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Light a Candle at St Colman's from 1 Dec 2024

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Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

03 April 2025

Art Exhibition by Fr. Peadar O'Callaghan

Fr. Peadar's Art will be displayed in Cobh Library from April 5th - 30th May 2025

Art Exhibition by Fr. Peadar O Callaghan

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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Latest Homily

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

Latest Articles

April 2025
- Art Exhibition - Fr. Peadar O'Callaghan
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

Desert Fathers 14

Below is the text of the fourteenth 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

Conversation with Sofia Carozza

I was recently privileged to be interviewed on the podcast Pilgrim Soul on the subject of my Lent Book, Healing Wounds. You can listen to the episode here (on Spotify), here (on Apple Podcasts), or wherever you like to listen to 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: Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 14 Below is the text of the fourteenth 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.
Abba Isaiah said: ‘Woe is me, for your name is all around me, yet I serve your enemies! Woe, indeed woe is me for I do that which God abhors; and for that reason he does not heal me.’
After the section on hesychia comes one about compunction. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines compunction as ‘anxiety arising from awareness of guilt’ or ‘distress of mind over an anticipated action or result’. It admits as a secondary sense, ‘a twinge of misgiving’, that is, ‘a scruple’.
Here we see a further example of a trend already noted: the tendency, over time, to reduce terms developed to render nuanced states of soul to banal, purely emotional categories. In addition to the advice they offer, the apophthegmata enrich our conceptual vocabulary. Thus they make us better able to deal with complex experience, less inclined to yield to hopelessness. For despair tends to issue from ambivalence, situations in which we feel overwhelmed by confused pain, unable to enact a response. What we can articulate, we can learn to deal with.
That is why we find the Fathers determined to name the thoughts that trouble them or the demons that hold them hostage, even as Christ, confronting the madman of the Gerasene, that poor fellow who lived among tombs and practised self-harm, cut through distracting chitchat and addressed the malign occupant with sternness, asking, ‘What is your name?’, in order, then, to order the evil one out.
So what did the Fathers have in mind when they spoke of compunction? Their Greek word for it, katanuxis, has the same literal sense as the Latin compunctio, which English cavalierly adopted. Both nouns are drawn from verbs of action that mean ‘to gouge’ or ‘to prick’. Think of a bull gouging a matador, causing bloodshed; or of a child pricking a balloon, causing it to emit a brief ‘ptssh’ before it spirals sadly to the ground. The basic reality is one of puncture. In fact, if you pronounce ‘compunction’ carefully, your ear will tell you that the words are related.
At risk of puncture are puffed-up people seduced by vanity to have exorbitant ideas about themselves, conducting their lives on the basis of illusions or of claims to power born of fame, status, or wealth. Compunction results when the air goes out of the balloon; when we have to confront our real rather than our projected self. What remains of me when self-aggrandisement is no longer fuelled? That is the question this section addresses.
Scripture gives us examples of instants of compunction: the woman at the well when Jesus told her all she had ever done; Peter at cock-crow, conscious of his thrice-repeated betrayal; Paul falling from his high horse. Most of us can painfully recall such moments from our own history. We significantly speak of our conscience being pricked, precisely, when we realise we have acted unworthily or spoken untruth. Such rude awakenings are precious. They are, however, merely the beginning of a drawn-out process which we may or may not wish to face.
It is one thing to realise a specific manifestation of ill-will or resistance to grace; it is another to own up to patterns in my life that are unsound or broken in order to embark on the arduous work of conversion. The Fathers’ commitment to compunction was about such probing. It led them to acknowledge the estrangement from God that results from transgression, and to grieve over it. By giving into sin, veering off the straight path into the wilderness, we not only grieve God; we sabotage our own happiness.
I have cited two woes ascribed to Abba Isaiah, a monk with the courage to confront his poverty. His words spoken centuries ago touch us in the present. ‘Woe is me, for your name is all around me, yet I serve your enemies!’ How can it be that I read the Bible, frequent the sacraments, recite my prayers, yet keep giving in to temptations that put to death the life of grace in me? How can I say ‘Amen!’ to the Body of Christ one moment, then the next make a cynical remark or lose myself in waterless places on the internet? ‘Woe, indeed woe is me for I do that which God abhors; and for that reason he does not heal me.’ God wants, intends to heal me; but he does not impose his saving power against my will.
This is a great mystery: God’s reverence for our sovereign freedom. When I call out in distress, ‘Lord, heal me!’, do I adopt the measures that will serve my return to health or do I stay, despite myself, attached to my sickness? Jesus’s question to the paralytic prostrate at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, ‘Do you want to be healed?’, regards each of us. It may be the needle we require for compunction. There is hardly a more urgent cause for pride’s pricking than my choice to stay mired in sickness when health is within reach. Compunction is the human response to God’s light shining in our darkness.
It is a mistake to think that such exposure to the light is instantly delightful. That depends on what the light reveals. The sorrow of compunction is a healthy pain, though. It springs from my certainty that what I am now does not determine what I may become. Compunction is grievous, but there is a flicker of joy in it, and energy for change, for new life.
Proud as a peacock! There is a lesson in this display.
Photo from Wikipedia.

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Sofia Carozza I was recently privileged to be interviewed on the podcast Pilgrim Soul on the subject of my Lent Book, Healing Wounds. You can listen to the episode here (on Spotify), here (on Apple Podcasts), or wherever you like to listen to such things.
You know, any experience of trauma — and the word trauma literally means a wound — will have its traumatic effect. There will be pain to negotiate, and fear perhaps, and humiliation, and all those things. And that is work that needs to be done. But any traumatic experience has the potential, precisely, to come back to a theme we talked about earlier on, that of deepening my compassion. Let’s not forget that compassion means a suffering with. It is insofar as I have the experience of what it is to be in pain in whatever way, of what it is to sustain this particular wound, that hopefully the penny will drop: ‘Ah, I’m not the only person in the universe who is actually wounded.’ And the person next to me may visibly or invisibly be wounded in a way. And I think, ‘Well, if this thing that I’m carrying is hurting me like this, I wonder what sort of hurt he or she experiences.’ And that can contribute to what St. Benedict wonderfully describes towards the end of the Prologue as ‘the widening of the heart.’ My little peanut heart starts growing as it becomes more and more able to assume into itself the reality of other lives. It starts growing, step by little step, towards the dimensions of God’s heart, which is a heart without any limitations at all.

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.

Youth Work for All… because every young person deserves access to youth work services! Imagine a world where every young person, no matter where they live or what their background is, has access to fun, safe, and life-changing Read More 1 Likes

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