Return of the wayward Bishop

He helped found Shelter, then became one of Ireland's most prominent bishops - until forced to admit he had a secret son. Now the Catholic Church has forgiven Eamonn Casey and he is on his way home. David McKittrick reports

He left Ireland under the darkest of dark clouds 14 years ago, having dealt a hammer-blow to the authority and standing of the Irish Catholic Church, a blow from which it has not recovered.

Eamonn Casey, one of Ireland's most dynamic and prominent bishops, had been chosen to act as master of ceremonies when Pope John Paul II visited the country in 1979.

But the revelation in 1992 that he had a teenage son brought up secretly in the United States caused Catholic Ireland to gasp in shock, for there had never been a clerical scandal of such magnitude.

The Irish faithful had never expected to see and hear a woman describe her affair with a bishop as "the most magical thing I had encountered in my life", adding: "I was on gossamer wings."

Bishops were supposed to inspire the faithful, yes, but hardly to produce such individually rapturous responses. The Catholic Church has not been the same since.

Now, after 14 years of exile, the former bishop of Galway is on his way back to Ireland. He is expected within weeks, and his hope is that at 78 he can live out his retirement as quietly as possible in the west of Ireland.

During his years abroad, he pined for home and hoped to be back earlier, but powerful enemies within the Irish church ensured he was forced to keep his distance. Today, the overwhelming feeling in the country seems to be that the time has come for his return.

But although he has been forgiven by many, the affair will not be quickly forgotten, for the extraordinary tale of the bishop, the American divorcée and their secret son is so sensational it will be talked of for decades.

Eamonn Casey, even before he became a bishop, was a priest who always seemed to be in the news. Based in England in the 1960s, he stood out as a campaigner for the Irish homeless in Britain, helping to found the Shelter organisation. He became bishop, first of Kerry and, in 1976, Galway in the west of Ireland, where he maintained a reputation for being always on the move.

He was to be spotted speeding round Galway's roads, in cars which included a Mercedes and a BMW, on church and charity work. Unlike many religious figures, he had a cute instinct on how to handle the media and use it to his advantage, often appearing on television.

So when he ran into trouble during a trip to England, and was banned for drunken driving, he performed an effective public "mea culpa" which won him credit for humility and openness.

Although in religious terms an orthodox conservative - on the surface, at any rate - he was a strong critic of United States policy in Central America, causing a stir by his refusal to meet Ronald Reagan during the American President's visit to Galway in 1984.

An Irish newspaper commended him as "outstanding among the Irish bishops for his humanity, his passionate concern for the deprived, the poor and the defenceless". It added: "His name is a synonym for energy, drive and determination in the cause of good."

The paradox was that a bishop who once declared that "any clergyman with more than four figures in the bank has lost the faith" should so publicly have enjoyed sport, fast cars, good food and drink. But few, if any, guessed that his worldliness should extend to the bedroom, and that in 1974 he had fathered a son while Bishop of Kerry, and that he had managed to keep it secret for 18 years.

He was, after all, a staunch defender of priestly celibacy. Although reluctant to acknowledge his son, he had once lectured parents that they had a "far greater need to be available to their children than previously".

The mother of his son was Annie Murphy, an American woman who had gone to Ireland, at her father's suggestion, at a vulnerable time after a divorce. She told how she met the Bishop. "I came off the plane and very quickly, the moment I laid eyes on him, it was a spontaneous kind of love. He pursued me, because even though I was crazy about him, I never thought anything like that would happen.

"I knew the minute I went to dinner with him, that night he was holding my hand. The relationship started three weeks after I got there and I was like his mistress. It lasted a year and a half."

Dr Casey and his lover made use of an 18th-century hunting lodge overlooking the Atlantic at Dingle in Co Kerry. The lodge was a summer residence for bishops of Kerry, but no one dreamt it would be used as a romantic rendezvous rather than a place of religious reflection.

Ms Murphy said the affair was "out of this world" but she became pregnant. She added: "The pregnancy put pressure on us. He led me into a brainwashing - that I was an immoral person and that I had to be cleansed. I had to give up the baby because that was God's will and then I would be reborn as a good Christian Catholic person.

"I was supposed to go into a Catholic hospital, I would have the baby and it would be taken from me instantly, given up for adoption and I would never see my child again. As soon it was born it would be wrapped and taken. I just said, "That sounds dreadful, unbelievable'."

