Forbidden Fruit

by Annie Murphy

  Even the bastard son is mine, not Eamonn’s.

  “A Disgusted Catholic” from New York, after calling me a “low-life slime” prophesied: “God will punish you if not here then hopefully in the hereafter…. Your son is also lowlife to keep trying to know his father.”

  Yet another letter read:

  You are a very mean, lowdown, sidewinding, two-timing broad the way you treated Eamonn Casey. He was a man held in high esteem by his people until you dragged him into the gutter.

  He stole $70,000 [sic] from his parishioners to shut you up and still you had to squeal. I will be in Ridgefield very soon and will put oatmeal in the radiator of your car and cut the brake pipes, so watch your ass.

  Cordially yours.

  I am glad he did not write in an uncordial mood.

  Peter was upset that Eamonn had given no reason for his resignation when his one aim was to make him admit paternity. I was less surprised, knowing how stubborn Eamonn was. My chief worry was that he might suffer to no purpose.

  I was at work on Monday evening, May 11, when Conor phoned my home to tell Peter that Eamonn had issued a dramatic statement at midnight Irish time saying that Peter was his son.

  When an excited Peter passed the news on to me, I was astonished. It must have cost Eamonn a great deal to make a public confession after all those years, years which all his many admirers were bound to reassess in the light of it.

  Next day, I read Peter the full statement in the paper. When he heard the words he is my son, he stood up, raised his fist in the air and let out a loud shout of victory. In my mind, it erased the bitter memory of Eamonn’s saying to me all those years ago, “He is not my son,” and Peter’s earlier cry of dereliction.

  By his courage and persistence, Peter had at last achieved the minimum to which everyone is entitled: his birthright.

  The full text was:

  I acknowledge that Peter Murphy is my son and that I have grievously wronged Peter and his mother Annie Murphy.

  I have sinned against God, His Church and the clergy and people of the dioceses of Galway and Kerry.

  Since Peter’s birth I have made contributions such as they were, towards my son’s maintenance and support. All payments came from my personalresources except for the one sum of IR£70,669.20, paid to Annie Murphy in July 1990 through her American lawyer.

  That sum was paid by me from the diocesan reserve account on my personal instructions to a third party. I confided in nobody the nature and purpose of the transaction. It was always my intention to repay that money.

  The sum of IR£70,669.20 and interest has, since my resignation, been paid into diocesan funds of the diocese of Galway on my behalf by several donors so that the funds of the diocese are no longer at any loss.

  I have confessed my sins to God and I have asked His forgiveness as I ask yours.

  Prayer, guidance and dialogue are clearly necessary before final decisions are reached about how I can set about trying to heal the hurt I have caused, particularly to Annie and Peter. I have already set out on that road and I am determined to persevere.

  I trust that you will respect my need for some time and space to reflect and pray so that, with God’s help, I can again hope to serve Him and His people, especially Peter and Annie, in my new situation. Pray for me.

  The most surprising part of the statement was Eamonn’s admission about how he had acquired the $125,000 he gave us.

  He had written out a check from a diocesan reserve fund to a Galway businessman, presumably countersigned it, and paid it into his own account. He said he intended to pay the money back but two years went by and he never did. Had an American banker or politician acted like that, he would have been accused of forgery and embezzlement.

  The seventeen-year cover-up was ended. Eamonn had used those years to help many people. He had played masterly poker with a very weak hand. Sadly, as I had predicted, the Bishop got crucified. Calvary followed him to Galway.

  What people think of me I no longer care. I am only sorry that Eamonn has been made to look a rascal in the eyes of many. They would have sympathized had he left to marry me in 1974, but he had furtively taken forbidden fruit; he had privately indulged what for years he had publicly and vehemently decried.

  Once, though, when I said to him jokingly, “I do have a lot of power over you, don’t I?” he replied, “I’ll fight you to the death so the truth doesn’t come out, but if it does, I won’t give a damn.”

  He was always positive. He believed that whatever happened, God had a plan for him. He was not afraid.

  * * *

  On May 12, I gave a press conference, chaired by Peter McKay, in the midtown Peninsula Hotel. The room was crowded with TV cameras and over a hundred journalists from many nations. After years of secrecy I could now speak openly; I was a whole person again. I felt proud of having helped to vindicate my son.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “the Bishop has gone through pain. We have all gone through pain.… I am looking for Eamonn to do the right thing, that is, take the time and effort and some soul-searching to come forward and meet Peter. The time is past for him to be a father figure. Maybe they can be friends.”

