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Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

16 June 2026

Eucharistic Holy Hour

Led by Fr. John Keane , Director of Eucharistic Adoration Holy Hour

Glengoura Church, Conna Parish - Friday July 10th at 7pm

All very welcome

Fr. John Keane

29 June 2026

Monday 13th July 2026

A one-day trip to Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain in Co. Mayo

Age range: 13 to 20 years of age

This pilgrimage will suit those who can hike up a mountain (about 3 hours hiking in total, including the descent)

Bus Details: Pick up at Town Park, Fermoy, Co Cork at 8.30am

Returning at 10.30pm to the same spot, the same day

The bus can pick up others on route, if convenient

Cost: 30 Euro per individual, covering bus and evening meal
Participants are asked to bring a packed lunch

Mass will be celebrated at Ballintubber Abbey

Organised by Fr. Eamon Roche and the Camp Creideamh leaders

For details and booking please click here or call Fr. Eamon on 086-9972539

Croagh Patrick Youth Pilgrimage

23 June 2026

A Summer Gospel chapter-a-day programme took place 4 summers ago in 2022
Perhaps you might like to consider taking part in a 2026 summer programme

Each day via WhatsApp you will receive an audio recording of one chapter of the Gospel followed by a short commentary

The schedule is as follows:

Beginning
July 1st - Mark chapter 1
A chapter a day until
July 16th - Mark chapter 16
Then Gospel of Luke - July/ August
Then Gospel of John - August
Then Gospel of Matthew - beginning September 1st

Summer Gospel chapter a day programme

Annual National Grandparents Pilgrimage
Celebrating the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly

Sunday 26th July 2026 - Knock Shrine

A day of grace and blessing for the whole family as we honour Grandparents and the Elderly

Schedule:
Annointing of the sick - 2:30pm
Mass - 3:00 pm
Rosary Procession (Weather permitting)

ALL ARE WELCOME

Knock Shrine Pilgrimage 2026 Poster FINAL for PRINT 5.15 2 1

National Grandparents Pilgrimage - Knock Shrine 2026

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21 June 2026 - Golden Jubilee Mass of Thanksgiving

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June 2026
March 2026
- Fatima Pilgrimage 2026 - Carrigtwohill Parish
October 2025
- Bishop Crean meets Pope Leo
September 2025
- "Behold I'm doing a new thing" says the Lord (Isaiah 43)
February 2025
- Recent picture of St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh. Co. Cork
October 2024
- Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral

Coram Fratribus

Going Home

Months have passed since I had the conversation below with Jan-Heiner Tück in a cell in Pannonhalma. I just haven’t had time to translate it until now. The German original is available here, both as text and in an audio Read More

Coram Fratribus

Inkling of a Call The latest chronicle of St Cecilia’s Abbey in Ryde features an obituary of Sr Marie Bernard Eckhardt, who died in March after 68 years of monastic life. This intelligent woman of deep prayer, a native of Switzerland, was to the end ‘courteous, interested in everything and everybody, sometimes quite blunt in her opinions, always full of kindness’. The seed of her monastic calling was sown early. In an account written when she was just shy of 80, she traced her vocation back to an experience entertained when, aged four, she had asked her father why she had no grandfather: ‘My father explained that he had died and then went to heaven where he would remain for ever. This was called eternity and I remember lying on my bed, closing my eyes for a minute or two and then saying to myself: “No, eternity is much longer than this.” It gave me a great thrill to “play eternity”.’ How natural eternity is for a child whose mind and sensibility have been quickened by baptism. How convoluted life can become when this quickening has not taken place and the child, growing up, lacks coordinates by which to understand the infinite longing of which the human soul is by nature possessed.

Coram Fratribus

Colliander The fact that Tito Colliander has not, apart from Way of the Ascetics, been translated into English puzzles me. I consider his seven-volume suite of memoirs a work of exceptional significance. It is also very beautiful. Colliander was a consummate stylist. His language, Torsten Kälvemark has written, is ‘that of the burning beeswax-candle’s flame’. Asked whether he was devout, Colliander answered: ‘I don’t really know what that means. The tradition to which I belong doesn’t corral people, doesn’t set them apart and say, that’s a devout man, that is not; that fellow’s a Christian, that one isn’t. After all, we all stand together carrying our failures. No one can judge and condemn. The Thief had blood on his hand, yet in old Russian icons it is he, not Peter, who stands ready to receive us into Paradise.’ We can only pray, ‘Lord have mercy’. The precondition is a sense of our insufficiency. It is the only appropriate attitude we can have before Christ Jesus, ‘for we don’t give away all we possess, our faith is weak, we cannot move mountains. Yet even if our faith is weak, or we seem to have no faith at all, we can call out, ‘Lord, have mercy’. The call itself may bestow upon us the gift of faith.’