Ms Murphy insisted on keeping the baby, named him Peter, and took him back to America. She had to put pressure on the bishop, she said, to obtain financial support.

"Eamonn belligerently and grudgingly offered $100 a month," she said. "Then I said I would go to Rome and make my son a ward of the church, and within 48 hours he said he would pay $175 a month and I said OK. When Peter was four, it went up to $260 a month."

Years passed but it all became public in 1992 when Ms Murphy, feeling she and her son had been scorned, told her story to a Dublin newspaper. Two years earlier, she said, Dr Casey had given her and her son $120,000, but said "wicked" things when her new partner told him that Peter was an angry teenager who wanted to have contact with his father.

When the news broke, Dr Casey fled the country for America, leaving in his wake a stunned and floundering Irish church. He would later admit surreptitiously taking £70,000 from church funds, disguising it in diocesan accounts as a loan to a third party.

The transaction had been noted by others in the diocese but never queried: in those days the word of a bishop was not doubted or questioned. Later, the money was repaid by donors on Dr Casey's behalf.

Again he issued a "mea culpa" statement, confessing: "I acknowledge that Peter Murphy is my son and that I have grievously wronged Peter and his mother, Annie Murphy. I have also sinned grievously against God, his church and the clergy and people of the dioceses of Galway and Kerry. Pray for me."

Dr Casey, no longer a bishop, was quickly packed off to the Catholic missions, serving for five years in a dirt-poor district of Ecuador in South America.

The affair was so startling that it caused great damage to the Irish Catholic Church, yet it is now viewed in a different perspective, given the much worse waves of scandal which have since engulfed the Church. Just last week came the revelation that the compensation bill for abuse in church institutions could reach €1.35bn [£918m]. A torrent of cases of child-sex abuse has emerged since the Casey affair, with hundreds of examples of attacks on children by priests and other clerics.

Official reports have also shown that bishops and others were frequently told of continuing abuse but failed to respond effectively. The Church stands accused of not just inactivity but complicity in a horrific saga.

Over the years, there was occasional discussion of whether or when Dr Casey should return to Ireland. He spent five years in Ecuador before moving to a parish in Sussex and he has several times slipped quietly back into Ireland for occasions such as funerals.

In his time in exile, Dr Casey has by all accounts established a reasonable relationship with his son, though he and Ms Murphy have only minimal contact. He is very willing, he has indicated, to repeat his apologies to all concerned.

Few bishops, priests or laity have any strong objections to him coming back, but powerful figures have until now blocked his permanent return.

Cardinal Desmond Connell, the most senior figure in the Irish Church, had made it clear, publicly and repeatedly, that he did not want Dr Casey, an former Maynooth classmate of his, returning on his watch.

Ironically, Cardinal Connell was among those criticised for sweeping sex abuse cases under the carpet. But he has never pulled his punches about Dr Casey. "Every so often he seems to come back and tear open the wounds again," he said, accusing Dr Casey of causing continuing scandal.

Other bishops had retired in the normal course of events, he added, "and each and every one of them, if I might put it this way, got lost. There wasn't one other word from them. That has been the practice".

Cardinal Connell's retirement in 2004 removed from the Irish hierarchy the most vocal opponent of a Casey return. The hierarchy now has no objection to it, and a house has been prepared for him in rural Galway.

Ireland has just produced another example of a breach of the church's celibacy rule. A few weeks ago, Father Maurice Dillane, acknowledged being the father of a baby born last year. The general reaction was one of sympathy rather than shock, and in fact, there was bemusement and indeed amusement at the age difference, because the priest is 73, the woman is 31. Theirs was not a passing affair but rather a relationship which lasted for many years.

The priest and the woman have left the district, but the general response, locally and nationally, has not been to condemn them. The Irish Independent called the reaction "a massive outpouring of public sympathy".

This is the modern Ireland to which Dr Casey will be returning. One of the greatest changes since his departure has been the crumbling of the authority of the Catholic Church, with falling Mass attendance and difficulties in finding new priests.

Much of the old religious deference has gone: the Church in 1992 was a lot more proud and powerful than it is today. Dr Casey played a part in bringing about its reduced state, though the darker scandals which followed his own fall from grace inflicted even greater damage.

Paradoxically, he is now benefiting from Ireland's new mood of cosmopolitan toleration. The general sense is that he has been long enough in exile, and that it is time for Christian compassion and forgiveness. Ireland is about to welcome home its prodigal bishop.