"Did you see yer one with Gaybo, talkin' on the Late, Late Show.
She was tellin' us about the things that happened long ago
How she loved the bishop and he loved her just as well
Only God knows will he go to Heaven or to Hell"
From 'Howya Julia' by The Saw Doctors
THE
picket-fenced suburbia of Southern California might seem an unlikely
endpoint to one of the greatest sex scandals in recent Irish history,
but it is here that Annie Murphy, one-time lover of former Bishop Eamon Casey,
now makes her home. Perhaps because it was among the first scandals to
emerge -- the tale of the priest, his American lover and their son
riveted a nation and still resonates down the years.
Murphy's
health has not been great in recent years -- she has said she suffers
from a wasting disorder -- but she's probably more content than she was
when her face was emblazoned across tabloids on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Life has been kinder to the divorcee.
On the East Coast,
with its more deep-rooted Catholic communities, where she raised her
son Peter and lived most of her life, she was a figure of some
notoriety. Here, in the sun and smog, the 63-year-old passes completely
unnoticed.
Partnered with Thaddeus Heinchon, a painter of some renown,
she prefers not to talk about the events that defined her life, at least
publicly.
A phone call to Heinchon's home was answered by a woman who
when asked if she were Annie Murphy replied "Is this about Eamon?" and
then politely declined to comment much further.
Peter, who is
understood to live in Boston, may have as much to do with that as any
pressure the embattled Church could bring to bear. After his family's
story became international news, he bemoaned the fact he and his mother
had become "D-List celebrities".
Perhaps aware he could only forge a
relationship with his biological father away from the media's glare,
Peter has not spoken about his family's story.
But Annie has confirmed
that in recent years he and the former bishop have forged a better
relationship. "Eamon is in contact with Peter. He talks to him a lot.
Things are much better."
If life has merely allowed her a little
peace, history seems to have redeemed Murphy entirely.
The time when her
mere existence was regarded as an act of brazen defiance seems very far
off indeed.
In 1992, when her shaky voice was heard on Morning Ireland,
people pulled over their cars on the Stillorgan dual carriageway to
listen in shock and awe.
Later, she would be inspected by a curious
nation on The Late Late Show.
The questions she faced then, whether on
television or on radio, seemed tinged with the suspicion that she had
somehow snared this clerical charmer in her divorcee talons.
In a
country that had not yet legalised divorce, her very Americanness seemed
to be regarded as an affront, and the sexual detail of her book a
product of the tawdry confessional culture she came from.
We weren't
ready for the mention of anyone's semen, let alone a bishop's.
Casey
was a hypocrite to be sure -- even then, we all saw that. But he was
also one of our own, a big-hearted charmer brought low by his human
weakness and regarded, for that, with a sort of chivalrous pity.
Cardinal Connell spoke of the "wave of compassion" that he enjoyed.
As
far as Murphy was concerned, we were, in the main, hostile witnesses.
In hindsight, we can now trace a line back from Enda Kenny
denouncing the Vatican (and being likened, by one priest, to Hitler) to
that moment when it emerged that Bishop Casey had left Ireland for New York in abject disgrace. No less than
The Flight of the Earls, it was an exit that signalled the beginning of the end.
A
schism between Church and state was opened -- and with every
octogenarian cleric heckled on his way to a courtroom and every
Bible-thick report into decades of abuse, it widened ever more.
As "a
vocation" became seen as somehow being synonymous with paedophilia, a
generation of quiet, young men shied away from the priesthood and the
older ones lost touch even more with young people in the country.
It
made us realise that more than anything the Casey scandal was not in
itself the End of Days, but the almost pathetically innocent beginning
to a story that would soon turn much darker.
It must have seemed an innocent enough moment when the handsome young priest with his brogue and looks charmed the people of Connecticut.
Murphy, then just seven, was introduced to him -- she is his second
cousin once removed.
They were related through her mother (three of her
grandparents were Irish).
The two did not meet again until April 1973,
when she was 24, a lapsed Catholic and recovering from a failed marriage
of two and a half years.
Her father, a surgeon at a hospital, had
remained in contact with Casey over the years, set up a visit to Ireland
to help get her mind off her marital problems.
As Murphy recalled it,
Casey, who was then serving as the Bishop of Kerry, told her father: "If
Ireland has nothing else, it has serenity, so send Annie to me. I'm
sure she'll find something special."
"Special" wasn't the word.
From the moment the young divorcee clapped eyes on her clerical saviour,
there was a frisson between them. "I felt it immediately," she later
wrote. "I can't describe it. I was bewitched, I was bewildered ...
