An Irish Bishop Was Buried in a
The funeral of Bishop Eamonn Casey in 2017 seemed to draw a line under his scandalous affair years before. But this summer, disturbing new allegations emerged.
The funeral Mass for Eamonn Casey seemed to befit one of the best-known Catholic bishops in all of Ireland. The pageantry on that cool March day in 2017 included 11 bishops and five dozen priests, all in white, gliding as if airborne up the center aisle of the pew-packed cathedral in Galway.
Incense and awkwardness commingled. Bishop Casey, who was 89, had once been the charismatic and progressive leader of the Galway Diocese, in western Ireland. But the disclosure in 1992 that he had fathered a child with a distant American cousin, and then refused to have anything to do with the boy, had rocked the Catholic-dominant country and sent him into the wilderness.
At the funeral, a fellow bishop referred to Bishop Casey’s “profoundly upsetting” actions. Then pallbearers carried his wooden coffin down to the cathedral’s crypt, the apparent end to the story of a charismatic but duplicitous cleric whose transgressions at least had been with a consenting adult.
But the past is patient. In late July, seven years after Bishop Casey’s death, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, aired a sobering television documentary asserting that an affair was the least of the man’s covered-up offenses. The disturbing allegations, including that he had begun sexually abusing a niece when she was 5, have now ignited demands that his remains be removed from the crypt — that he effectively be evicted from the sacred ground reserved for the former bishops of Galway.
Among those championing such a drastic move is the broadcaster Joe Duffy, whose popular call-in radio show, Liveline, often taps into the national psyche. Mr. Duffy said that the phone lines for his program “just went on fire” after the new allegations, with furious callers demanding the bishop’s disinterment.
