Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

This is not a virtual candle. For those who wish to participate, a candle will be placed in the Cathedral in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament for your intentions.

For the month of November, the focus will be on remembering our deceased loved ones. “Indeed, the church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian Religion, has honoured with great respect the memory of the dead.” (Directory on Popular Piety and the liturgy, 251)

Themes will vary during the year, following to some extent the Liturgical Calendar but also including other celebrations and occasions as they arise.

Donations received will be used for the ongoing maintenance of St Colman’s Cathedral.

With gratitude always for your support and prayer.

Yours sincerely,

+ Wm. Crean
Most Rev. William Crean, D.D.,
Bishop of Cloyne.

Light a Candle at St Colman’s Cathedral

Light a Candle at St Colman's Cathedral

12 September 2024

Sunday 8th September, Mass was celebrated for the Indian Community in St. Mary’s Church, Carrigtwohill to celebrate the Birthday of Our Lady, followed by a Procession to Our Lady's Grotto and a celebration.

Munster Konkans, a community of families originating from Mangalore in South West India, and currently living in and around the Munster region, gathered together for the celebration of ‘Monthi Fest’ (Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) on Sunday, 8th September.

This is the biggest family feast of the year in the Konkan culture, and is also celebrated as a harvest festival, where the first fruits, vegetables, and grains of the season are offered to God in a gratitude for His blessings.

Carrigtwohill Parish - Mass celebrated for the Indian Community

Bringing Lourdes to the Faithful

September 15^th - 16^th 2024

The visitation of the holy relics is an opportunity to have Lourdes come to our diocese so that we can all experience the pilgrimage in Lourdes at home in Cloyne.

Petitions

There will be an opportunity for pilgrims to leave petitions and personal intentions to Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernadette.

Petitions should be written at home and brought to the churches. A petition box will be located at the Marian shrines in the churches.

Veneration of the relics ends at 9pm each evening in both churches.

Our Lady of Lourdes help our faith!

Visit of the Relics of St. Bernadette to the Diocese of Cloyne

23 August 2024

September 2024

Bishop William Crean, Bishop of Cloyne, has made the following new appointments which will come into effect on Saturday September 14th 2024.

V. Rev Jeremiah O’Riordan P.P. Donoughmore to retire and become Pastor Emeritus (P.E.)
Rev. Fr. Eamonn McCarthy, Spiritual Director, Radio Maria, Dublin, to become P.P. Donoughmore. Fr. Eamonn will also serve as Diocesan Co-ordinator of our celebration of the Jubilee Year 2025 with its theme “Spes non confundit” Hope does not disappoint.
Rev. Fr. Andrew Carvill C.C Mallow to be Administrator of Mourneabbey Parish while continuing to reside in Mallow
Rev. Fr. Brendan Mallon, Chaplain to Pobalscoil na Tríonóide, Youghal to serve as C.C. in the parish of Cloyne
V. Rev Michael Dorgan P.E. C.C. to retire and continue to reside in Ballycotton as Assistant Priest.
Rev. John Keane C.C. Macroom to serve as Assistant Priest in Youghal.
Mrs. Maureen Walsh, Sec. of the Diocese of Cloyne Safeguarding Committee to become Chairperson in succession to Mr. Willie Keane who has served in the role for 11yrs and for whose sterling leadership and commitment we are deeply indebted.

I, as Bishop, and the people of the Diocese are deeply grateful to our priests for their generosity of spirit and commitment.

I’m grateful to those involved in these new appointments. Change always involves uprooting from the familiar to new and less known people and situations. We are indebted to all for their generous spirit of service to the people of God entrusted to them.

Their ministry is a sharing in the commitment of so many people, priests, religious and lay women and men who quietly, yet so effectively, nurture faith and life in our parishes.

The Jubilee Year 2025 (Holy Year) has been designated a celebration of Hope – which never disappoints. Sadly, the lives of too many are marked by despair and darkness. Our faith enables us to be people of light. But we need each other to nurture that hope in and for one another.

We, in the Diocese of Cloyne, are blessed with the ministry of so many priests still. It is important that parish communities who have witnessed the decline in attendance wake up to loss of purpose and meaning that is taking place in and among us.

Let this Year of Jubilee be a graced time for us to put fresh heart into our families, schools and parishes.

Let us pray for those taking on new assignments. We pray the blessing of contentment upon them.