  Once the story was in the open, I felt obliged to tell it in its entirety, or others would tell it in a faulty or malicious way. I do not have Eamonn’s luxury of confessing my sins in secret. But I, too, needed to be a penitent and to find healing in making public my own shortcomings, my wildness, my own hypocrisy.

  I also wanted my son to know that he was born of a genuine and long-lasting love. This book, in a sense, is his family album.

  My hope is that it will provoke change, especially in the Catholic discipline of clerical celibacy. I know from bitter experience the harm it causes. How many priests and bishops are behaving like Eamonn, how many women and children, like me and Peter, are suffering as a result?

  My story is shocking, I know. The long secrecy and deceit have been shocking, too.

  Many things in the story will be new to Eamonn and to Peter. They will both suffer because of it. But I have come to believe that ultimately truth can heal if we are brave enough to face it.

  What have we to share, we the little ones of the earth, except our small grain of truth?

  Epilogue

  How strange love is, how unpredictable. Lovers move in the same fantastic orbit, they dream the same dream.

  How could our love, Eamonn’s and mine, survive the bitter goodbyes and long, long absences? It was a mystery, like a seedling that sleeps year after year in the desert. One shower and it spikes the earth, blossoming instantly in beauty.

  Our love was like that. We had only to hear the other’s voice or see the other’s face and, whatever our resolutions, our sleeping love thrust upward through the desert sands and bloomed again. When we were together we filled every place we were in; never was there time enough to say all we needed to say.

  But why did this divine love not flow from Eamonn to Peter? Why could Eamonn not stop loving me and not begin to love the fruit of our love? Why could I, who loved them both, not help them love one another? This, too, is a mystery.

  My father warned me that if I stayed in Ireland, Eamonn would tire of me and only love Peter. When I left for America, the opposite occurred. He continued loving me and was indifferent to Peter. Yet Eamonn is really concerned for young people. Hence my hurt and bewilderment.

  I wish I could blame myself entirely; guilt can be so satisfying. But looking back, I see it was neither my obduracy nor Peter’s vindictiveness that finally brought Eamonn down. It was chiefly an inexplicable lack of love in a very loving human being. I felt like saying to Eamonn: “Stop praying for Peter twice a day, for it does you and him no good. Use the time saved to meet him. Look at him and say yes to him, say amen to him, for he is your own flesh and blood and for that alone he is lovely and twice-blessed and in him you are graced with immortality.”

  Peter says that Eamonn has probably been a child too long to grow up at this stage.
Mother Church is still telling him what to do and not to do. Peter was less a child at sixteen than Eamonn is in his sixties. Maybe Eamonn did Peter a favor by staying away. Peter, too, might have led a life of endless denials.

  Eamonn had one last surprise in store for me. After all the reported sightings of him from Peru to Florida to parts of Ireland itself, I learned in November 1992 that he had spent the first few months of his self-imposed exile a few miles from me. He was counseled by a Jesuit priest who was also a physician and psychiatrist in the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. Though we were only an hour’s drive apart, he was still unable to fulfill the promise made in his public statement to try to heal the hurt caused to Peter and me. My heart goes out to him; his inability to communicate shows his hurt must be far deeper than ours.

  A last word on the three main players in this drama.

  First, Peter.

  My companion, my beloved and my constant joy, how glad I am I never gave him up. I fought that fight almost to death and would fight it again a hundred and a thousand times. I never realized that the hardest part of bringing up my son would be his father’s indifference to him. Why did I fail for so long to appreciate Peter’s Siberian solitude, his sense of being a half person in a half world?

  Peter is now studying political science at the University of Connecticut. I pray that Eamonn will be present at his wedding, even at the christening of his first child. How or when it will be I do not know, but I remain convinced that one day my son and his father will meet again and, at last, be friends.

  Next, Eamonn.

  There have been nights since his exposure when I have not slept because of him. I felt he was conveying his anguish to me.

  My wish for him is that by telling this story I may help him to become his own person at last, not to hurt or humiliate him. He has been a victim since his father pressured him when he was small to dedicate himself to the Church.

