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Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

13 February 2025

Cathedral drone pic original size St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh

16 January 2025

Pilgrimages for 2025

Pilgrimage to Knock
Sunday 11th May 2025. Parishes to make their own travel arrangements.

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes 30th May - 4th June 2025
All bookings for the Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes should be made through Joe Walsh Tours by telephone 01-2410800, online Joe Walsh Tours or by post to 89 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, D02WY88. No booking is definite until a non-refundable deposit payment of €350 per person (plus insurance premium where applicable) has been receipted by Joe Walsh Tours. Early booking advisable.

Pilgrims who would like to travel with the Special Assisted Section should apply to: Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes, c/o Parish Secretary, 27/28 Bank Place, Mallow, Co. Cork. Tel: 022-20276. This special assisted/sick section is accommodated at the Accueil Notre Dame. Acceptance for travel with the special section for the sick is subject to approval of the Pilgrimage Medical Board. The closing date for receipt of application is 31 March 2025.

Pilgrimages 2025

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23 March 2025 - “The man who thinks he is safe…”

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February 2025
- Recent picture of St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh. Co. Cork
January 2025
- Pilgrimages for 2025
- Jubilee Pilgrimage to Assisi & Rome 25 Sep - 2 Oct 2025
October 2024
- Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral
August 2024
- Visit of the Relics of St. Bernadette to the Diocese of Cloyne
- New Appointments In The Diocese Of Cloyne - Sep 2024
July 2024

Coram Fratribus

Renewal of Vows

On the final day of retreat, the Benedictine nuns of Saint Michel de Kergonan renew their vows. You will find an English translation of the homily by scrolling down a little.
Os 6.1-6: Votre fidélité – une brume du matin.
Lc 18.9-14: Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 13

Below is the text of the thirteenth 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. Read More

Coram Fratribus

Annunciation

You can find an English translation by scrolling down.
Parmi les joyaux que nous donne la liturgie d’aujourd’hui est l’hymne assigné aux vigiles, Iam cæca vis mortalium.
Le texte est écrit par Prudence, un contemporain de Saint Augustin. Né en Espagne, de Read More

Coram Fratribus

Renewal of Vows On the final day of retreat, the Benedictine nuns of Saint Michel de Kergonan renew their vows. You will find an English translation of the homily by scrolling down a little.
Os 6.1-6: Votre fidélité – une brume du matin.
Lc 18.9-14: Qui s’élève sera abaissé; qui s’abaisse sera élevé.
La vie bénédictine nous apprend à vivre surnaturellement. Elle nous aide aussi à vivre selon notre notre vraie nature. Le but de l’ascèse n’est pas de combattre la nature, mais de l’ordonner en vue de fécondité.
Un tel project exige de la persévérance, qui est parfois un combat.
‘Votre fidélité’, dit le Seigneur à Israël, ‘est une brume du matin, une rosée d’aurore qui s’en va.’ Eh oui, si nous restons livrés à nos préférences faciles et passagères, ce n’est que trop vrai.
Il faut donc s’enraciner, s’enraciner comme des arbres, de grands hêtres bretons, pour que notre fidélité soignée corresponde à celle de Dieu, vaste comme la mer.
C’est cela le fondement de toute vie spirituelle: l’agir de sa fidélité sur la nôtre.
Le renouvellement des voeux d’une communauté est un acte solennel. Quelle grandeur dans un Oui à vie redit d’un coeur simple, sans partage!
Notre engagement se fait une fois pour toutes, le jour de notre profession; il tient, que nous le renouvelions ou non. Le renouvellement n’est pas d’ordre juridique.
Il s’agit plutôt de souffler sur la flamme de notre premier amour pour qu’il brûle plus vivement, illuminant la compagnie des pèlerins avec lesquels nous poursuivons la route depuis nos nécessités présentes jusqu’à l’havre sûr de la maison du Père.
Vous réaffirmez, chères soeurs, votre oblation la veille du dimanche Lætare. Puisse votre fidélité radicale être une source toujours plus profonde de bonheur pour vous-mêmes, tout comme elle console l’Église et réjouit le Coeur de Dieu. Amen.