Coram Fratribus

Going Home Months have passed since I had the conversation below with Jan-Heiner Tück in a cell in Pannonhalma. I just haven’t had time to translate it until now. The German original is available here, both as text and in an audio file.
Jan-Heiner Tück: Bishop Varden, we find ourselves in the Benedictine abbey of Pannonhalma, a location we might call a ‘counter-place’. The abbey ha a large library. It is the setting of a spiritual life. What importance do monasteries like Pannonhalma have in the largely secularised societies of our time?
Erik Varden: A fundamental importance, I’d say, as places of hospitality, of prayer, of simple presence, of continuity in the midst of change. We’re in a house that was founded in the year 996. The fact that such an institution should exist in today’s Europe would, on the face of it, seem highly improbable. The fact that it does exist brings a certain stability I think we greatly need.
JHT: You have hinted at the situation in Europe. We are confronted, in the West above all, with data produced by sociologists of religion showing increasing religious indifference. What happens when people no longer sense the sort of longing we speak of in theology and in Church, when the bridge to transcendence seems in some degree to have collapsed? How do you respond to such a challenge?
EV: I’d respond first of all by sounding a little counterpoint, for I am not altogether convinced by sociological data. I think the climate of religious indifference is in the process of changing. I see a tectonic shift taking place. I think of the context in which I live and work, in Scandinavia. Our countries — Norway and Sweden in particular — are deeply secularised. I believe we can say, though, that secularisation has, where we are, come to an end, quite simply because there’s nothing left to secularise. And because secularisation in principle is no infinite process.
In what I read and in the people I encounter, I ascertain a fresh longing, a new search for meaning, for criteria of judgement, for community, for truth. The word ‘truth’, held up to scorn in certain circles, can still be called by its name. People today are looking for carefully thought-through and realistic answers, answers proposed by persons who exemplify and live out their propositions of sense and truth.
JHT: If I may further counterpoint your counterpoint with regard to findings concerning religious indifference among sociologists of religion: a recently published study by the Pew Research Centre establishes that ‘People participate in worship services less often. The importance of religion declines in their personal lives. Belonging to religion is becoming less common.’ This is said to apply especially to young people in Northern Europe. Would you still presume that the vacuum of sense, and thereby the search for religious answers, is in fact growing?
EV: While I have the greatest respect for the Pew Research Centre, I must simply say that these statements do not empirically correspond to my own observations. Not only in Norway, but also in other countries marked by persistent secularisation, I see an increase of interest in religion among the young. I observe that young people flock faithfully to carefully prepared and reverently celebrated liturgies. Naturally, I do not suggest that this is a majority phenomenon; yet the tendency is manifest and persistent.
Young people hunger for substance. They have little patience with empty, sentimental waffling. And that is a good thing.
JHT: In your book The Shattering of Loneliness you describe your own path of spiritual awakening. You were, as a baptised agnostic, confronted with the twentieth century’s experiences of negativity and suffering. This led you into a crisis. The experience of listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony gave you clues by which to revisit the question of the sense of things, which then found an answer in the Church, a space of broad remembrance. Can you say something about what distressed you, then about what happened on your way into the Church as a space of remembrance?
EV: As I evoke the process, in a way that is necessarily abbreviated, in the book, it was connected with a story my father told one day at the dinner table. My father was a vet. He had just come back from a visit to a farmer he knew well. He knew this man had been in a camp during the war. It was a hot summer’s day. When my father arrived, the farmer was working shirtless outside. My father saw scars on his back, clear traces of violence. Nothing was said about it; there was nothing to say. The farmer didn’t dramatise the matter. My father, meanwhile, saw the connection between what this man had lived through and what he had suffered; and this he related simply at table, while we were eating.
I was impressed, deeply touched by this story. I must have been about nine years old. I was interested in stories about the War on account of ways in which it had impinged on my family. I was born in 1974. The end of the War wasn’t that far into the past. The War and its consequences still played a certain role in our community, in society. Still, what I had picked up in films, to some extent in books, was now embodied and made present in a man whom I did not personally know, but whom I might know.
The fact that suffering and injustice were so close to me produced something of a trauma. It caused a kind of inward wound that had to be examined and healed.