+ William Crean

Bishop of Cloyne

Further information: Contact Fr Jim Moore

Page 1 of 2

Email Subscription

Receive diocesan news and announcements direct to your email

Conversation with Peter Halldorf

Yesterday evening, the Norwegian translation of my book on chastity was launched at Litteraturhuset in Oslo.
The Norwegian version carries the title that from the inception of this project has been my work title: Homo castus.
It is my concern to show Read More

Coram Fratribus

Zena Hitz on Religious Life

This review appeared in the February 2024 issue of First Things.
At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. In so far as they are Read More

Coram Fratribus

Choose Life

This homily was given to conclude a course given under the title, ‘Arise, and fear not!’, on present and future perspectives of religious life.
Ephesians 6.1-9: Guide them as the Lord does.
Luke 13.22-30: Will only a few be saved?
In the Read More

Coram Fratribus

Christ & the Church

Ephesians 5.25-33: I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church.
Luke 13.18-21: The kingdom og God is like a mustard seed.
Give way to one another in obedience to Christ. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, Read More

Coram Fratribus

Religion of the Self I think of an essay Vito Mancuso published on 13 June last year, a day after the death of Silvio Berlusconi. Mancuso reflected not so much on the man as on the phenomenon he embodied, il berlusconismo, instantiating a global tendency that puts ‘the primacy of personal success before any kind of outreach to others, establishes applause as the measure of anything’s value and transforms citizens into spectators.’ The piece goes on: ‘You see, in earlier times one could imagine the transcendent in various ways: in the classical sense of Catholicism and other religions; in the socialist and communist sense of a classless, finally just society; in the liberal, republican sense of an ethical state like the Prussian one lauded by Hegel; in the sense of right, incorruptible personal conscience as in Kant’s moral philosophy; and in many other ways besides. All of them, though, have this in common: the conviction that something exists that is more important than the self, before which the self must quieten itself and serve. From the beginning of mankind, the concept of God has stood, exactly, for the vital sense according to which there is something more important than my self, my power, my pleasure […]. The triumph of berlusconismo represents the breakdown of this spiritual and moral tension. In as much as it constitutes a religion of the self, it proclaims the opposite: nothing matters more than me.’ Where this tendency is prevalent, what chance has any meaningful notion of society or of the common good?

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Peter Halldorf Yesterday evening, the Norwegian translation of my book on chastity was launched at Litteraturhuset in Oslo.
The Norwegian version carries the title that from the inception of this project has been my work title: Homo castus.
It is my concern to show that chastity concerns more than just sexual morality; that it refers to a way of being human that is characteristic of our essential nature. Thus, even as we refer to ourselves as homo sapiens, and even as great readers of humanity, such as Johan Huizinga in his seminal work Homo ludens, have used similar formulae to propose a broad anthropological perspective, so chastity provides a lens through which we can see ourselves holistically, in the endeavour to become whole.
The book was launched in conversation with Peter Halldorf, renowned writer and publisher, founder of the Ecumenical Community at Bjärka Säby. The conversation was enriched by perspectives on the book from different angles represented by the psychiatrist Torunn Landrø, the philosopher Ali Jones Alkazemi, and the literary critic Live Lundh.
You can watch a recording of the event (conducted in Norwegian) here.