Hosea 6.1-6: Your fidelity – a morning cloud.
Luke 18.9-14: He who humbles himself will be exalted.
The Benedictine life teaches us to live supernaturally. It helps us, too, to live according to our true nature. The purpose of asceticism is not to combat nature, but to order it in view of flourishing and fruitfulness.
Such a project calls for perseverance, which at times spells combat.
‘Your fidelity’, says the Lord, ‘is like a morning cloud, like the dew that quickly disappears.’ If we surrender to the pursuit of facile, passing preferences, this is how it is.
We must root ourselves, therefore, like trees, like majestic Breton beeches, in order that our nurtured faithfulness will correspond to God’s, as vast as the sea.
This indeed is the foundation of all spiritual life: the interaction of God’s fidelity with ours.
A community’s renewal of vows is a solemn act. What grandeur in a Yes unto death spoken from an undivided, simple heart!
Our commitment is made once for all, on the day of our profession. It remains valid whether we renew it or not. Our renewal is not of a juridical nature.
It is a matter, rather, of breathing on the flame of our first love so that it burns with greater liveliness, illumining the company of pilgrims in whose midst we follow the road that passes from present necessities to the sure harbour of the Father’s house.
Dear sisters, you reaffirm your oblation on the eve of Laetare Sunday. May your radical fidelity be a source of ever deeper gladness for yourselves, even as it consoles the Church and rejoices the heart of God. Amen.

Coram Fratribus

Order In an article in The New Statesman this week Bruno Maçães reflects on the tendency in global politics to break structures down for destruction’s sake or, at most, to engender a tabula rasa for an imagined brave new world. What has happened to the principle of order in public discourse? ‘The idea of order’, he writes, ‘is a valuable one because it expands the mind. It forces us to step outside our own perspective, to look for balance and impartiality in a broader horizon where others have their place too.’ The trouble is that now ‘there seems to be no order worth preserving’. The assumption is widespread. It accounts for much anxiety, much anger. Even the most casual grasp of history shows that such an assumption cannot sustain society. It fragments, disorders. Catholic theology has the valuable concept of tranquillitas ordinis enunciating an aspiration to concord, the communion of intelligent hearts. It’s time to blow the dust off it, not just to propound it but to demonstrate it in micro-societies. Deafened as we are by inflated rhetoric, stunned by virtual fantasy, the real renewal of the polis will, based on sound concepts, be experiential.