  Though many critics will say that I encouraged Eamonn to betray himself, I believe that the only time he was anywhere near to being his true self was when he was with me. Who but I saw his big green wondering sea-haunting eyes, and all the hopes and desires that shone in them? If I did not make him feel valued, why did he always love me? Could it be that one reason why he did so much good in his ministry was because I had given him the always-remembered, never-retracted comfort of love?

  Eamonn was not only weak, he was also unbelievably strong. I, who have been in his arms, know it was not easy for him to give me up. Even later, he acted as he did not only to save his skin but to save his soul and, being a bishop, to save others’ souls.

  How many people he made happy, how many he housed, clothed, and fed. Arthur has written of him words so generous I can only repeat them here: “May the people of Ireland extend to Eamonn their hope and acceptance of his plight. And recognition of all that is great within him so that he may come home and share with them once again in the greatness that is his.”

  Finally, myself.

  What a relief to no longer have to live a lie. I live in today with the hope of a better tomorrow. Having faced the abyss, I am finally free of myself, free for myself. What the future holds for me I do not know.

  Do I still care for Eamonn when we have caused each other so much pain? Do I still miss him? Yes and yes. He will always be my beloved jazzman, the daring dancing laughing music-making ghost who wanders in and out of the byways of my heart.

  I miss walking hand-in-hand with him up winding mountain roads and on blown white sands beside a milk-white sea.

  I miss, while strong winds rattle the gray slate roof, the fireside storytelling.

  I miss the whispered intimacies, kisses, love-clasps, and silent thunders of the flesh.

  I miss waking by his side to fresh new dawns and the delicate singing of a thrush.

  I miss what was and, this hurts so much more, what might have been.

  Sometimes, but more rarely now, a chance word, a sound, a smell, a chord of music makes me close my eyes and I return, oh yes, to Inch to revel in the green-leaf times and feast my mind on memories of paradise.

  After eighteen years of secrecy, culminating in one of the greatest scandals ever to befall the Catholic Church, here at last is the true—and the only authorized—account of Annie Murphy and her love affair with Eamonn Casey, Bishop of Galway, Ireland. Romantic, spellbinding, and often shocking, the haunting passion of this profound love story is quite simply unforgettable and rivals any in recent fiction.

  Annie Murphy came to Ireland from the United States in 1973 after the breakup of a turbulent marriage. She made the trip hoping to find spiritual peace under the guidance of a distant cousin, Eamonn Casey, then Bishop of Kerry. Instead, she found a charming, dynamic man—and the attraction was immediate and mutual. Within weeks the two were lovers, caught up in a whirlwind romance at Casey’s hilltop retreat on the Atlantic coast.

  Fifteen months after Annie’s arrival, she and Eamonn became parents. But sadly for Annie, the love Eamonn felt for her—and the Church—did not extend to his son, Peter. Fearing scandal, the Bishop did everything possible to force Annie to give Peter up for adoption—and even went so far as to interfere with her medical attention when she developed a life-threatening infection after the birth. When Annie resisted and returned to America to raise her child alone, the Bishop did his best to cover up Peter’s existence, shunning contact with his secret family and providing only sporadic financial support.

  Despite Casey’s efforts, however, knowledge of Peter—and the Bishop’s affair with Annie Murphy—could not remain a secret forever. In May of 1992, Annie and the son the Bishop tried so desperately to hide went public and forced Casey to acknowledge the truth. The disclosure caused Casey, the Bishop of Galway, to resign from his diocese—and added fuel to the ongoing debate over the Church’s positions on celibacy, birth control, abortion, and the role of the clergy.

  Forbidden Fruit is an astonishing and unique story of a union so powerful it rocked the foundations of the Catholic Church. Replete with intrigue, drama, and breathtaking emotion, it is ultimately a story not only of deception and denial but, most important, of love and forgiveness. For despite all the controversy, the extraordinary passion between Annie Murphy and the Bishop of Galway blazed so brightly that it still reverberates through both their lives, all these years later.

  Peter de Rosa is a former Catholic priest and was a professor of philosophy and theology before leaving the priesthood. He is the author of bestsellers including Vicars of Christ, Rebels, and Bless Me, Father, all of which received outstanding reviews. He now lives in Ireland.