Coram Fratribus

Zena Hitz on Religious Life This review appeared in the February 2024 issue of First Things.
At first glance, it seems odd that a major academic publisher should commission a volume on, as it were, the phenomenology of religious life. In so far as they are perceptible at all, religious have retreated to the margins of our imaginative universe, as defendants in court cases, amiable extras in musical comedy, or (weirdly) characters in gothic horror. Sure, there are religious who teach in schools here and there. There are the Sisters of Mother Teresa. There are a few incurable eccentrics opting for a life of enclosure. But these are marginal groups. What is more, are they not headed for extinction? Recent decades have seen a catastrophic fall in vocations in the West. In one of the Holy See’s most notable recent documents on religious life, the instruction Cor orans from 2018, the tenor is defined much more, I’d say, by the chapter on ‘Suppression’ (that is, the closing of moribund communities) than by the one on ‘Foundations’. This is not unuseful. We have lacked clear procedures for closure. Still, it makes you think.
Religious agonise over the demise of their state of life. When I was discerning a call to monastic life 25 years ago, vocational literature, published in the 70s, still exuded self-confidence. Fading brochures showed photographs of monks and nuns, sisters and friars doing all sorts of enterprising and holy things, usually in crowds. This pictorial projection did not quite match the reality on the ground. Communities were becoming geriatric. More often than not they were giving up traditional works. Religious schools were being closed or passed over to lay trustees solemnly pledging to keep the institutes’ ‘charism’ alive. Hospitals and care homes, privatised or state-run, no longer accommodated religious who, through untold sacrifices, had laid foundations for healthcare. Even monasteries were restructured. In the early 2000s it was no longer financially viable for an abbey such as mine to live by agriculture, as our community had done for almost 200 years. Monks and nuns closed down their farms and turned to … what? Hard choices had to be made. It is tough to set up shop afresh in a competitive landscape with a tired, diminishing workforce. One temptation has been to establish token industries to keep able-bodied brethren gainfully employed while in real terms communities started living off savings. This is a shortsighted policy in any walk of life, one expression among many of resignation to seemingly dismal long-term prospects.
Many communities have negotiated change with a supernatural attitude: ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away’. Though even from within such a mindset, a mindset solidly anchored in faith, ambiguous discourse has issued. I think of a tendency, for example, to recast death as purpose, as when communities long without recruitment proclaim, ‘Our present task is to witness to dignified dying’, or when an elderly monk, rattling around in a cavernous monastery, says, ‘Oh well, as long as I can die here!’ There may be heroism in such statements; but there may also be self-indulgence, the satisfaction of acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think, too, of a refrain that has long puzzled me. One hears it regularly. It articulates what I would call an essentialisation of consecrated life. Faced with the circumstances described above, religious tell one another: ‘Take courage! What matters is not what you do but what you are’. The attitude, once interiorised, has attendant risks. It invites me to idealise a sense of my mere presence and erodes the significance of mission. Now, a community without a clear mission will have no force of attraction; one can, after all, be anywhere. We might ask if such a community would even have a raison d’être.
Only against this socio-cultural backdrop can one appreciate the timeliness of Zena Hitz’s book. It is presented as a philosopher’s view of religious life. What does that mean? Hitz is a learned woman. Not only has she mastered the canon of philosophical writings; she refers to Plato and Husserl with the easy familiarity of friendship, as if they were squash partners with whom she lunches. The point of the book, though, is not to shower the reader with quotations or technical terms. Hitz shows herself a philosopher chiefly in the sense that she asks ‘Why?’ about things we take for granted. She states that her intention is not ‘to do justice to the enormous variety of religious communities and their influence on Christian life’, to analyse, say, the neo-Platonist strain in the Cappadocians, the mendicants’ part in rehabilitating Aristotle or the Benedictine response to the French Revolution. No, for this is not a book designed to flaunt learning, but to seek understanding: ‘I am a philosopher, and my gross ignorance, like the ignorance of Socrates, provides opportunities in its defects.’ The approach works. It is refreshing, given that literature on religious life is often weighed down by ponderous self-affirmation.
The book is composed in the manner of a three-part invention. One theme is the repeated strain of ‘Why?’ asked on a foundation of first principles. A second theme is the author’s experience of religious life, during a few years spent at Madonna House. This reference adds an intimate note, though it is deployed with such discretion that it never becomes invasive. The third theme gives voice to a polyphonic chorus. Hitz notes, ‘I am promiscuous with my sources’. Promiscuity isn’t always bad. The breadth of her references provides illumination, surprise, and touches of humour. In the index, under ‘P’, you find Paul, Péguy, Priam of Troy, Pseudo-Dionysius, Ezra Pound, and Elvis Presley.
There are five chapters. The first, entitled ‘The Call’, addresses the nature of vocation matter-of-factly. This is helpful in a climate given to mystifying this whole business to such an extent that ‘vocation discernment’ becomes a lifelong task, almost a vocation in its own right. Hitz stresses the primacy of self-knowledge. To follow a vocation is to assume that God in his providence has seen something in me I had not noticed, then to try, letting go of inadequate notions of self, to rise to true perception. This process is arduous but also, pursued with integrity, freeing. It widens the heart. It lets me see ancient perils, fears and desires lodged deep within me, in a new light. In an arresting image, Hitz describes a visit paid decades ago to the old World Trade Center:
We took the elevator to the top of one of the towers. Through vast windows, we saw a thunderstorm, well below us, flashing lightning as it moved across the city, from Brooklyn into lower Manhattan. I had never been above a thunderstorm, before – or since. It was magnificent to see something that would be overwhelming or dangerous on the ground reduced to a beautiful entertainment, harmless as a school of tropical fish.
Subsequent history made her reflect with grief that no earthly vantage point is final: that particular view across New York exists no more. Yet the symbolic impact remains. To follow a call is to learn to see more clearly. It is to contemplate oneself and one’s history from a higher altitude, in an ever broadening perspective.