JHT: You also describe how you were reading the literature of witnesses to the Shoah — Primo Levi, Élie Wiesel, and others. One might think that the more we engage with the calculated, perfidious crimes of the twentieth century, the deeper we go into the accounts of survivors, the more we will face a sense of senselessnes that will turn into a maelstrom. It would seem more natural, then, to drift into a philosophy of the absurd or into nihilistic speculation. Yet for you that is not how things turned out. Why not?
EV: Well, to be honest, I was exposed to this tendency. I did feel a certain temptation to give in to it. I was just a young chap, 14, 15, 16 years old, but the notion of Weltschmerz wasn’t a platitude to me. It stood for something real. This was the context in which I discovered the music of Gustav Mahler, his Second Symphony, specifically that symphony’s fifth movement, wonderfully set for a massive orchestra and chorus. It begins with an evocation of the tohu wavohu of the First Day, when all is chaos. Then a rhythmic pattern is established, which forms the basis of a melodic theme. The orchestra is joined by the chorus. Then a soprano soloist starts singing. She sings a text written by Mahler himself: ‘Have faith, heart, have faith: You have not lived in vain, have not suffered in vain.’
As I said, I was an adolescent. I hadn’t lived or suffered all that much. Yet this phrase by Mahler addressed and articulated everything that had become incarnate and concrete in the old farmer’s wounds. It spoke with such evident credibility. I then knew in my innermost being: This is true! It is trustworthy.
JHT: The twofold ‘not in vain’ in Mahler’s text points towards a promise that stand for still more, as the [German] title of your book indicates: Heimweh nach Herrlichkeit [‘Homesick for Glory’]. An intense engagement with wounding, negative experience can also serve to liberate a hope against all hope that this suffering might still be vanquished. The idea of homesickness which crops up in the book title presupposes that we know where we come from, that we were once home, before we left, or lost, that home. Remembrance of our lost home is then projected forward, towards something that will help vanquish the situation in which we presently find ourselves. How can such ‘homesickness for glory’ be related to the Garden of Eden, the paradigmatic originality that we have lost, and to the Heavenly Jerusalem towards which we are moving?
EV: I’d say that the Garden of Eden stands first for communion. It represents the harmonious communion between man and woman, man and creation, man and God. The fact that we carry with us the remembrance that such communion is possible is something I regularly ascertain in pastoral work — I see it, too, in myself. That is why I think we must take longing very seriously.
Thinking about these things, I have been influenced by Athanasius of Alexandria. His reflections in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word sets out from a categorical distinction. He draws a line between, on the one hand, man’s hedonistic desire for wellbeing and enjoyment and, on the other, his longing, precisely. Athanasius indicates that this longing can become perceptible as a call originating outside ourselves. Suddenly I am aware of a voice that says to me: ‘Please come home.’ I’ve no idea where home is! But then I find I carry the consciousness of an archaic existence, an archaic order, that addresses me as follows: ‘You are not lost or damned, you must not for ever be a stranger and a wanderer upon the earth. Somewhere, somehow, a definitive home is waiting for you. And look, someone is standing at the window, waving…’
JHT: … waiting for the wanderer to arrive at last. Athanasius was a spiritual man. It was evident to him that this longing could not be satisfied by earthly goods. He had an established inkling that there is more. Today, meanwhile, many people seem content to settle into a well-tempered bourgeois existence. They do not seem discontent with what they have and enjoy — and so I come back to what the sociologists of religion diagnose as a disappearance of religious longing. How can we begin, in such a setting, to recall the message that there’s more?
EV: I find it can be constructive to touch this notion of longing. We might ask: What do you long for? In my experience, there aren’t all that many people who would say, ‘Oh nothing, I’ve everything I could want.’
The fact that the human being is pregnant with a yearning for infinity emerges even in purely secular discourse, these days primarily in the notions of transhumanism. Face to face with death, people seek technical, digital, or medical methods by which death might be conquered. Well, that’s one way to go about it. But I notice, above all in young people, the emergence of a different attitude. One may have grown up in great prosperity without material problems, perhaps even without any too significant human problems; one may have what one desires and yet find, it isn’t enough!
