In May 1988, a man called Arthur
Pennell confronted Bishop Eamonn Casey at the door of his residence in
Galway.
He said he was the partner of Annie Murphy in Connecticut and he
was helping to bring up her son, Peter, who had been fathered by the
bishop.
“What are you prepared to do about it?” he asked.
The Bishop of Galway refused to
admit Peter was his son and turned him away.
It was the start of a
series of events that would see the popular bishop disgraced and forced
into exile.
When Pennell returned to
Connecticut, Murphy decided to take legal action against Casey on the
grounds that her health had suffered from his actions.
The bishop
recruited a lawyer-priest from Brooklyn, Msgr James Kelly, to act as
intermediary.
As a result of the negotiations,
which concluded on July 25th, 1990, the bishop sent Murphy two cheques,
for $90,000 and $8,000, while not admitting paternity. He came to New
York to sign the necessary papers.
There was a chance it might have
ended there, but on that visit to New York the bishop unexpectedly met
his son for the first time.
As Peter later recalled, it was a
five-minute conversation and the bishop was “out of the door”.
He felt
his father treated him as “a small clerical error in his life”.
From then on Peter resolved that one day he would force Casey to acknowledge him publicly.
Annie Murphy subsequently made a
new demand that the bishop should pay for Peter’s college education.
Casey stalled.
When the money was not forthcoming she decided to go
public.
Part of her motivation was her continuing anger with Casey over
his dismissive attitude towards Peter.
Crippling damages
In February 1992 Pennell called The Irish Times news desk in Dublin and claimed Casey was the father of a teenage boy in the United States.
In those days, before the Catholic
Church was embroiled in paedophile sex scandals, there were good
reasons for a newspaper to be apprehensive about accusing a bishop of
fathering a secret love child.
Getting it wrong could bring the wrath of
the still-powerful Catholic establishment down on its head, discredit
the paper, and involve crippling damages.
The bishop was well regarded
for his work for the homeless and for his progressive views.
From the start, however, it was
evident the story was true.
I was assigned to interview Annie Murphy at
her apartment in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and found her to be a slim
woman of 43, attractive, composed, but full of outrage and nervous
energy, and utterly convincing.
Peter was a strapping 17-year-old with a
strong resemblance to Casey.
She told me in graphic detail
about the affair she had had with Casey during a visit to Ireland to
recover from a messy relationship in the United States. He was then 46
and Bishop of Kerry.
She was 24.
She gave birth to Peter in a hospital
in Dublin, where the nuns tried to force her to give him up for
adoption.
Casey never admitted paternity, she said, but for 15 years he
had sent cheques of up to $275 a month via intermediaries.
Casey had, in fact, started
sending money again to help meet Peter’s college expenses. He had
authorised two cheques, drawn on a Home Savings Bank in Brooklyn by Fr
Kelly, for $6,500 and $3,350 towards Peter’s college tuition.
The then Irish Times editor,
Conor Brady, determined to follow the money trail. The payments raised
questions of public interest. Casey had no known personal wealth, which
indicated that the money could have been misappropriated from diocesan
funds.
University education
While this was being pursued,
Annie Murphy began new negotiations through Fr Kelly for a final
settlement of $125,000 to $150,000 to pay for Peter’s university
education.
At this juncture Pennell
telephoned me to say, “Eamonn is going to give us that: 50 per cent
right away, the whole lot by the end of the year.”
Part of the deal was
no publicity.
“It has come to the point,” he said, “where I’m not
interested in anything except $150,000 for Peter. If I have to, I will
get a gun to do what I will have to do.”
He also claimed someone had been
trying to kill Peter.
They had complained to the police that their car
had been tampered with five times by “professionals” who had loosened
the wheel nuts.
He and Annie Murphy suspected “agents of the Vatican”.
The police in Ridgefield said they had dismissed their claims as
groundless.
Publication was now inevitable, particularly if they were using the threat of exposure in The Irish Times as leverage in negotiations.
Brady decided it was time to confront the bishop.
I called to see Fr Kelly at the
Hispanic Parish of Saint Bridget in New York to convey a request for an
interview. He telephoned Casey, who was holidaying in Malta, and the
bishop agreed to meet us and explain about the money.
He said he would shortly leave
Malta, pay a brief visit to Rome and then return to Ireland on May 5th.
The interview was arranged for noon on that date in the Skylon Hotel
near Dublin Airport. The bishop never turned up.
Next day The Irish Times
began publishing the full story.
The Vatican announced Casey had
resigned as Bishop of Galway.
It turned out that in Rome he had been
instructed to return to Ireland, pack up and leave the country, without
talking to anyone.
Left incognito
He left Ireland incognito on an
Aer Lingus flight to New York, from where he issued a statement
admitting he was Peter Murphy’s father and the money had been taken from
diocesan funds – and replaced that week by “several donors”.
He stayed for six months in a
contemplative monastery in the US before being despatched to Ecuador to
work as a missionary priest for six and a half years. That was his
“punishment”.
Ten years later Casey was allowed
to return to these islands. He became a hospital chaplain in the Arundel
and Brighton diocese in England.
It was 2006 before he was able to
return to Ireland.
He settled in Shanaglish, near Gort in Co Galway.
In an interview with Tralee
historian and broadcaster Maurice O’Keefe after his return, he said he
had left Ireland when he did because he wanted “to get out before the
media descended on me”.
Annie Murphy published a book
about the affair. She then left Connecticut and went to start a new life
in California with a different partner, an artist. Pennell has since
died.
In the years after his downfall
Casey quietly made his peace with Peter, who was then a student at the
University of Connecticut. They became friends.
In an interview with The Irish Times
in 2013, Peter criticised the Catholic Church’s treatment of the
bishop.
“It was ridiculous. I mean, six years’ penance in a foreign
country and then the five years he spent in England made it even more
egregious and more painful because of how close he was to his goal and
all he wanted to do was go home and say Mass. Was that so terrible?”
Conor O’Clery is a former Washington correspondent of The Irish Times