Like two children, we grabbed my bags and went off to his car. Once we
started he didn't drive; he flew. The scenery was captivating; patches
of lush, green fields speckled with white curly lambs, jagged brown
mountains and searing cliffs to the sea. That's the way it started and
it continued that way for some time."
She lived at the bishop's
summer residence in Inch, Co Kerry. "I spent the first nights talking
into the wee hours of the morning. Eamon was a firm believer in no more
than five hours of sleep -- it was only a waste of life." At the summer residence, the bishop would entertain the great and good of Irish society.
By
now a couple, he and his American friend made some effort to be
discreet, but not always. During a car ride back from Dublin with two
other priests sitting in the front seat, they canoodled in the back.
"Eamon loves to live on the edge. That was part of the fun."
Her
parents took a holiday in Dublin in August 1973 and rented a flat in
which they lived with Annie.
The bishop would visit her once a week and
she would go down to see him in Inch once a month.
She got a job in the
Burlington Hotel, and after her parents left, another young woman moved
into the flat with her.
Murphy did not use birth control when the bishop
visited.
"It must have been mid to late October when I became
pregnant," she later said, but she only found out at the end of
November.
She broke the news to Casey. "He said little, just
squeezing my hand and whispering 'this is a terrible, terrible shame'."
His more considered response was to implore her to have the child and
put it up for adoption as a way to "cleanse" herself. While these
discussions went on, she moved to his residence in Inch, where she was
introduced to his friends and relatives as "an American girl in
trouble".
Casey would read to her from religious books at night, which
she found confusing since she'd left the Church at 17.
She
refused to put the child up for adoption, and their relationship became
so strained that Murphy moved from Casey's residence to a private home
outside Dublin that helped unmarried mothers.
It was part of a scheme
whereby Murphy could move in with a "mixed Protestant-Catholic family
and take care of her infant son".
"In the beginning, having the solitude
of my own thoughts and being able to enjoy my pregnancy was enough. But
soon there was the nagging worry of less than a month 'til my baby was
due and still no one knew at home, just my sister, and I had only £150
to my name."
Peter Eamon Murphy was born at the Rotunda Hospital
in Dublin on July 31, 1974. It was a transformative event for his
mother, obliterating all her doubts.
"The minute I laid eyes on and held
my son, I knew there was no way I was going to give him up," she later
wrote. After Peter was born, Casey made frequent, tense visits to the
hospital, often with adoption papers in hand, in an effort to get Murphy
to change her mind. According to her, he would say: "I think you are
losing sight of what needs to be done for this child. If you'd only read
what I sent you, you can keep closer to God."
She said that when
she told him she had no intention of allowing an adoption, he replied:
"It is normal to feel this way but you have no right. It is a child of
God and must be given the best life has to offer, not an unwed mother barely
able to take care of herself."
During one visit to the hospital, Casey
became so emotional that a nurse was called and he was asked not to
return -- which would itself have been a shocking act of administrative
defiance in those years.
The pressure did not abate though.
Other
clerics visited her and tried to talk her into giving up the child.
One
became quite aggressive, leaning in to shout at her, his flecks of
spittle landing on her face.
Her sister advised her to simply pack up
and return to the US, but she was afraid of her father's anger.
She
did, however, eventually give in and in the autumn of 1974 she bade
farewell to Ireland and the bishop.
"Looking up at Eamon, I saw him
clenching the metal rails tightly and I waved for the last time. I was
sorry that what had started as a mystical blending that had happened so
magically could end up in a battle leaving us ravaged and torn apart."
Returning
to the US with her infant son, Murphy took a job as a telephone
operator at a hospital in Connecticut.
Though her parents had known
nothing about the pregnancy until she got off the plane and presented
them with their grandson, they were upset but supportive.
Casey,
however, was not. He offered her only $100 per month in child support --
a derisory sum for a man of his means. When Murphy threatened to make
the child a ward of the Church, and made plans to travel to Rome, she
says he upped the monthly amount to $175.
In 1978, after he was
appointed Bishop of Galway, Casey started contributing $285.
On the surface, there was no hint of the scandal to come.
In the 1980s, Casey basked in the afterglow that came from John Paul II's
triumphant 1979 visit to Ireland. A polished media operator, he
denounced sin from the pulpit but retained an activist link to the
country's youth that set him apart from the fusty Catholic hierarchy.
He
became a staunch critic of the US government's policy in Latin America.
When Reagan visited Ireland in 1984, the bishop refused to meet the
former US president.
It was no surprise that when he was convicted of
drunk-driving in London in 1986, his flock forgave him; the man was
human, charmingly so.
Throughout the early and mid Eighties, he
had little contact with Murphy, who held down two jobs as a secretary,
and none at all with his son Peter.
