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Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

19 February 2025

Priests of the Diocese attend the 'Well Day' in Tullylease in honour of St Berrihert, welcoming the pilgrim statue of the Sacred Heart which has begun its journey for the Jubilee Year 2025

A full church gathered for the occasion and walked in prayer to the Shrine, the Wells and Cemeteries as part of the 'rounds'.

(Photos with thanks, Fr Liam Kelleher)

Jubilee Pilgrimage in Tullylease

Hosting a Jubilee Conversation in your parish

Over 50 parishioners gathered in Cloghroe last week for what turned out to be a fruitful evening of prayer, input and synodal dialogue on the theme of our Jubilee Year of Hope.
The evening began with 30 minutes of silent Eucharistic Adoration concluding with Benediction, a 30minute input by Fr Eamonn McCarthy, our diocesan co-ordinator for the year, by way of exploration of the Jubilee themes and the document, Spes non Confundit, followed by a further half hour of animated exchange and dialogue among those present.

Jubilee gathering in Cloghroe

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Latest Homily

16 Feb 2025 - "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only"

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Coram Fratribus

Give God Time

Genesis 8.6-22: The dove Noah sent out found no place to set her foot.
Mark 8.22-26: He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village.
When, after the flood, the waters receded from the earth, the Read More

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Monica Mondo

Monica Mondo’s weekly programme Soul is an institution in Italian television. I was honoured to be asked to be Monica’s guest recently. Our conversation was broadcast this weekend. You can find it here (in Italian).
In the Book of Daniel, the prophet Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 8

Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
An Read More

Coram Fratribus

Give God Time Genesis 8.6-22: The dove Noah sent out found no place to set her foot.
Mark 8.22-26: He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village.
When, after the flood, the waters receded from the earth, the process took time. God did not pull the plug to drain the planet as if it were a bathtub. He let the waters draw back following a natural rhythm, patiently re-establishing boundaries set on the third day of creation.
He tends to proceed likewise when, from our lives, he drives away chaos and infirmity.
We have heard about Jesus’s encounter with the blind man of Bethsaida. Note the courtesy of the proceedings. Jesus takes the man’s hand, a gentle gesture, and leads him away from the crowd. The intimate process of healing must take place confidentially, away from curious eyes.
The incarnate Word of God, in whose image man was made, applied his life-breath to the man’s eyes in the form of spittle, letting his hands (‘his sacred hands’ as we say in the Roman canon), rest on them a while. Thus the restoration of sight begins. It passes through stages, letting the man get used to engaging with reality afresh.
Is it not often the case that we, healed of an ill that has plagued us, feel, in addition to relief, a kind of bereavement?
We can come to identify ourselves so fully in terms of an infirmity that we do not know, when it goes, who we are. We need time to find out. Perhaps we have then, like the man from Bethsaida, to stay outside the village a while, alone with ourselves before God, in order to rediscover our place in the world, and our task.
For God heals us for a purpose. Having stood before him blind crying, ‘Lord, that I may see’, we must first of all let let him act freely, applying his remedies. Then we must learn to ask, our sight restored, ‘Lord, what would you have me do, where do you have need of me?’
Detail form a floor mosaic in San Marco, Venice.

Coram Fratribus

Charles V The resignation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1556 is the stuff of myths. He, one of the modern world’s most powerful rulers, withdrew to the monastery of Yuste in Extramadura, where he hunted and fished and rode his horse practically into his apartment, yet lived a retired, penitent, prayerful life, with a view onto the Hieronymite monks’ high altar from his bedroom. The mere idea that absolute power might in fact be relative, subject to a higher good and a higher aspiration, challenges us – and is a salutary subject for reflection in the world right now. August von Platen-Hallermünde wrote in a poem dramatising Charles’s retirement: ‘The head that stoops unto the scissors now/Under the weight of many crowns did bow.’ The tonsuring may be a legend. The image remains pertinently real, immortal. The German text is here.
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Von-Platen-Karl-V.m4a

