This week, the front pages, the documentaries and the phone-in radio programmes revealed a new angle on the Casey story.
We thought we understood the issue — namely, that as the best-known Catholic bishop in these islands, he fathered a child with a distant cousin.
At first, he denied it and then failed miserably in his duties as a father. It’s now much worse than that.
The RTÉ/Mail on Sunday investigation accuses him of being a serious child abuser for many years.
I knew Bishop Casey and worked successfully on committees with him, but I never knew him well because he didn’t like me.
He was a friend of Fr Michael Cleary, who was a friend of mine; he often tried to convince Bishop Casey that I was not a clerical loose cannon.
Casey was not the only bishop who dismissed me as a troublemaker because I wrote for the Sunday World. I could live with that.However, I never suspected he abused children or was, as Ian Elliott said, a sexual predator.
At one point, I sympathised with him as an old man who was forbidden to offer Mass publicly. I thought Rome was harsh on him because he had a relationship with an adult woman.
I was puzzled that priests who abused children were not treated as harshly as Casey was. That was the narrative of the time. It was what Eamonn Casey wanted us to believe.
I am now horrified that church leaders in Rome and here in Ireland knew he had accusations of child abuse against him and kept it a secret.
They kept that critical news from us.
There were 11 bishops and 61 priests at his funeral Mass in Galway Cathedral. They put on a show for him. How many of them knew he was an abuser? Did anyone think of the damage perpetrated on his victims and all victims of clerical abuse?
As usual, the clerical club protected one of its own and left the victims/survivors to suffer in silence. The former bishop’s reputation was maintained, and the abused lived in quiet desperation, trying to overcome the unrelenting hell sex abuse causes.
The sad fact is that the leadership of the church here, and more particularly, in Rome, were hypocrites; they ignored the pain of the victims of clerical abuse. Does safeguarding mean anything anymore?
The Vatican should have defrocked the bishop and should have laicised him so that he could not masquerade as a cleric, thereby giving him a platform to continue abusing. They should have ensured he was thoroughly investigated by the police in the various states where the accusations arose. Furthermore, they should, at the very least, have publicised the fact that there were accusations of abuse against Bishop Casey.
The discussions during the week centred around Casey himself. I reminded myself that victims were abused all over again. I thought of his family.
I wondered if his priest friends knew he was an abuser and predator. If they knew and said nothing, how can they sleep at night?
How could they trust the leaders who kept Casey’s criminal behaviour a secret? Many of them, in ignorance, defended Casey and made fools of themselves. I was one of them.
My biggest fear is that after 30 years of dealing with abuse and causing ordinary Catholics to be shamed and embarrassed, victims are still ignored and abandoned while clerical abusers are protected.
The institutional church is systemically incapable of doing the right thing. How pathetic is that?