Masses Today

6.30: Seán Giblin, (Anniv)
11.00 Muriel Roache, (Anniv)
12.15 People of the Parish, (Anniv)
6.30 Nellie Kearney, (Anniv)

AS I WAS SAYING...

It is ten years ago this week since Eamon Casey resigned as bishop of Galway. For some reason, it seems far longer. Memory plays its own tricks. Because, in the mind's eye, his resignation and the subsequent revelations belong emotionally to the 'black and white movies' and the 'dry battery' days! The splash was truly enormous at the time precisely because the waters appeared so still! With hindsight, we know that beneath the surface, all was not well. Terrible truths were there concealed. Casey was by no means the first bishop or priest to father a child; (the Mc Entaggarts and the McAnaspeys will bear that out). But he was the first cleric to be 'outed'. In this sense, the 'Casey scandal' was a true benchmark, a line drawn in the sand between the 'old world' of ecclesiastical secrecy and the new, more demanding world of universal accountability. Eamon Casey –like the rest of us- had many faults. But, because he was larger than the rest of us, his faults seemed greater. He could be arrogant and dismissive in company. He could childishly dominate a table or a room, demanding that all present pay full attention to his supposed cleverness or wisdom. He was garrulous to an embarrassing degree, and a megalomaniac on bad days. He was never embarrassed to claim credit for successes that were not obviously his, or slow to distance himself from spectacular disasters that obviously were.

However, that is only part of the story. There was a great deal more to Eamon Casey than his faults and failings. In fact, given the sordid nature of subsequent revelations, Eamon's sins were small by comparison. He deserves the absolution of hindsight. There is a notion abroad in the land that his exile is being prolonged at the behest of the Irish bishops. I don't believe it. But the belief is so widespread that it does merit an official public denial. If Eamon wishes to come home, he should of course be allowed home. Ecclesiastical exile is an early medieval notion. It should be left to that age!

Historically, the traditional Irish bishop had a lot in common with James Joyce's divine artist in ‘A Portrait….’: "Like the God of creation, he remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Casey was neither indifferent nor invisible. But then he was not your run-of-the-mill bishop, minted at Maynooth and trodden into shape in the Irish ecclesiastical winepress. Casey escaped to London. This move -in the early part of his priestly life- ensured that his mind bore the catholic rather than the parochial stamp.

He was 'larger than life' in that he was blessed (or cursed?) with a volcanic energy. He was quick-thinking, far-seeing and amazingly generous. The plight of humanity moved him to action - and he was par excellence a man of action. Suffering recognises no barriers or boundaries. Neither should our concern. Casey would have agreed with the observation of Becket's Pozzo: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors."

Human beings are everywhere and everytime the same, from generation to generation, from country to continent. It was this conviction that made Eamon Casey's name synonymous with Trócaire, Bóthar, Shelter, and a host of other First, Second and Third World projects. His range of philanthropic interests were vast. When he took up a cause, he espoused it with great passion, to the exclusion of all other issues and considerations. In this sense, he was absolutely single-minded, and that was one of his great strengths. His was a dedicated but necessarily blinkered mind, focused for the time being on a single goal. Here was a passionate man with a human heart and enormous energy. He gave the Church a human face.

But a very fine line runs between runs between single-mindedness and arrogance. The single-minded person can exclude all reality he deems to be distracting. And Eamon tried to exclude one major distraction that would not allow herself be treated as such, and rightly so. Casey's fall was tragic in the Shakespearean sense: he was one of those leaders who ‘were themselves the authors of their proper woe.' Annie Murphy didn’t bring about Eamon Casey’s downfall. Eamon Casey did. He spent almost twenty years sawing slowly the branch on which he sat. The collapse was inevitably. Our pity for him, though it will not cease or diminish, should be modified accordingly.

That sort of inevitability is one of the ingredients essential to Shakespearean tragedy. As the play gathers momentum, the ingrediences converge and the nose tightens around the neck of the tragic hero. Not tragic in the conventional sense, but tragic in Hazlet’s dramatic sense that ‘a man may start a course of events, but he can neither calculate or control the outcome.’

The Victorians too were fascinated with ‘the hand of Fate’, with the notion that a weapon was being secretly fashioned far away from the eventual target. Thomas Hardy employed this somewhat strained genre to address the great tragic topic of his day, the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic. In his 'Convergence of the Twain', he visualised both the opulent ship and the cold iceberg growing to greatness independently of each other. But the world is finite in what it can accommodate. In Hardy’s poem the ship and the iceberg grew to such greatness that their cataclysmic clash was one day inevitable. The eventual clash between Annie Murphy and Eamon Casey was even more inevitable. Annie’s sense of being wronged intensified as Eamon’s ecclesiastical career advanced. Two apparently independent realities are destined for eventual convergence. Parallels are to be found particularly in the final verses of Hardy’s poem:

'Convergence of the Twain'
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

Or sigh that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said 'Now!' And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Obviously, there is a world of difference between the terrible tragedy that was the sinking of the Titanic and the Casey/Murphy affair. However, ten years ago, the resignation the surrounding circumstances caused more than a ripple in Galway. Eamon –despite his faults- made his generous contribution here while he was with us. That contribution should not be airbrushed from history. We had too much of that airbrushing in the past. It did the Church great harm, much grater damage that Eamon Casey ever did. We now wish him well and pray that he has peace in his retirement.

-Dick Lyng.

MATTERS OF INTEREST

NO GREAT CHANGE

A total of 90% of the old currency has been returned to the Central Bank but over £400m (€507m) is still out there in pockets and jam-jars. According to the Central Bank, about one quarter of the outstanding £400m is in coin but the vast bulk in note form, comprising £13.8m in £100 notes, £54m in £50 notes and £124m in £20 notes.A massive £47.6m is still out there in old tenners and £39.8m exists in fivers.

"A certain amount of it is lost, some of it will be gone in tourist's pockets and there is a certain amount of money hidden away that will turn up years from now. Lady Lavery notes are still coming back even now; they had been hidden away," said a spokesman for the Central Bank. He pointed out that 87% of £100 notes have been returned, 96% of £50s, 92% of £20s, 78% of £10s and 64% of £5 notes. 62% of old coins are now back but the bank expects that a certain amount will never come back as they may have left the country in the back pockets of tourists.

The distinctive Irish coins have been sold to a Spanish company for smelting. Elmet, based in Bilbao, North Spain, paid the Central Bank for the metal content of 7,000 tonnes of Irish coinage which began to be shipped out last January. The old paper money has been shredded, put into bales of briquettes and sent to landfills.

Bank customers can continue to lodge old paper money in their accounts until the end of the year but coins have to be returned to the Central Bank.




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