsignor Michael Ledwith left the college presidency in 1994. This despite complaints going back at least 10 years before his departure and many media and other queries since then.
It's still unclear where the Church stands on its level of co-operation with civil investigations of clerical child sex abuse.
The message is loud and clear. The clerical Church has room in its heart for even the most heinous, if repentant, child abuser. But it has no room for a bishop who crosses the line into fatherhood, no matter how remorseful he may be. It underlines a view of priesthood as some sort of all-male exclusive club where there is forgiveness for falling by all sorts of waysides, except parenthood.
There is something deeply skewed about that sort of thinking.