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Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

04 August 2025

Stage 2 - Saturday 9th August 2025

Starting from Sacred Heart Church, Mogeely to Killeagh Parish Church

Start time: 8am

Pilgrim Passport and Stamp available at each stage

For more information please visit Midleton Parish website

East Cork Camino

22 May 2025

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025, Ballyvaloo Retreat and Conference Centre, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Y21 X392

Join us for a nourishing retreat as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si' in the beautiful surroundings of Ballyvaloo. Be inspired by the richness of ecological spirituality

"May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope" (Laudato Si', 244)

€250 per person (accommodation and all meals included in price)

To register please email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Trocaire Raising Hope Retreat

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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3 Aug 2025 - Vanity of vanities

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August 2025
- East Cork Camino - Stage 2 Saturday 9th August
July 2025
- Koinonia Cloyne
May 2025
- Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025
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
- Camp Creideamh Killarney - 7 Aug 2024

Coram Fratribus

Transfiguration

Daniel 7.9-14: A stream of fire issued from his presence.
Luke 9.28-36: His clothing became brilliant as lightning.
Today’s feast commemorates an historical event, a moment of transition in the public life of Jesus. Before it, he appears as a preacher and Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 32

You can find this episode 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.
Saint Gregory said: If, when Read More

Coram Fratribus

Sibling Rivalry

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman; 2 and they said, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” Read More

Coram Fratribus

Sixtus Pope Sixtus II is mentioned in the Roman Canon. I used to find the lists of saints in the Canon dull. Others must have felt the same, else the Missal would not have given the option of cutting them. As the years passed, though, the names came alive, each redolent with a personal story, a presence. The lists are now very dear to me. I feel a stab of pain when they are shorn. Pope Sixtus II was pope for less than a year in 257-8, a generation after the death of St Cecilia. He was St Lawrence’s bishop. Both were killed on the orders of Valerian, the emperor, four days apart. Sixtus was preaching to the people when soldiers came and dragged him away to be beheaded. A century later Pope Damasus placed an epitaph on his tomb. It begins: Tempore quo gladius secuit pia viscera Matris hic positus Rector caelestia iussa docebam, ‘At the time when the sword pierced the Mother’s pious bowels I, the [people’s] guide, lying here, was expounding the divine commandments.’ His feast invites us to remember thankfully all those bishops of Rome who have stood firm when impious arms have sought to molest Mother Church. They instantiate Christ’s promise to Peter, showing that the Church is built on Rock and that ‘the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.’

