Former bishop of Killaloe Willie Walsh, who died aged 90 on Wednesday, was one of Ireland’s more remarkable Catholic bishops.
A deeply compassionate man, as testified to repeatedly by the many abuse survivors he met personally, in 2002 he was the first senior figure in the Church to publicly acknowledge bishops had placed the protection of the institution ahead of the protection of children.
That was seven years before the Murphy Commission reached the same conclusion in a report on the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations in Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese.
In 2007 the independent lay-led One in Four group, which assists abuse survivors, described him as showing “tremendous courage” in his approach to the child abuse issue and noted how, as far back as 1995, he had acted “way beyond [the practice of] any bishops” on the issue.
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He was bishop of Killaloe from 1994 to 2010, when he reached the resignation age of 75. Throughout his period as bishop he was at odds with the rigidities of the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI under which he ministered. Nor did he hide this.
[ From the archive: The bishop who speaks his mindOpens in new window ]
He publicly disagreed with the Church’s ban on artificial means of contraception, felt the celibacy rule for priests should not be mandatory, favoured women priests, disagreed with Church rules banning Protestants from Communion and was always publicly supportive of gay people despite grim church teaching at the time.
He was unhappy, generally, about the church’s exclusion of people, pointing to second unions and homosexuality as examples.
He was a bishop before his time and would probably have felt much more at home with the mood in the Catholic Church that followed the election of Pope Francis in 2013.
And, while grateful to media for its role in exposing abuse scandals in the Church, he also issued it with a warning.
In a November 2009 address to the Association of European Journalists in Dublin, he spoke of the past oppressive influence of the Church.
“The power of the church, politics, banks, developers” had been knocked, leaving a “vacuum”, he said. “I do think the media is the big power in the land and the big challenge for media today is not to use that power to oppress.”
The youngest of six children, he was born on January 16th, 1935, near Roscrea, Co Tipperary, where he attended national school before going on to St Flannan’s College in Ennis.
His ordination in 1959 took place in Rome. For 25 years he taught Maths, Science and Religion at St Flannan’s, where he was also deeply involved in coaching notably successful hurling teams throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In October 1994 he was ordained Bishop of Killaloe.
