After the Dillane affair, will Church finally get the message on celibacy?

THE resignation of Father Maurice Dillane, 73, as a curate in Co Galway after fathering a child has again put the Catholic Church in the public spotlight.

Father Brian D’Arcy adopted an understanding approach, essentially demanding that the celibacy rule for priests be reviewed. “The compulsory celibacy issue has to be addressed,” he said.

The current reaction is very different to the news in 1992 that Bishop Eamon Casey had fathered a child, or a couple of years later when the media broke the story of the late Father Michael Cleary. Indeed, Fr D’Arcy’s own attitude has matured significantly.

In 1994, Desmond Connell described the Casey affair as the low point of his term as Archbishop of Dublin.

His remarks were devoid of Christian compassion. “There is an obligation to repair scandal because people have been deeply disturbed not by the initial revelation of, say, the Bishop Casey scandal, when there was a wave of compassion, but by the subsequent behaviour of Bishop Casey,” the archbishop said.

“Every so often he seems to come back and tear open the wounds again... I know that people were utterly shocked when they saw him appear in episcopal insignia in Cork. The scandal is there. He turns up at the World Cup and the scandal is reinforced.”

The behaviour about which the archbishop was complaining was that Eamon Casey had the nerve to show his face in public. He went to Cork in 1994 for the funeral of his brother-in-law, who had devoted the final years of his life to looking after his invalid wife, the bishop’s sister. Did the archbishop really think that attending such a funeral was wrong?

In January 1994, it emerged that the late Fr Cleary had fathered a son. The Church ignored it at the time, while elements of the media cannibalised each other. John Cooney of the Irish Independent traded insults with Gay Byrne and Stephen O’Byrne of the PDs castigated the media.

“If there was any truth whatsoever in this story, then the public have a right to know,” O’Byrne said. But he thought the rumours, which had been circulating for years, were nonsense.

It was a nightmare for Fr Cleary’s secret partner, Phyllis Hamilton, and their son, Ross. The secret was out, but the manner in which it was being denied was even more hurtful than the truth. “Our lives were turned into a living hell,” Phyllis said.

Using information provided by a member of the Cleary family, one Sunday newspaper rubbished the story, along with a rumour that Fr Cleary had fathered another child as well.

The family supposedly had admissions from two men saying they were the fathers of Phyllis’s two boys, and the family member said Fr Michael had a DNA test done in London to prove he was not the father of Ross Hamilton.

Phyllis, who was depicted as gold-digging opportunist and even a blackmailer, was horrified at the coverage. She successfully sued two British-based tabloids for substantial damages.

“I thanked God for the scientist who discovered DNA testing,” she said in a newspaper interview published in June 1995. She knew that DNA would establish the truth, and she disclosed that Fr Michael was also the father of her first child, Michael Ivor, born in March 1970 and put up for adoption.

Bishop Thomas Flynn, media spokesman for the hierarchy, deplored her newspaper interview on RTÉ news, even though he admitted that he had not read it.

The story was “an unprecedented invasion of privacy”, Cardinal Cathal Daly complained. “What is worse, it is an invasion of the privacy of a dead person who can’t respond.”

Father Brian D’Arcy, who spoke out so eloquently this week, did not cover himself in glory back then. He rubbished Phyllis’s story because Fr Michael had personally told him there was no truth to the rumours.

Kathleen Lynch, then a Democratic Left TD, went on RTÉ calling for legislation to permit posthumous libel actions to be brought by families in such cases.

DESPITE the unseemly rush to defend Fr Micheal, DNA tests proved he was, in fact, the father of both of Phyllis’s sons. When Bishop Brendan Comiskey called for a debate on clerical celibacy, Bishop Willie Walsh of Clare and Bishop Michael Murphy of Cork supported him, but Cardinal Daly denounced them all as “badly misguided”.

In his outburst the cardinal went on to refer to “occasional but rare infidelities among the clergy”. It seemed he was virtually accusing them of heresy.

“There is no matter of doctrine or faith involved,” Bishop Comiskey argued. “I thought for us to remain silent was daft.”

In the light of the subsequent intolerant attitude of Church leaders towards those bishops, it does not require much imagination to understand why Fr Cleary had maintained his silence.

As the famous singing priest he would have been accused of taking advantage of Phyllis, a vulnerable 17-year-old virgin, just half his age when their relationship began. She came from a troubled background and had spent her formative years in an orphanage.

If he admitted what had happened, Church leaders would have thrown him to the wolves, like Eamon Casey. Of course, they might have protested their concern for the vulnerable young woman whom he had manipulated, but this would have been pure hypocrisy because they did not give a damn for her.

In the wake of what happened to Bishop Casey, Fr Cleary was terrified of being exposed, and Phyllis was even more worried. She believed the stress led to his early demise from cancer. Their son Ross was convinced his mother could not cope with the pressure either, and she died prematurely at the age of 51 in 2001.

She was the main victim of the whole thing - a young woman who fell in love with a celebrity who happened to be a priest. She had to keep their secret and give up their first son for adoption.

When she told the truth she was pilloried by elements of the media and, God help us, the institutionalised Church.

Eamon Casey and Michael Cleary were the cheerleaders in Galway for Pope John Paul II, but their subsequent difficulties showed that the arrogant leadership of the Church had lost touch with its members. A decade ago, some 70% of Irish Catholics and 40% of priests favoured an end to mandatory celibacy, but the leadership would not listen.

Many priests have since quit in frustration, the number of vocations has dwindled to a trickle, while attendance at Sunday Mass has dropped significantly. The initial response to the Dillane affair would seem to suggest that society has matured.

It is time that the Church leadership got the message.