This impresses me. It is a new thing that sixteen or seventeen year-olds turn up and ask, in the cathedral bookshop, in church, or in my office: ‘What’s all this about? Why do I exist? What is the meaning of my life? Do I have a significance in this world that may even exceed my own perception? Is there such a thing as ultimate sense? Does my longing for love make sense? What do you actually believe in when you confess faith in Jesus Christ?’ I find that the approach of these young people is often strictly empirical. That is to say: they’re not always motivated by a tempestuous inner awakening. They’ve simply looked closely at their parents, uncles, and aunts, who are able to buy everything they want, to live comfortably, yet are not really happy. Then they come up with these questions quite of their own accord, questions that open onto a much broader horizon of meaningfulness.
JHT: This ‘malaise of immanence’, to speak with Charles Taylor, is something others, too, notice in young people. It comes about partly because, after a long period of progress in technology and science, of increasing prosperity, todays youth are born into a time of crisis when it is obvious that not everything will carry on as it has been, when the future may turn out to be more difficult, more critical. And partly because the questions of direction present in the propositions of digital space are only unsatisfactorily explained elsewhere, so that there is new interest in religion. This prompts me to touch the theme of the Church as a space of remembrance. In The Shattering of Loneliness you speak of an apprenticeship of remembrance. A couple of chapter headings might serve to illustrate what you mean by this space of remembrance. It is opened before us through counsels such as, ‘Remember that you are dust’, ‘Remember that you were a slave in Egypt’, ‘Remember Lot’s Wife’. Also of course, and centrally, in the Eucharistic commission: ‘Do this in memory of me.’ Are these phrases, which belong to the Church’s culture of remembrance, ones you would put into the backpack of these young people setting out in search of orientation?
EV: Absolutely. I do so regularly. It is wonderful that the Church offers us a space in which we are able to confront life the way it is in fact. The Church is not a utopian space. Growth in faith and personal maturity presupposes self-knowledge grounded in realism. The monastic tradition has always insisted on this.
The inscription on the temple of Apollo in Delphi, ‘Know yourself, Gnothi seauton’, is a precondition for the process by which we learn to know and recognise the other, the definitively Other, as Lord. Through the questions it raises, the Bible offers us pedagogically a path of growth that is truly timeless, characterised by immediate relevance. That is very helpful in a world that, as you say, is so precarious.
In addition we encounter great rememberers such as Moses, Lots’ Wife, the Disciples at the Last Supper and again on the way to Emmaus — people who realise that awareness of the past enables a perspective on the future. They show us that remembrance of what has been prepares me to acknowledge without fear what is still to come, the unknown. I am helped to remain in movement even while so much is set to paralyse me.
JHT: This is ultimately the concentration of the dimension of time that comes about in the celebration of the Eucharist. There is the remembrance of the Passion of Christ, his suffering for our sake, in the Eucharist as signum rememorativum. There is the present effect of the Eucharist as a signum demonstrativum conferring grace and creating community. Then it is the aspect of the Eucharist as signum prognosticum, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. To be homesick for glory is a way of remembering a future that will outshine and surpass all present projections…
EV: I do think this perspective, which, the way you have just described it, sounds so sublime, theoretical, even mystical, is in fact recognisable for those who participate in the Eucharistic mystery. That is why the Church’s space of remembrance, if I may return to this term, offers us a possibility of insight even when we see and understand that space as something very concrete. It points towards a new experience that shows us a way upward and outward from our world, which has become so one-dimensional.
JHT: I find it interesting that Peter Handke repeatedly speaks of Communion concretely in his work. On the one hand, he points out that the people who go to Communion are extremely different. He speaks of the ‘epiphany of the people’, astonished to note ‘the greatness and smallness of the people, of the young and the old, the clever and the halfwits, the normal and the crazy’. On the other hand, a culture of loving attention and patience thus comes about spontaneously. We let the other go first. Our customary world of acceleration is slowed down. One may sit still and be quiet without feeling embarrassed. These are precious counter-experiences, if you like, enabling the Church to be a counter-space, which exercises its own force of attraction.
EV: It can indeed be a counter-space. My Trappistine sisters on Tautra tell my something similar. On a regular basis they notice that people enter their monastery church, on a small island off the west coast of Trøndelag, simply to sit still and weep. This doesn’t mean they are all overwhelmed by grief. Simply, the church allows the opening of rooms within that have been boarded up for too long.
JHT: The wanderer, the homo viator, does have a need to see that the window is opened anew in order to point homeward, pointing towards the land we are moving towards, to keep our gaze fixed on the patria…
EV: Quite. That is the essential task of the Church: to let this homeland appear before us. And to do so credibly.