Coram Fratribus

Spirit of the Beehive Victor Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive is older than I. Learned disquisitions have been written about it, essays situating it in a cultural, political context marked by the Spanish Civil War. Rarely have I been so haunted by a movie. Rarely have I seen one so carefully constructed with an attention at once analytical and poetic. Destinies and relationships play out within a collective, implicit wound. It cannot be spoken. The couple under whose roof the drama is enacted never exchange a word, simply call each other’s names as if blindly seeking each other in thick fog. The performance of the two young sisters is remarkable. There is a disturbing scene with a cat suggesting that a legacy of violence, though silenced, breeds violence even in the innocent. The bees moving up and down in a closed environment with not a fragment of pollen to be found know not the futility to which they are condemned. This is a film to make one wise, or at least a little wiser.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 13 Below is the text of the thirteenth 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. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Another day when a council was being held in Scetis, the Fathers treated Moses with contempt in order to test him, saying, ‘Why does this black man come among us?’ When he heard this he kept silence. When the council was dismissed, they said to him, ‘Abba, did that not grieve you at all?’ He said to them, ‘I was grieved, but I kept silence.’
Abba Moses’s black skin is often referred to in the stories told about him. Of course, racial prejudice has a long history. It conditioned relationships in the fourth century as it does in ours. We must be wary, though, of reading ancient narratives with modern spectacles. This little story probes beyond questions of ethnicity. It speaks of negotiating hurt, of living with vulnerability. Therefore it has relevance for all of us.
The setting is a council in Scetis, something like a republic of monastic desert dwellers in Northern Egypt. The assembled Fathers resolve to treat Abba Moses with contempt ‘in order to test him.’ In the Gospels we find people ‘testing’ Jesus to trip him up.
In Biblical terms, a test is not always a trap, however.
Think of what Moses tells Israel in Deuteronomy, as the people are about to take possession of the Promised Land: ‘You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments, or not.’ God’s testing has pedagogical intent. Its purpose is not primarily to manifest man’s heart to God, who knows what is in man; it is to reveal man to himself.
We are all more or less prone to self-delusion. We may have grand ideas of our idealism, spirituality, and selflessness. The chances are, though, that at some metaphorical level we are plagued by an ingrown toenail: something about our history, character, or looks that makes us feel insecure, so anxious, so disposed to self-protecting anger.
We discover what is in our heart when, notwithstanding the manicured elegance we like to project, someone steps on that toenail, whether by accident or design. Such discovery is pretty unpleasant, but useful. For it is ill to ride some high horse of principle if, in fact, my chief concern is to hide some intimate complex; my outward position, then, will be shaped to some extent by inward fear, and fear, being an insidious impulse, will be likely to sway my judgement. My integrity is, as a result, compromised. I may find myself subtly, unwittingly undermining the common good.
Abba Moses was a highly respected, much loved monk in Scetis. His ethnic background was evident to all. It does not seem to have been a problem to anyone. The Fathers seem to have wished to establish whether it was an issue to Moses himself. Gathered in council, they doubtless had important business to discuss. Will Moses’s judgement be objective? Or conditioned by a chip on his shoulder? This they set out to discover, testing the abba’s humility, probing his peace.
Moses responds with silence — and silence in the face of insult is indeed a response. It speaks of non-violence and firm integrity. Note the exchange that took place when the council was over. The Fathers ask, ‘Abba, did that not grieve you at all?’ It is a touching detail, revealing a trait that marks the best of the desert dwellers: their great gentleness.
The counsellors’ intent had been to test, not to injure. Before they part from their brother, they want to make sure he does not harbour a grievance. Moses’s reply is revealing, too. He does not pretend to be made of steel. He admits: ‘In fact, what you said did sting’. But he did not feel the need to strike back, to meet insult with insult. He stands before them as one who has stepped outside the spiral of violence that often conditions relationships. Having owned his vulnerability, he does not need to keep it secret. That leaves him free in the face of provocation. What might seem to others a possible weakness is to him an accepted part of his being. It is not to be denied; but neither is it to be made into a label defining his identity.
That Moses’s sense of self was rooted at a much deeper level is apparent from another story told about him. Again the setting is that of a council:
A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.’ When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him.
Abba Moses, free with regard to others’ prejudice and his own secret wounds, interacted with the world, not on the basis of calculable schemes of retribution, but from keen awareness of the utter disproportion between God’s gracious holiness and human misery. Thus he became a vehicle of mercy, a vessel of peace.
We are called to step outside our own shadow, into the bright light of mercy. It may burn at first, but then it liberates, delivering us from imprisonment in the dank dungeon of self.
Sunrise in Tromsø.