In 1988, Murphy's then partner,
Arthur Pennell, a Scotsman, flew from the US to Ireland and confronted
the bishop. Casey denied paternity of the child, saying the father could
be "her ex husband or Paddy the Porter".
Pennell returned to the
US and in the following years there was correspondence between Casey's
solicitor in Listowel and Annie Murphy's lawyer in New York, Peter
McKay.
These included two cheques, marked "re: Murphy vs. Casey". One
was for $90,000 made payable to Annie Murphy.
Another was for $25,000
to Mr McKay.
In a (later) statement, Casey claimed the majority of this
money had come from his personal funds and the portion that came from
Church funds had since been repaid with interest.
He flew to the
US, where he was involved in negotiations for an out-of-court settlement
with Murphy.
Casey also agreed to see Peter for the first time since
just after his birth, though the meeting did not go well.
"He was kind
of cold and distant," said Peter, who worked part-time at a local
grocery store.
"He just asked how I was doing, where I would like to go
[to college]. It was something you would talk to your guidance
counsellor about, but even a guidance counsellor would have a more
personal conversation."
There was a sense that Murphy was
preparing her trump card -- going public. When she met Casey at a hotel
in New York in 1991, she arranged to have him secretly filmed.
In 1992,
Casey's refusal to deal with his son directly lead to a move by Murphy
and her then partner to become involved in discussions for a further
$150,000 to be put in a trust for Peter's education.
The negotiations
were unsuccessful; the bishop could not raise the money.
At the time,
Pennell claimed that Murphy was still in love with Casey: "She'd marry
him in the morning."
Murphy and Pennell eventually decided to go
to the press.
A local US TV station turned down the story, telling her
they thought they would become an IRA target if they covered it.
The
family then got in touch with Irish media, which had some trouble in
confirming Casey's paternity: it seemed he had never admitted in writing
that he was the father of Peter Murphy.
In the meantime, events
were moving quickly. Murphy got into a big row on the phone with Casey
and called the Galway diocese, informing Casey's secretary that everyone
had better get ready for a big shock because the bishop has a son.
Sensing perhaps that the only thing left was a paternity test on live
TV, Casey made his way to Rome, where he tendered his resignation. It
was May 6, 1992.
A few days later he announced that he was Peter
Murphy's father and admitted that the funds used to support the young
man had come from Church coffers, but had since been repaid "by several
donors".
The reaction in Ireland was one largely of regret,
especially when Casey was speculated to be hiding out in Latin America.
Sympathy for Murphy, who in 1993 published her account of the affair,
was thin on the ground.
"I wish that he'd stayed," the journalist Nuala
O'Faolain wrote. "I think his being here would have prevented some of
the ugliness which has rushed to fill the vacuum in the overall account.
There's the vicious misogyny, especially on the part of older Catholic
women. 'The bloody bitch,' I've heard Annie Murphy called. 'Villain.
Money-grabber. Whore.'"
In the Nineties, Casey worked as a
missionary in Ecuador before eventually moving to England, where he
worked as a parish priest.
In 1993, in an interview with Veronica Guerin,
Casey expressed his sorrow at how things had turned out.
"I regret
deeply the hurt I have caused to many people, especially Annie and
Peter," he told her.
Asked if he was happy, he replied: "Well, yes I am.
Obviously, there are things I need. For instance, I want to be able to
go home a free person."
By 2002, a majority of people in Galway
were polled as saying they wanted the "prodigal son" to return home.
Casey, meanwhile, was reincarnated in popular culture as an Irish rogue.
He was the subject of Martin Egan's song Casey, performed by Christy Moore, and The Saw Doctors' musical ditty Howya Julia.
The
endless reports of child sexual abuse by priests in Ireland and across
the world set Casey's indiscretions into sympathetic relief.
The
revelation of Fr Michael Cleary's love child with his housekeeper,
Phyllis Hamilton, further inured a weary public to priestly scandal.
It
seemed inevitable that Hollywood would begin sniffing around the story.
John Boorman, who made The General, was said to have been interested.
Annette Bening
was being mentioned for the role of Murphy, and Peter, who had worked
in film, declared his support of the project, although it ultimately
never got off the ground.
It was February 2006, however, before
Casey returned for what was "a quiet homecoming".
Decades-old
allegations of child sexual abuse made against him by a Limerick-born
woman were dismissed after an investigation by the DPP and he settled
into what has become an unofficial retirement.
The now 84-year-old
has lived in east Galway since.
His health has been poor in recent
years -- he has suffered a series of strokes and he is still not allowed
to say Mass.
Along with his son's forgiveness, it is probably the
redemption that Casey would most wish for before he dies: one last
chance to address his flock and the people who have stood by him.
And
surely nobody, not even a certain divorcee in California, would begrudge
him that.