Sister Aquinata Böckmann, doyenne of scholarship on St Benedict’s Rule, wrote a crucial, slim volume in 1981 called Touchstone Poverty. Religious authenticity is measured, she surmised, by the extent to which genuine, enduring poverty is practised. It is tempting to make excuses in this area, especially in a culture saturated with material wealth. Many of us who are professed religious have cause for self-examination. In her second chapter, ‘Blessed Are the Poor’, Hitz holds up a mirror useful for this exercise. She does not prettify poverty. She evidences its existential grandeur: ‘the link between catastrophe, poverty, and love is mysterious’. She also explains why poverty, rendered concrete in self-denial, makes sense for people resolved to live in the truth. Mortification is ‘training in rational desire’, a farewell to blind appetite. It touches intimate depths, ‘desire for a certain kind of helplessness’, that is, desire ‘to live in a way that recognised that I was, in truth, helpless’, so available for grace, relieved of the illusion of self-sufficiency. Poverty can have a secret apostolic dimension: ‘The cultivation [through renunciation] of one’s own character, to burn out greed and to cultivate compassion and humility, if practiced writ large, would transform the surrounding community.’
Of such transformation we have need. Yet the finality of religious life goes beyond it. It seeks an encounter with God, for which self-knowledge is a preliminary stage, a way to learn where our treasure, and so our heart, is. Only thus can we direct our heart well: ‘When one’s private life is a dual life, what is kept in secret reveals what is authentic about us, the truth of what we care about.’ This can be an exultant realisation. It can also be damning. The desirability of knowing God is spelt out with reference to Julian of Norwich, ‘no pious idiot’, we are assured, but a woman ‘gripped’ both by the turmoil and terror of earthly living and by the palpable reality of divine consolation. Julian knew the possibility of a contemplative outlook foreshadowed in the one Hitz enjoyed in New York at an altitude of 1,300 feet. From such a stance it is not only defensible but reasonable to affirm, faced with things as they are, that ‘all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’.
The constitution Lumen Gentium tells us that the Church is called to be ‘a lasting, sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race’. A religious vocation is necessarily oriented towards communion, even if one is a hermit. A hermit, Evagrius noted, is simply one who is ‘separated from everything’ in order to be ‘united to all’, banishing indifference and wishing to learn compassion, embracing the horizontal axis of the Cross. To pursue unity in this way is to enact charity. This is the subject of Hitz’s insightful fourth chapter, ‘The Family of Humanity’. Charity, she writes, ‘is a single and undivided condition of a person’, vertically touching God, horizontally touching neighbour: the condition is cruciform. A community living within the axes’ point of intersection is ‘a community that looks like humanity’. I suspect that when the classicist Hitz speaks of ‘humanity’ here, she intends to play not merely on the register of ‘pertaining to the human species’ but on that of ‘philanthropy’, ‘kindness’. Charity on these terms ‘is beautiful’, but ‘makes constant war with our comforts’, taking us back to the question of our priorities. Hitz speaks of celibacy within the optic of charity, a sensible approach too rarely practised. She is, she admits, ‘severe on sexuality’, though ‘not out of prudishness’; rather, ‘to counter the overwhelming rhetoric on the other side.’ We act, she writes,
as if life without sex is impossible, and entertain the thought, even if less commonly nowadays than in my youth, that sex with strangers is harmless. Both cannot be true: Either sex reaches down to the core of our being, and so ought to be treated with reverence and caution, as something which might bear life’s meaning for us, or it is harmless, like chewing bubble gum, and can be given up without a second thought.
Hitz sets out from this framework to engage with fundamental aspects of religious life: intercession, doubt, loneliness, ‘the strange consolations of the Christian, the lights in darkness’, and forgiveness. I did not follow every turn of her argument in speaking of the love of enemies. I endorse the claim that at a human level ‘the ultimate defiance is to take the sting out of [one’s enemy’s] bite, to use what one receives from them for one’s own good and the good of others.’ But I do not see how one can say that a Christian love of enemies ‘requires the capacity to see one’s sufferings as good, as successes or blessings’. Suffering is always scandalous. It is the possibility of its transformation through love that is sublime.
The final chapter is less strong. One gets the impression of an author rushed, subject to flustered emails from her editor. The terms named in the heading, ‘Abandonment and Freedom’, are evidenced with reference to Walter Ciszek, Edith Stein, and Takashi Nagai. Hitz has penetrating things to say about each, of course, but her argument remains, uncharacteristically, a little superficial. The story of Edith Stein ‘Facing Death’ just cannot be told on five pages, with Mother Posselt’s life as sole reference. We are touching the abyssal perspective opened in Stein’s Kreuzeswissenschaft, a work that remained unfinished on the table in her cell when she was rounded up from the Carmel of Echt on 2 August 1942. There’s really a new book in this chapter. One can only hope Hitz will write it one day.
By way of criticisms, I have two. Overall, I found the stress on ‘stripping away’ a little excessive. Hitz relates that when she entered Madonna House, her director, ‘a former dentist’ — I am still pondering the significance of this detail — had told her: ‘If you didn’t come here to die, you came for the wrong reason.’ This corresponds to the myth whereby Trappist monks of old greeted one another with the words, ‘Brother, remember you shall die’ (though the lore from which the myth arose also insists that the monks were vowed to silence). By all means, this element matters, indeed is essential, but as a means: the end is life and thriving. St Benedict in his Rule for Monks spells out two criteria by which to evaluate a religious vocation: Does the candidate truly seek God? Does he desire fullness of life? The religious life lived well, albeit precariously, is a happy, joyful life. This fact does shine through now and again, but could have been made more prominent.
My second criticism is directed at the publishers. The volume is part of a series in which ‘A Philosopher’ looks at lots of interesting stuff: science, work, architecture, sport, and so forth. This is all very well. My fear is simply that a readership which ought to be targeted, religious themselves, will feel put off by the packaging, presuming the book to be a dry, academic treatise. That would be a monumental pity. For they have in this book a great resource, a source of renewal.
Having read Hitz’s book pencil in hand, I have drawn from it a small anthology of apophthegmata. ‘What we love follows from what we see, […] we can long for something after glimpsing only a shadow of its garment.’ ‘I reckon that to hold something in loving attention while reconciled to its permanent annihilation is not humanly possible.’ ‘Anger must be used well.’ ‘Our distractions are incursions of our real desires.’ ‘Grief brings us into contact with the nature of things’. This book is the work of a philosopher who asks pertinent questions, reasons clearly, sees deeply, and loves wisdom. It is itself wise, and companionable.

