Eamon Casey who died
recently was one of Ireland's most famous bishops. Irish bishops have been
famous for lots of things but Eamon
became famous for one thing in particular, he fell in love with a friend who was married and they had a son .
When he was a student
in Maynooth seminary some of his fellow
students prophesied that he would not live long - they thought he would die in a mighty
crash driving his car furiously fast. Driving in those
days if you " went over
forty" either you boasted about it or someone else complained about it. Someone suggested there should be a law requiring a red flag to
be carried in front of his car. He did have some crashes but nobody got hurt. Our
concern about his loving or driving
may make us forget how caring, thoughtful, compassionate were so
many other things he did. Like cooperating with Des Wilson (no relation of
mine I'm afraid ) to build houses for people in England who didn't have any or
heading Trócaire in Ireland to help get
food and a living for people in this world who had neither.
Eamon Casey was
ordained in 1951 and so, as Maurice Chevalier might have sung, I remember him
well. He went to England as a lot of Catholic
priests did in the fifties and sixties , saw the plight of workers there who
were paid for the job but not provided with decent living during the job or after it.
There was another
Eamon who followed much the same track, Eamon Gaynor who was ordained the same
day I was - he joined up with people like the Mc Alpine's fusiliers Christy Moore sings about and went along with them as they shifted camp from one section of English
motorway to the next, living like nomads
because that's the way it was. One Eamon was bringing companionship to
the labourers , another Eamon providing homes for them if they could get a bit of prosperity and peace to live in them. Brave young men who thought comfort was for other people. Falling in love "inappropriately" and
driving too fast seem not to matter all that
much when you look back on it.
Institutions are
strange. They see what you are good at and get you to do something else instead.
Casey was taken from the houses and Gaynor from the motorways back to Ireland
to savour the -- what's the word, decitement
perhaps -- of the Irish church struggling to ignore the Second
Vatican Council. They made Casey a bishop and Gaynor a curate and there you
were. Casey eventually became head of Trócaire which was good, although one always remembers it was founded when anti-birthcontrol hysteria made many religious people wary of
organisations like Oxfam. Fortunately Trócaire and similar organisations did
magnificently and carried themselves with dignity until the hysteria faded. One
of the people responsible for that was Brian Mc Keown , a Belfastman, one is proud to say.
As for the Eamons of
this world and the people they generously befriended, some of them built
motorways for our English neighbours, some fought their wars for them, some
preached their sermons for them, some built their schools and managed their
hospitals for them. One prominent member of the Catholic church in England and generous
admirer of the Irish said to me : One of the best things you Irish people could do for England is go home and force us
to do all this for ourselves.
One is not always grateful
for large mercies though. I don't know exactly where the
idealism of Eamon of the Motorways led him eventually but I do know the other Eamon's love life made us forget how many houses he
and that other Des Wilson got built.
How would it have
been if the church administration had brought
one of the Eamons back not to administer church affairs but to help the
homeless in Ireland , and told the other Eamon to stay where he was and go on taking
care of the uninsured and lonely Irish
who were left, as it were, by the side of the road?
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