Born: August 13th, 1935
Died: April 28th, 2025
For a time Bishop Brendan Comiskey, who died in April aged 89, was viewed as in the vanguard of prelates cautiously seeking to create a moderate, more liberal and more ecumenical version of the Irish Catholic Church.
But the church leadership’s egregious and hugely self-defeating policy of placing the institution above the individual in the face of what ultimately became a litany of clerical child sexual abuse scandals brought him down.
He could and should have resisted those church diktats, but, as acknowledged by abuse victim Colm O’Gorman of the One in Four survivors’ support group, he dealt with “the issue in the way that he was directed to manage it by canon law and by the Vatican”.
Fr Jim Fegan, a priest of the Ferns diocese speaking at the bishop’s funeral mass, made a similar point, saying: “We can see more clearly now that Brendan Comiskey was in some ways a product of the church culture of his time, and that was a culture that focused on organisation rather than people.”
Comiskey resigned as Bishop of Ferns in 2002 following a BBC documentary, Suing the Pope, which exposed scores of abuse allegations against 21 priests in the diocese going back more than three decades.
He was blamed for colluding in the cover-up of the paedophile allegations and of failing to protect children who were sexually abused by priests. This in turn led to an inquiry and the 2005 Ferns Report, which was damning of his and his predecessor Bishop Donal Herlihy’s handling of the cases.
One of the most notorious of the abusers in the Ferns diocese was Fr Sean Fortune who, while facing 66 allegations against 29 boys, died by suicide in 1999.
In his resignation statement in 2002 Comiskey apologised to victims and said he had “done his best” to address the allegations against Fortune and other priests, but “clearly that was not good enough”. He had found it “almost impossible to deal with” Fortune, he said.
He repeated his apology when reacting to the Ferns Report in 2005, adding, “while I acknowledge and regret my failings, I emphasise that these were not deliberate, but rather were human failings”.
Another failing he faced up was his alcoholism. In September 1995, he travelled to the United States because, in the words of a diocesan press officer, he was “physically and emotionally exhausted”. Shortly afterwards it was confirmed he was being treated for a drink problem.
This led to a frenzy of media stories about his treatment, and who was paying for it, and about his lifestyle, with innuendo in particular about a number of holidays he took over the years in Thailand. One newspaper reported that he was detained at Bangkok airport drunk and without identification.
At a press conference on his return in February 1996 he confirmed his alcoholism and his regular attendance at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He said he had received alcoholism treatment for free in the US and had never touched diocesan funds for his own use. He said he was not arrested at Bangkok airport, but that he had problems getting through immigration because he lost his passport, a difficulty that took two days to resolve.
He loved Thailand, its culture, its climate and its people, and deplored “lurid and sleazy comments” about his holidaying in the country. To one journalist’s question he responded: “If you’re asking was I out consorting with prostitutes, I was not.”
It was as a “wounded healer” that he came back to Ferns, he told reporters. “I return limping into the dawn like Jacob, after a night of wrestling with God’s angel and my own demon, as much or more in need of the people’s support as they are of mine.”
Comiskey was born in Clontibret, Co Monaghan, in 1935 to Clare (née McArdle) and Patrick J Comiskey. He was educated in St Macartan’s College in Monaghan. He joined the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and was ordained in 1961. In 1971 he was appointed provincial of the Anglo-Irish province of the order and eight years later was made auxiliary bishop of the Dublin Archdiocese. He was appointed Bishop of Ferns in 1984.
He had a high media profile and had a number of communications roles in the church. He placed himself firmly on the liberal wing of the church, with the likes of Bishop Edward Daly of Derry and Bishop Willie Walsh of Killaloe, in urging an examination of the priestly celibacy rule. He was reprimanded for his stance and instructed by the Vatican not to speak again on the subject, but he stuck to his view.
As a member of the Bishops’ Commission for Ecumenism, Comiskey was heavily involved in building relationships with other Christian traditions. In 1998 he expressed “deep sorrow” and asked for forgiveness for the 1957 Catholic boycott of Church of Ireland businesses in Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford.
That boycott happened after a Protestant woman married to a Catholic man took her three children to Belfast, insisting she would only return if her children were raised as Protestants. This was in breach of the then Catholic Ne Temere rule, which demanded that in such “mixed marriages” children must be raised as Catholics.
That apology was graciously acknowledged at the time and later after Comiskey resigned. The late Church of Ireland Wexford Minister Canon Norman Ruddock, responding to his standing down, said Comiskey was “light years ahead of any other Roman Catholic bishop in the area of ecumenism”.
In a Rite and Reason article in The Irish Times, he wrote that “like another Monaghan man, the poet Patrick Kavanagh, Bishop Brendan has known times of great loneliness and rejection”. And he said: “Our hearts go out to the victims. But priests in other dioceses in Ireland have been found guilty and convicted. Did their bishops resign? Why has Bishop Brendan been singled out as a pariah? Why has he to be the scapegoat for an evil that has been present in the church for years?”
At Comiskey’s funeral mass in Clondalkin, Dublin, Fr Jim Fegan said that “failure in one aspect does not define the entirety of a person’s life or their great legacy”. He said that “at all times Brendan stated very clearly that all those who have suffered abuse must never be forgotten,” while adding: “He had a huge, huge heart, and he always spoke of the value of compassion and the power of a kind word or a helping hand.”
That view was strongly endorsed by Maria Lynskey, the niece of Joe Lynskey, one of the Disappeared who was abducted, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA in 1972. After Comiskey’s funeral she said she and the wider Lynskey family would be “forever grateful for the compassion shown by Bishop Brendan Comiskey and his family” in facilitating the search for her uncle’s remains in Annyalla Cemetery, Co Monaghan, last November.
That was based on intelligence that Lynskey’s body was secretly interred in the Comiskey family grave, but whatever additional body was buried in the grave it was not that of Lynskey.
In macabre fashion it is suspected that when the bishop’s mother died in a fire more than 50 years ago that some people, taking advantage of an open grave, dug about three feet further down, buried the still-unidentified remains, covered it up, and when the Comiskey family came to bury their mother the next day, no one suspected a thing. Comiskey, who was in ill-health at the time, presided over the exhumation. It is understood that the experience caused him great distress. Ms Lynskey thanked the bishop and the Comiskey family “from the bottom of my heart” for permitting the search.
Bishop Comiskey, who treasured his Monaghan roots, was buried in Annyalla Cemetery. He is survived by his nieces and nephews, extended family, members of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, clergy and a wide circle of friends.
