Time to put celibacy issue to bed in name of the fathers

Thursday January 19th 2006

THE fathering of a child in rural east Galway by septuagenarian priest Fr Mossie Dillane with a young schoolteacher has once more thrown the celibacy issue to the fore with a vengeance.

It has also copper-fastened the majority of Irish Catholics in their new-found belief that the Vatican must drop the rule on compulsory clerical celibacy.

In spite of the appeal by the Bishop of Clonfert, John Kirby, for the couple to be allowed their privacy, the dramatic news of their love-child has unleashed a heated national debate on a burning issue which both Rome and the hierarchy want to keep douched.

Listeners to the Joe Duffy Show on RTE radio yesterday were roughly four-to-one in favour of married clergy, a breakdown in line with recent opinion polls.

The Fr Dillane case merely confirms just how out of touch Pope Benedict XVI and the bishops are with popular thinking. Apart from Fr Dillane becoming a dad at the age of 73, there is a general lack of surprise among most people, and even many priests, that discreet sexual relations do take place between a man of the cloth and an unmarried woman.

This reaction is in complete contrast to 15 years ago when the nation was stunned into disbelief at the revelation that the former Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, had fathered a child named Peter with American divorcee Annie Murphy.

In 1992, people could not believe their eyes as they followed the Casey-Murphy story as if they were watching a Dallas-style soap opera transplanted to the Irish episcopal bed-chamber in the romantic Dingle peninsula, part of the domain of the then Lord Bishop of Kerry.

Equally, when news broke after Fr Michael Cleary's death, that the Dublin radio-padre had fathered children, there was still a conditioned reluctance on the part of many Catholics to accept it was true.

It is now a platitude to say that the disclosures of horrendous clerical child sexual abuse cases in the intervening period make both Casey and Cleary seem normal, and that their worst offences were to cover-up their natural sexuality. Yet, like the fugitive Bishop Casey, Fr Dillane, a former Columban missionary, has gone into hiding. Just as Casey opted to remain in the priesthood rather than marry Annie Murphy and rear his son Peter in a loving home, the indications are that Fr Dillane has no plans to marry the mother of his child.

At such a traumatic time for priest and lone-parent mother - as well as their respective families - Bishop Kirby is to be commended for defending their personal privacy.

Yet, Bishop Kirby must know that the Dillane affair is a matter of legitimate media interest, because of the public implications arising from the Catholic Church's requirement that its priests be celibate.

Indeed, the Dillane case has sparked off the kind of broad debate about priestly celibacy which the Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, has called for - though, no doubt, he did not envisage discussion being focused on the Clonfert couple.

Within the rules currently governing priests, traditionalists are correct in arguing that Fr Dillane's engagement in what the theological manuals of his student days labelled as "carnal relations" means that he has broken his vow to remain celibate.

Rules

This has made his position as a curate in the parish of Woodford-Looscaun untenable. He has resigned from the diocese.

It appears, however, that he retains the status of retired priest, presumably with the right to say Mass and administer the sacraments.

As such, he has not emerged as a champion of a married clergy, as some of his friends have presented him. Nonetheless, the Dillane case will give further momentum to the consensus in Ireland for the acceptance of married priests.

There is no sign, however, that Pope Benedict will be distracted from his piano-playing of Mozart in the papal apartment in order to fine-tune popular demand.

? Irish Independent