Coram Fratribus

Annunciation You can find an English translation by scrolling down.
Parmi les joyaux que nous donne la liturgie d’aujourd’hui est l’hymne assigné aux vigiles, Iam cæca vis mortalium.
Le texte est écrit par Prudence, un contemporain de Saint Augustin. Né en Espagne, de famille chrétienne, Prudence résidait, lui aussi, à Milan durant l’épiscopat d’Ambroise. Bon fonctionnaire, il fut appelé à la cour de l’empereur à Constantinople où il a pu croiser Arsène, tuteur des princes impériaux. Comme Arsène il trouva l’ambiance de la cour nocive. Il s’en retira pour mener une vie ascétique consacrée à la prière — et à la poésie. Le monde chrétien, pensait-il, avait besoin d’un nouveau langage pour exprimer la spécificité de sa vision de l’univers, de l’histoire, de l’homme. Prudence s’est consacré à cette tâche jusqu’à sa mort en 408, à soixante ans.
Chrétiennement élevé, Prudence a connu un monde païen. Il a vu la campagne de Julien pour faire revivre les vieilles crédences romaines; il savait ce que peut devenir une société où le christianisme s’éclipse. En invoquant ‘la raison aveuglée des mortels’, cæca vis mortalium, il savait de quoi il parlait.
Je trouve impressionnante sa deuxième strophe:
Hæc dum sequuntur perfidi
prædonis in ius venerant
et mancipatam fumido
vitam barathro immerserant.
Il s’agit d’hommes perfides qui trahissent une lumière révélée et libératrice pour diviniser plutôt l’oeuvre de leurs mains; qui se livrent bêtement au pillard, le monotone Père des Mensonges qui s’arroge les prérogatives de Dieu. Ainsi, ils s’adonnent à une vie de servitude menée dans un abîme enfumé sans perspective.
Cet arrière-fond, supposant la fumée qui s’élève des sacrifices païens (auxquels notre monde hypermoderne se livre aussi, à sa manière, avec abandon), révèle la vraie splendeur, l’admirable contraste du mystère célébré aujourd’hui. Non seulement Dieu se souvient de sa création pour la sauver. Il entre dans notre condition pour la renouveler de dedans, inaugurant une nouvelle création.
La collecte exprime de manière concise la dynamique qui en résulte: quand le Verbe s’incarne dans le sein de Marie il assume ‘la vérité de la chair humaine’ — notre chair comme elle est avec ses élans, ses désirs, ses pesanteurs — afin que nous, confessant avec tout notre être notre Dieu et Rédempteur, soyons participants de sa nature divine. L’évangile, c’est cela: la possibilité d’une humanité illuminée, non par un faux, ennuyeux gnosticisme, mais par un feu divin qui renouvelle jusqu’à la moelle notre chair et notre esprit, consumant tout attachement ténébreux, tout mensonge, tout compromis avec le mal, nous rendant aptes à connaître Dieu.
La transmission crédible de cette bonne nouvelle est une tâche urgente. Amen.
* * *
One of the gems the liturgy offers us for this feast is the hymn assigned for Vigils, Iam cæca vis mortalium. The text is written by Prudentius, a contemporary of Augustine’s. Born in Spain to a Christian family, Prudentius, too, lived in Milan while Ambrose was archbishop there. Being an excellent civil servant, he was called to the emperor’s court in Constantinople. There he may have come across Arsenius, tutor to the imperial princes.
Like Arsenius, Prudentius found the atmosphere at court noxious. He retired from it to live a life of asceticism — and poetry. He thought the Christian world needed a new language with which to express the specificity of its vision of the universe, of history, of man. Prudentius dedicated himself to this task until his death in 408, at sixty.
Though raised a Christian, Prudentius was familiar with what a pagan world looked like. He witnessed the campaign of Julian the Apostate to breathe new life into ancient Roman religion; he saw what happens to society when Christianity is eclipsed. When he invoked ‘the blinded reason of mortals’, cæca vis mortalium, he knew what he was talking about. I find his hymn’s second stanza impressive:
Hæc dum sequuntur perfidi
prædonis in ius venerant
et mancipatam fumido
vitam barathro immerserant.
It speaks about perfidious people who betray a revealed, liberating light in order, rather, to divinise the work of their hands; who hand themselves over gullibly to the Ravager, the monotonous Father of Lies, who usurps divine prerogatives. In that way they give themselves up to a life of servitude spent in a smoky, prospectless abyss.
This backdrop, presupposing the smoke of pagan sacrifices (which our hypermodern world likewise pursue in its way with abandon), reveals the splendour and admirable contrast of the mystery we celebrate today. Not only has God remembered his creation to save it. He has assumed our condition to renew it from within, inaugurating a new creation.
Today’s collect concisely sums up the dynamic: when the Word became incarnate in Blessed Mary, he assumed ‘the truth of human flesh’ — our flesh as it is with its yearning, desire, and heaviness — so that we, confessing our God and Redeemer with our whole being — might become partakers of his divine nature.
This is what the Gospel is about: the possibility of man illumined, not by some tedious faux gnosticism but by divine Fire renewing our flesh and spirit to the core, burning up all dark attachments, all lies, all compromises with evil in order to make us fit to know God.
The credible transmission of this good news is an urgent task. Amen.
The prisoners’ chorus in Fidelio (from a 2013 production in the Theater an der Wien) – an image of mankind enclosed in abyssal imprisonment, longing for the day, for light.
O welche Lust, in freier Luft
Den Atem leicht zu heben!
Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben!
Der Kerker eine Gruft.

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

Pilgrimages for 2025

Pilgrimages for 2025

Jubilee Pilgrimage to Assisi & Rome 25 Sep - 2 Oct 2025

Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral

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