Coram Fratribus

Tannhäuser ‘With Wagner’, wrote Mère Labat, ‘we are at the opposite extreme of Mozart and also of Bach, whose technical transports are always at the service of a truth that is authentic, healthy, and profound’. She did not doubt Wagner’s genius, but thought it impure, marked by a ‘pernicious commotion’ that, ‘in an overheated atmosphere of passion or false mysticism, bears a philtre capable of fettering us as magically as that which bound Tristan to Isolde.’ She has a point. Yet Wagner is capable of splendid elevation, in Tannhäuser, for example. The production running at the Zurich Opera is musically exquisite, nearing perfection. The gorgeousness Tahu Matheson speaks of here is wonderfully displayed. It’s a pity the stage director seems to have missed what the drama is about. Instead of letting the music and words speak, he introduces distracting, dull subplots, as when Landgrave Hermann and the knights come crashing in snorting cocaine, as when the Pilgrims abseil down from panels of florescent light or lie about in the snow (when it is supposed to be late summer) like dead poodles. The opera’s Christian symbolism, especially in the representation of Elisabeth – part Mary, part Solveig – is lost. Yet one can close one’s eyes and find it again. For the music does speak, and hints at grace, gloriously.

Coram Fratribus

How to see Asked to contribute to The Tablet’s annual Summer Reading supplement, I was happy to spread the word about a lovely book I took away with me on holiday: ‘Having gone (twice) to see the marvellous Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery, I turned to Jeremy Robbins’s Francisco de Zurbarán and the Fabric of the World. It’s a terrific read, both a monograph on Zurbarán and an introduction to the Spanish Golden Age. It is, too, a treatise on the art of seeing, which we need to practise these days, when all we seem able to do is scroll.’ ‘It is hardly surprising’, Robbins writes, ‘that certain of Zurbarán’s figures have been likened to still lifes, for the effect of his style is to render all life stilled.’ Just how illuminating and beneficial this is you can find out for yourself simply by pausing for ten minutes or so before one of the master’s painting while dropping (but really dropping) everything else.

Today we celebrate the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle.
He is the patron saint of architects.
St. Thomas is best known for his role in verifying the Resurrection of Jesus. Thomas' unwillingness to believe that the other Apostles had Read More 2 Comments

🙏Amen.Amen 🙏

8 Likes

Posted: 4 days ago

Cloyne Diocese Eucharistic Adoration
Holy Hour of Directed Adoration
Led by Fr. John Keane , Director of Eucharistic Adoration Holy Hour
Glengoura Church, Conna Parish - Friday July 10th at 7pm
All very welcome 14 Likes

Posted: 5 days ago

Today we celebrate the feast day of St Oliver Plunkett.
Saint Oliver Plunkett (1st November 1625 - 1st July 1681) was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.
Oliver Plunkett was beatified in 1920 and canonised Read More 4 Comments

Amen🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻✝️Amen 🙏Amen 🙏

23 Likes

Posted: 6 days ago

Monday 13th July 2026
A one-day trip to Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain in Co. Mayo
Age range: 13 to 20 years of age
This pilgrimage will suit those who can hike up a mountain (about 3 hours hiking in total, including the Read More 8 Likes

Posted: Last week

Paróiste Ghobnatan
🌞 SCEIDEAL AN tSAMHRAIDH / SUMMER SCHEDULE 2026
Beidh sceideal an tsamhraidh i bhfeidhm ón tseachtain seo ar aghaidh. Tiocfaidh na gnáth socruithe ar ais ar an deireadh seachtaine don 15ú Lúnasa. Leis an sceideal seo, beidh deis ar na Read More 2 Likes

Posted: Last week