Coram Fratribus

Transfiguration Daniel 7.9-14: A stream of fire issued from his presence.
Luke 9.28-36: His clothing became brilliant as lightning.
Today’s feast commemorates an historical event, a moment of transition in the public life of Jesus. Before it, he appears as a preacher and healer, in continuity with the prophets of Israel. The Transfiguration brings a change of register. From now on the Gospel will be principally about, not his works, but the manifestation of his being; it will be less about the words he speaks than about the Word he embodies.
Our gaze is turned towards the cross-shaped redemption he is set to accomplish. It will be wrought in squalor, seen as annihilation, but will yet be glorious, as we learn from St John the Evangelist, one of the witnesses who, high on Tabor, beheld Christ’s glory in its fearful splendour.
So the Transfiguration refers to a particular epiphany. But its relevance is not constricted to this transitory scene. The Transfiguration reveals an intrinsic aspect of the Person of the Word, a current of divinity transmitted by his human nature so that we, if we are on the right wavelength, might capture it.
The glory manifest on Tabor belongs to Jesus as properly his. It is alive in him from his conception in Mary’s womb until his death on the cross and holy resurrection; it remains present in the Church’s sacramental life. The Holy Sacrifice we celebrate this morning carries a ray of this light, ‘brilliant as the sun’. Its purpose is to enflame us, too.
It is sometimes said that we need, these days, a ‘re-sacralisation’ of the liturgy and Christian practice. This is not false, I believe, but we need to be careful: let’s not consider ‘sacralisation’ an end in itself. The pursuit of idealised ‘sacredness’ easily leads to idolatry, for man is inclined to envisage it as a reflection of himself. The Old Testament condemns this tendency. Its strictures remain timely. For a Christian, there is no such thing as ‘the sacred’; what is truly sacred indicates, quite simply, a trace of the presence of our God Three-in-One, rendered palpable by the Word, conveyed by the Spirit.
What we need to develop is an ability to see God ‘as he is’. We have to purify our vision, turning it away from deceptive lights that blind us, rather the way the phosphorescent glare of our cities hides from us the stars. We must actively seek the glory Jesus displays through each stage of his life; we must re-read Scripture with the Transfiguration as our hermeneutic key; we must recognise the glory that shines in the sacraments in order, then, to correspond to it by our way of life.
Each time we recite the creed, we confess that Mary’s Son is ‘God from God, Light from Light’. This affirmation implies a call for our illumination in Christ, who nurtures us with himself to renew our being in his likeness.
The greatest obstacle to Christian perfection is, I’d say, our tendency to forget the lofty intention God has for us or to doubt that he is capable of realising it.
May this feast restore our trust, courage, and enthusiasm. May it provoke in us an existential thirst not satisfied by dull, stagnant water stored up in cisterns, making us yearn instead to drink from the source that springs up to everlasting, glorified life. Amen.
Tranfiguration icon by Kateryna Kuziv.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 32 You can find this episode 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.
Saint Gregory said: If, when you proposed to give yourself up to philosophy, you thought you would encounter no hardship, your induction will have been unphilosophical. Blame attaches to your formators. If you are prepared for hardship but find you do not meet it, it is a grace; if you meet it, you must endure it patiently. Else you will not be true to your purpose.
To us, the word ‘philosophy’ designates an academic discipline often perceived as being so abstruse that it seems to have no bearing on practical life. The enclosure of philosophy within a narrow framework of technical terms and assumptions was a notable feature of intellectual life in the twentieth century. As a result many women and men take it for granted, now, that philosophy has nothing to say to them. ‘Philosophical’ has come to spell ‘useless’. A friend once told me of a conversation he had overheard on a British train. A lady relayed at length to a friend some business that had caused her great hardship. The friend, having taken all this in, replied: ‘My dear, you have to be philosophical: don’t think about it!’ It is a telling quip.
The ancients envisaged ‘philosophy’ differently. Plato introduces the term towards the end of the Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus have spent an afternoon trying to find a term that may suitably apply to a variety of intellectual endeavours: one that describes what Lysias and the rhetoricians are up to while also defining the work of Homer and the poets, Solon and the makers of laws. How, asks Phaedrus, might one word describe these three exemplary professions? Socrates answers that to call each ‘wise’ [sofos] would be to go too far: ‘that epithet’, he says, ‘is proper only to a god. A name that would fit […] better, and have more seemliness, would be “lover of wisdom” [philosophos], or something similar.’ Phaedrus is satisfied. Socrates shows himself a worthy philosopher when, before the two friends take leave of one another, he makes this prayer to the gods: ‘Grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may not war against the spirit within me.’
You and I may have trouble thinking of speech-makers or lawyers, or writers of poetry, who would merit the title ‘philosopher’. That is our loss. The search for wisdom ought to be the basis of public and cultural life, and no one will seek her with integrity and determination unless he loves her. By Plato’s lights, philosophy spells disinterested self-transcendence in articulate pursuit of an objective good.
It was with this definition in mind that monastic life came to be known, quite early on, as philosophy. True, few monks were producers of texts; but all sought to make of their lives a statement — a lovely statement — worthy of the gracious truth of God’s gift in Christ. They strove to live logically, one with the saving, divinising Logos.
Naturally, there is also a more specific aspect to the association of monks with philosophy. For readers of the Greek Old Testament, the Sophia of philosophia was a personal presence, none other than the figure of Wisdom that emerges, sublime and familiar, in the last books of the Jewish Scriptures as a divine agent ad extra, the means by which an eternal, limitless, immaterial God engages concretely with creation. In the eighth chapter of the book of Proverbs, Sophia speaks. Putting her nature into words, she explains the role attributed to her in the creation and sustenance of all that exists in the universe as we know it: ‘I was beside [God], like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men’. For all their austerities, the Desert Fathers aspired to know this delightful Wisdom. They were no strangers to her joy although they contemplated it in through the prism of Christ’s Paschal sacrifice.
The early Church saw the Old Testament’s Wisdom as a type of the Word by which all things came to be, the Word made flesh in Mary’s womb. That connection finds mature expression in the first of the O Antiphons we sing during the last days of Advent, when, on 17 December, we invoke Christ as ‘Wisdom proceeding from the mouth of the Most High’, then ask him: ‘Come and teach us the way of prudence.’
For a Christian minded to live and think coherently, philosophy is structurally christocentric, for Christ is the measure of reality. In the light of what he did for us, philosophy is, too, what Edith Stein, a sophisticated intellect, called a ‘science of the cross’. Philosophy will yield its deepest secrets only when illumined by a self-sacrificing love at once notional and embodied. That is what Abba Gregory hints at. He traces a trajectory monks must follow if they are serious about reaching, through the folly of the cross, the wisdom from on high, ‘peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, without uncertainty or insincerity.’ A renewal of philosophy on these terms is overdue. We have a task before us.
Boethius wrote: ‘O strong of heart, go where the road/Of ancient honour climbs./Bow not your craven shoulders./Earth conquered gives the stars.’ Thus thought the humble desert dwellers, too, pressing on to enter where Jesus, our forerunner, has gone before.
Marble bust of Plato: a Roman copy (1st century AD) of an original (350-340 BC). Now in Altes Museum, Berlin. Wikimedia.