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Monica Mondo Monica Mondo’s weekly programme Soul is an institution in Italian television. I was honoured to be asked to be Monica’s guest recently. Our conversation was broadcast this weekend. You can find it here (in Italian).
In the Book of Daniel, the prophet is referred to as vir desideriorum, a man of desires. This image has always represented the archetype of the monk; it is not less the archetype of the apostles, and of every Christian.
For a full list of previous broadcasts. follow this link.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 8 Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
An elder said: ‘Let us practise meekness and forbearance and longanimity and love. For these are the things that make a monk.’ He further said: ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ [horos christianou mimēsis Christou].’
You know the old maxim, ‘The habit does not make the monk’. Here we are told what does. These sayings are typical of the Fathers’ economy of style. We must turn them over in our mind carefully to draw out the sense they carry. As foreign readers we are up, too, against challenges posed by translation. Since the Fathers used words sparingly, their choice is significant. It will be worthwhile to pause over a few specific terms.
To start from the end: when I put in my translation, ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ’, I paraphrased a little. I saw no other way. The saying in Greek is more elegant and denser. It juxtaposes two parallel formulations. First it speaks of horos christianou. A horos is an outward boundary. The horos of South Wales is the Bristol Channel. We get the image of the Christian as a formless landmass bounded by a demarcation line that gives him or her definitive shape, territorial integrity. This demarcation line is defined as mimēsis Christou. The word mimesis is now well established as part of the English language. We can responsibly render it by ‘imitation’, as long as we do not think of ‘imitate’ as ‘ape’. Mimetic imitation stands for the interiorisation of a pattern; mimesis conditions, potentially transforms, personality. What constitutes a Christian, what defines him or her in soul, mind, and body, is Christlike life, life in Christ. Our constant goal is this, nothing less.
Four qualities are listed as expressions of this kind of life. The first sounds hopeless. We have made of the word ‘meek’ a term almost of abuse. So let us remember: the term in Greek is that of the third beatitude, of those who will inherit the earth. This word’s resonance is wonderful, in fact. It suggests kind affability, clemency, serenity, characteristics born of strength, not weakness. We might grasp the sense of it best by way of an example. I think of a passage in the life of St Silouan of Athos, born in 1866. One day, while he was still a youth, he was out harvesting with his father. It was a Friday. It was the boy’s turn to prepare the midday meal.
Forgetting that it was Friday, he prepared a dish of pork for their lunch, and they all ate of it. Six months later, on a feast-day in winter, [his] father turned to him with a soft smile and said: ‘Son, do you remember how you gave us pork to eat that Friday in the fields? I ate it but, you know, it tasted like carrion.’ ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me at the time?’ ‘I didn’t want to upset you, son.’
This is an example of meekness: readiness to swallow a grievance and to retain a correction for months in order to deliver it peacefully and for it to be heard in peace. Silouan, a luminous paragon of monastic virtue, truly a modern Desert Father, said late in life: ’I have never reached my father’s stature. He was quite illiterate: he even used to make a mistake in the Lord’s Prayer which he had learned by listening in church. But he was a man who was gentle and wise.’ We are called to be like that.
The second quality I have called ‘forbearance’. In Greek it is anexikakía, literally: ‘strength to endure bad things’. Such strength is acquired through a right perspective. It is a curious fact that grand Byzantine emperors carried as part of their ornaments an object called anexikakía. On state occasions they carried it in their right hand while their left held the sceptre. The anexikakía was a cylindrical, purple silk pouch that contained a handful of dust, a symbol of its bearer’s transience. The emperor carried it as a reminder that status is fickle, that he himself would one day return to dust. To bear current tribulation, or heavy duty, with courage, aware that all flesh is grass, but that God’ s gracious promise endures: this is forbearance.
‘Longanimity’ comes next. I could have put ‘patience’, but opted for the Latinate, admittedly awkwarder term because it renders an element explicit in the Greek makrothumía. The word thumos stands for temper; makros means broad. A broad-tempered person is no longer a slave to his or her moods of the moment. He or she has learnt to contain a kind of temperamental extension allowing dust to settle, passions to cool, before what is inwardly felt is articulated in a word or action. Longanimity is connected with magnanimity. People who have learnt to structure their personality in this way become necessarily generous, and pleasant company.
The fourth quality is love, agapē. Self-control is no end in itself. It is a means to prepare oneself for gracious encounters, to be an agent of communion. We read in John’s First Epistle: ‘Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’ Life in Christ, mimēsis Christou, stands for entry into a divine mode of being. For all their devotion to the Passion and trust in the power of Christ’s Cross, the Fathers never forgot that the finality of human life is participation in God’s loving nature. That is why their words, even when they are stern, are light, and full of light.
The horos of South Wales! view towards Nash Point.

Coram Fratribus

Countering Blandness ‘It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position’, writes Tracey Rowland disarmingly, only to remark that she is delighted to be in the company of (other) various high-profile people ‘who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again’. At stake is the collectively dawning realisation that the cause of faith is not served – has it ever really been? – by a pastoral strategy set to correlate it to the culture of modernity. It is time to insist, again, on the difference Catholic Christianity makes hermeneutically, ontologically, ethically, aesthetically. Rowland concludes: ‘The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different—and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.’ It is worth reading the whole piece, which you can find here.

Parish Masses across Ireland to pray for Jubilee of Deacons Father Edward McGee, National Director for the Permanent Diaconate in Ireland, has invited parishes around the country to avail of dedicated liturgical resources - including some Prayers of the Faithful - to be offered at Masses to celebrate the upcoming Read More 4 Likes

Posted: 19 hours ago

Photos from Cloyne Diocese's post Priests of the Diocese attend the 'Well Day' in Tullylease in honour of St Berrihert, welcoming the pilgrim statue of the Sacred Heart which has begun its journey for the Jubilee Year 2025.
A full church gathered for the occasion and Read More 19 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Pilgrims of Hope 2025 - Jubilee Conversations - Diocese of Cloyne https://cloynediocese.ie/news/pilgrims-of-hope-2025-jubilee-conversations 10 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

16 Feb 2025 - "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only"... https://cloynediocese.ie/failte/homilies/16-feb-2025-if-our-hope-in-christ-has-been-for-this-life-only 4 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Photos from Cloyne Diocese's post Make kindness the norm💙Today is Random Acts of Kindness Day! 💛
“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”― Aesop
Here are examples of some little acts that we can do today to be kind:
🌟Be a good listener
🌟Compliment another
🌟Ask Read More 1 Comments

Love this.
I have one done already this morning.

10 Likes

Posted: 3 days ago

Jubilee Pilgrimage in Tullylease

Priests of the Diocese attend the 'Well Day' in Tullylease in honour of St Berrihert, welcoming the pilgrim statue of the Sacred Heart which has begun its journey for the Jubilee Year 2025

Pilgrims of Hope 2025 - Jubilee Conversations

Hosting a Jubilee Conversation in your parish

Recent picture of St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh. Co. Cork

Upcoming courses at the Dominican Retreat Centre, Tallaght

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