Coram Fratribus

Choose Life This homily was given to conclude a course given under the title, ‘Arise, and fear not!’, on present and future perspectives of religious life.
Ephesians 6.1-9: Guide them as the Lord does.
Luke 13.22-30: Will only a few be saved?
In the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, we read of how Judas at the end of the Last Supper rose up, took his purse, and went into the night. Having eaten and drunk in Christ’s company, he proceeded to betray his friend and host.
It is possible, then, to receive inestimable grace one moment, and to throw it overboard the next; to be immersed in uncreated light, yet to opt for darkness. Indeed, we have seen examples, far too many examples, of this in our time. We know the nefarious consequences of infidelity.
Today’s Gospel reminds us that we shall be held to account for our response to God’s gift. God ‘desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2.4), yes; but we must proceed towards it. We must turn away from untruth, be converted. Death has lost its sting; but we must choose to let that sting be extracted, choosing life instead of death.
In the final years of his papacy, John Paul II warned that a ‘culture of death’ was encroaching on the ‘culture of life’ that is Christianity’s gift to the world. He wrote in Evangelium Vitae, ‘We find ourselves not only faced with but necessarily in the midst of this conflict: we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life’ (n. 28). The choice does not just involve the key issues of abortion and euthanasia. It involves every aspect of existence.
‘Is this an option for life?’ The question is a criterion for every decision we make, great or small. Christian life as such, and religious life specifically, is about more than self-preservation. The Lord calls us to give life, to be fruitful. Where we tend to live like ants, seeing only the pine-needle we carry, God has a cosmic perspective. He sees each part of the universe in relation to the whole. His commandment in the beginning, ‘Be fruitful, fill the earth’ (Genesis 1.28) is paralleled by his commission to the apostles, ‘Go and make disciples of all nations’ (Matthew 28.19).
Even as the four primal rivers — Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates — carried paradisal water everywhere, the Church’s charismatic conduits, her religious institutes, are set up to irrigate the earth. Each of us is a micro-component in these waterworks. Wherever Christ is, there is paradise; and from paradise a spring of living water gushes forth. May we be found to be accessible founts of that water, apt to help slake the thirst of parched humankind.
Thereby ‘men from east and west, north and south’ will taste the goodness of the Lord and be drawn to his banquet, queuing at the narrow door, which will in fact show itself broad.
Wherever we serve, whatever our task, we play our part in preparing that great convocation. Let us rise, then, and cast off pusillanimity and fear. God can do all things. He can make water into wine, swords into ploughshares, enemies into friends, dry places into fruitful land.
Remember: ‘He who calls you is faithful, he will do this’ (1 Thessalonians 5.24). Only choose life. And he will make it flourish. Amen.