Coram Fratribus

Sibling Rivalry Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married, for he had married a Cushite woman; 2 and they said, “Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” […] And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed; 10 and when the cloud removed from over the tent, behold, Miriam was leprous, as white as snow. Numbers 12.1-13.
Few stories in Scripture are more moving than that told in the second chapter of Exodus about a young girl who, on the shore of the Nile, accompanies the bullrush basket in which lies her baby brother, laid there to preserve him from the ire of a maniac Pharaoh.
The girl saw how Pharaoh’s daughter, come to the river to bathe, picked up the child. Emerging from the reeds she presented a ruse by which the infant would be put back into the arms of his mother, brought in as wet-nurse.
What a bond between Moses and Miriam, his elder sister! How protective of him she must have felt! When Israel left Egypt, the two of them were allies in a project of redemption. Their brother, Aaron, too, played a crucial part, totally at one with Moses. The sibling trio seemed inseparable, bound together by affection and faith.
A diabolical impulse, though, could drive even these apart. We have heard how Miriam and Aaron began complaining, increasingly resenting their younger brother. The Lord spoke up for Moses. The other two learnt their lesson starkly.
And we, what can we learn? This above all: Moses, we read, was ‘the meekest man on the face of the earth’. So free of presumption was he that he was fit to see God. This meekness was not just an infused virtue, however; it was acquired through battle.
Even as the people of Israel, in a general way, began a campaign of murmuring against Moses as soon as they had crossed the Red Sea, he faced detraction from his nearest and dearest. These fall-outs, which pushed him to his limit, were not pointless. Others’ impure motives cleansed him, divesting him of vanity and selfish attachment.
Trials, interior and external, can serve a providential purpose. Let’s not waste opportunities. Instead of letting ourselves be pickled in sadness or resentment, let’s use them to grow out of ourselves into trustful abandonment, honouring God as God.
At the same time, let us watch our own murmurous tendencies. They resemble acid rain, having in them not the slightest force for life. The impact of such rain can be purified; but much time and effort is required. Why not rather use such precious benefits for good, to build up rather than tear down, to unite rather than wedge apart?
Miriam is cursed with Leprosy, Netherlands, mid 1500s Stained glass now in the Museum Schnütgen in Cologne. From Wikimedia.

Coram Fratribus

Curé d’Ars St Jean-Marie Vianney was an inspired pastor. The great message he conveyed concerned the Christian call to holiness, indeed, to divinisation. For Vianney it was axiomatic that the Christian is called to share in the very life of God. The tragedy of sin lay, for him, in the fact that it impedes the divine life in man and thus keeps him from his finality, the goal for which he is made, making it impossible for him to be truly happy. Consider a statement such as the following, from one of Vianney’s sermons: ‘Like a lovely white dove which emerges from the midst of the waters and comes to rustle its wings upon the earth, the Holy Spirit sets out from the infinite sea of divine perfections to come and agitate its wings upon souls that are pure, to impart to them the balm of love.’ That’s what I call preaching! Couldn’t we, in our day and age, do with rather more exposure to this message?

East Cork Camino Jubilee Year Pilgrimage of Hope 2nd Stage
This Saturday 9th August the 2nd Stage of the East Cork Camino takes place.
It will begin with Mass in Sacred Heart Church Mogeely, at 8.00 a.m. and concluding with Read More 3 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Today, August 6, is the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Matthew writes in his Gospel "Jesus was transfigured before them. His face shone as the sun: his garments became white as snow."
Matthew 17:1-6
Source-EWTN
Cobh Parish 11 Likes

Posted: 2 days ago

Today 4th August we celebrate the feast day of St. John Vianney- Patron Saint of Priests. Today we pray especially for all the priests in our Diocese, may God grant them grace and wisdom in their ministry.
I Love You, O Read More 1 Comments

To our wonderful Priests in Fermoy May the Lord bless you and keep you always 🥰🙏❤️🙏🌹😃

19 Likes

Posted: 4 days ago

Today we celebrate St. Alphonsus Liguori, bishop and doctor of the Church.
St Alphonsus Liguori, 1696-1787, founder of the Redemptorist Congregation , taught much on moral theology and the spiritual life. He is remembered as a popular preacher and influential Read More 14 Likes

Posted: Last week

East Cork Camino - Stage 2 Saturday 9th August

Stage 2 - Saturday 9th August 2025

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025, Ballyvaloo Retreat and Conference Centre, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Y21 X392

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

Pilgrimages for 2025

Pilgrimages for 2025

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