HIS parishioners call him Father Mossy, the sociable 73- year-old priest who loves nothing better than a party with singing and dancing and who plays golf off a handicap of six.

But Father Maurice Dillane’s secret is finally out: he really is a father — to a newborn baby son whose mother is a 31-year-old special needs teacher in the rural West of Ireland.

Yesterday the priest, his lover and their child were in hiding, but in an Ireland that has changed so dramatically in little more than a decade the question many of his flock — and farther afield — was posing boiled down to this: “In hiding from what?”

The only anger that could be detected in the calls to radio shows across the country was over the naming of the child’s mother as Madonna Burns by some Irish newspapers. Most callers felt that she had the right to privacy.

That didn’t apply to the “randy” priest but even the profiles of Father Mossy in the Irish red-tops couldn’t disguise his evident popularity. He was described as charming, a “man of the people” and the best priest to have served in the parish of Woodford-Looscaun, on the Galway-Tipperary border.

At Ballinasloe Golf Club, in Galway, where Father Dillane was president last year, nobody criticised him.

“He was always very open and didn’t have much time for some of the old ways of the Church,” said one player, who added that Father Dillane had ended the practice of reading out the names of parishioners with the dues that they had paid during Sunday Mass. “He was a liberal but nobody suspected anything untoward so this has surprised a few,” the golfer added.

Sources close to the priest’s family said that he had been in a relationship with the woman since she was 22. “They have known each other since Father Mossy came back from the United States nine years ago,” said one person quoted by the Irish Independent. “This was not just a one-off fling. They are committed to one another.”

Father Dillane, a native of Limerick, is a former missionary in Colombia. His vocation came relatively late, with his joining the priesthood after working in a bank. He was sent to minister in San Antonio, Texas, and upon his return a decade later was appointed to the parish of Mullagh-Killoran.

When he went to work in the parish of Woodford-Looscaun in 2004, his lover managed to transfer her job to the area. Late last year she gave birth to their child and the secret could no longer be kept.

Fourteen years ago the Bishop of Galway, the Most Rev Eamon Casey, apologised publicly after fathering a son in the 1970s to an American divorcée half his age. Ireland was outraged and the disgraced priest is now said to be living quietly in England. It has since been said that the decline of the Roman Catholic Church’s moral grip over Ireland can be dated to the Casey affair.

Jim Kennedy, a former priest and friend, described Father Dillane as youthful and charming. “He told me that he had a girlfriend — he wasn’t a bit worried. I would say Mossy probably went to Bishop Kirby when the baby was born and said, ‘Look, I have a baby now so what do we do from here on?’ ”

Father Michael Commane, a teacher and priest from Dublin, said: “It’s great to hear of a normal heterosexual priest for a change. There’s nothing wrong with a loving relationship. He should be left alone. That it is headline news baffles me.”

John Cooney, one of Ireland’s most respected commentators on religious affairs, said: “The Father Dillane case confirms just how out of touch Pope Benedict XVI and bishops are with popular thinking.”

Fatherhood

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