Coram Fratribus

Christ & the Church Ephesians 5.25-33: I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church.
Luke 13.18-21: The kingdom og God is like a mustard seed.
Give way to one another in obedience to Christ. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy. He made her clean by washing her in water with a form of words, so that when he took her to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because it is his body – and we are its living parts. […] This mystery has many implications; but I am saying it applies to Christ and the Church.
Our reading from Ephesians is a preacher’s nightmare these days. It seems to be stuck in a gender paradigm many now consider obsolete, even destructive. This passage used to be a fairly standard text at weddings. Now many couples go for other options.
The particular hang-ups of the hour must not blind us, though, to what is after all St Paul’s primary concern. The Apostle does speak of the relationship between husband and wife, man and woman; but even more essentially he speaks about the relationship of Christ to his Church.
Let us take what he says to heart. ‘The Church’, says Paul, ‘submits to Christ’. Her life unfolds from him, in him. He lifts her up and points her heavenward, enabling her to prepare her children for eternal life.
He is her light; were she to turn her face away from him, she would walk in her own shadow. Instead of contemplating Christ’s face, she would be preoccupied with her own form. It is a sad prospect, against which we must be on our guard.
Christ loves his Church; he loves her as his own body. For her he gave his life, to make her glorious. He adorned her, and adorns her still, with a beauty she could never approach by herself. Being of uncreated origin, this beauty cannot be reproduced, only received as grace and gift.
If only we knew the extent of divine love poured out on us! If only we knew the heights God’s grace calls us to reach! Well, then all our earthly relationships, too, would fall into place; and we would live happily on this earth, grateful to God for giving us through one another all that which of ourselves we have not, are not.
Then we should, together, constitute a mustard seed fit to be thrown into this world, God’s garden, there to become a lovely tree, and the birds of the air would shelter in its branches singing joyfully, spreading abroad comfort and delight.
The Word became flesh to make us, creatures of flesh, song, to the praise of his glory. Amen.
A wonderful tree with birds drawn by Dom Robert of En Calcat.

☘️Today we remember all the Saints of Ireland
🙏🏻The feast celebrates the gifts and the glory of God in his saints, their sharing in the paschal mystery of Christ, our communion with them in Christ, their example and their intercession Read More 3 Likes

Posted: 14 hours ago

Today is the Feast day of St. Martin de Porres - patron Saint of the sick and afflicted 🙏
He spent the first few years of his life in poverty, and learned to sympathize with the struggles of the poor.
Martin eventually Read More 8 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

This November we extend an invitation to you to join us in our Parish Mission hosted by Cobh Parish in connection with the Redemptorists.
This Mission will be a journey, a journey of faith renewal for our Parish.
Starting Sunday 17th Read More 2 Likes

Posted: 2 days ago

A date for your diary with an array of artists including storytellers, singers, dancers and instrumentalists- a night of great entertainment. 3 Likes

Posted: 2 days ago

Today we celebrate St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop.
Cardinal Bishop of Milan at the age of twenty one, he worked for reform in his Diocese, drafting Catechism of the Council of Trent. Patron saint of catechists and seminarians. 5 Likes