What a strange and almost sweet irony it was, that on Easter weekend we marked the passing of this institutional icon. We were left asking if the institution itself could survive this sort of loss: of the one figure in a dishevelled, tabloid-tainted "family" who used to be able to count on friendly, even deferential treatment from the media, what with the populist "love of a drink", and the photogenic smile, and the frocks and hats that looked like something from another era.
Yes, sadly or otherwise, it was in the season of resurrection that Brendan Comiskey chose to cut off his own bishopric. However, in contrast to the saccharine outpourings about the death of Betty Windsor Sr in the British media, there was little sign of nostalgia on the radio for the Brendan of old, a man who at one time could play the media like a fiddle - not least with his chummy, off-the-record confidences to journalists about what naughty things priests might get up to in their off-duty spare time.
Indeed, any broadcaster or guest who was feeling that sort of nostalgia would have been ill-advised to express it this week.
Everywhere there was conversation on the radio, Comiskey was enduring death by a thousand lashes, and the remaining members of the hierarchy were being lined up to endure it with him. And while some of them might be into that sort of thing, the whip was being handled with such collective public anger and anguish that the bishops cannot feel any pleasure about their future influence in Ireland. My God, even David Quinn was on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) and elsewhere saying that the Catholic Church should consider selling its property to compensate its victims. (I wonder will the British royal family think of that?)
The only bits of nostalgia I've heard, from Marian Finucane (RTÉ Radio 1, Monday to Friday), Gerry Ryan (2FM, Monday to Friday) and others, was for the relative innocence of poor old Bishop Eamonn Casey, whose public exposure occurred just 10 years ago next month, and who had the downright decency to have sex with a consenting adult woman. In light of all the fuss the self-same media personalities are prone to make about deadbeat dads and the damage done to boys who grow up without fathers, it seems a little rich to suggest that Casey committed a "victimless crime" without checking with Annie Murphy and her son Peter first. All the same, given the truly sickening stories we've been hearing from Wexford and elsewhere, that particular nostalgia was perhaps understandable.
As awful as the tales of abuse were, perhaps the most telling radio conversations dealt with the culture in the Church that tolerated such abuses. Justine McCarthy, on The Sunday Supplement (Today FM, Sunday) and later on The Last Word, was particularly strong on this question, calling attention to the apparent oath of secrecy that cardinals take never to reveal information that might embarrass the Church. And it was she who told the story of how, when Veronica Guerin asked the acting Bishop of Ferns in 1995 about the whereabouts of Father Fortune, he replied: "I don't know. Only God knows, and He won't snitch." That's right: snitch.
That word, far more than all the ashen-mouthed nonsense from the Church about how little was known about sex-abuse in the past, is the key to the priests' peculiar locker-room mentality. As attentive readers with long memories may recall, 10 years ago I wrote in The Irish Times about my own father, Father Henry J Browne, a New York priest who had a family on the sly - like Casey, only there were three of us kids and we lived just over the George Washington Bridge from his parish, not 3,000 miles away.
And he finally left the parish and the active priesthood to live with us while we were still small.
My dad's circle of friends continued to be priest-ridden, so I had the rare (but in my case repeated) privilege during my pre-teen and teen years of listening in on priests' whiskey-soaked, cigar-smoked conversations. A mainstay of such chats was "jokes" about amorous priests and what they might get up to with the right combination of altar boys and altar candles. It was clear that the yarns were not purely theoretical. Does anyone dare to tell me that these guys were unique? Give me a break.
Sexual abuse of children was obviously not the behaviour of every priest, but it has long been a known, institutionalised, sniggered-at activity within a Church full of fecked-up so-called "celibates".
In comparison to clerical sex abuse, the week's other institutional passing made for some rather amusing radio. For years we've been hearing how the BBC was gradually scaling back its plans for Queen Mum Mourning. Well, I'd hate to have heard what it was going to be like before, because on Saturday evening all five BBC radio services suddenly switched over to one turgid two-hour programme to mark the death, and even after that was done, Radios 4 and 5 Live carried on with Granny-loving silliness.
They were not the Beeb's finest two hours. On a couple of occasions early on Saturday evening, royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell got so caught up in the mournful mood outside Buckingham Palace that he suggested it was still Good Friday. On the BBC, on Teamtalk 252 - where they talked to one of her jockeys, ahem - and next day on Irish radio, everyone, even Gerry Adams on The Sunday Supplement, seemed quite excited about the fact that on several occasions in the 101 years of her existence, this woman gave every appearance of being a mere mortal human being, God bless her.
How timely, then, that John Quinn came along on Sunday evening's Open Mind (RTÉ Radio 1) with his "Letter to Olive", to show how a genuine human life might be remembered with love. Quinn is arguably RTÉ's best - and certainly RTE's most autobiographical - broadcaster, and this piece, while wordy and deeply personal (borderline exhibitionist?), was also extraordinarily evocative and,broadly, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house touching. This was borne out when Quinn was interviewed and extracts were played on Tuesday's Marian Finucane, and the phone calls came flooding in.
The subject, for those who missed both outings, was Quinn's wife Olive, who died suddenly last year, and the unromanticised romance of their lives together. Quinn allowed us to conclude - even led us to conclude - that wherever she is, Olive is probably having a good, if affectionate, sneer at her sometimes neglectful husband for indulging himself with a radio programme about her! Needless to say, "Letter to Olive" danced delicately with sentimentality, starting with the funny-sweet account of how John and Olive met while queuing for throat-swabs in a TB sanatorium.
And it danced not to the tunes we normally associate with 1966, when the meeting took place, but to music of a sappier kind, starting with Olive's favourite, Strangers in the Night, and ending with (what else?) Someone to Watch Over Me. Is the music of the "rock era" really destined to be forever insufficient to such storytelling? It seems churlish to quibble with this material.
The best summary of "Letter to Olive" and of Quinn came from a call that Finucane read out: "Caller says John Quinn has the gift of intimacy, then she broke down and couldn't say any more."