Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

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Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

09 March 2026

Evangelium is hosting a one-day Catholic apologetics conference for young adults (18–40)

Saturday 21st March 2026 (10am–6:30pm) at the Clayton Hotel Silver Springs, Cork

The day will include talks and a panel Q&A on topics such as the Resurrection, St Augustine, evangelising youth and the beauty of the Catholic faith

Tickets are €15 (incl. refreshments). Tickets can be found on Eventbrite or www.evangelium.ie

Evangelium Conference 2026 - Cork

03 March 2026

Carrigtwohill Parish Pilgrimage to Fatima 7th - 14th September 2026

Spiritual Director: Fr. Patrick Winkle

Direct return flights from Cork to Faro, with Bus to and from Fatima included
Full Board - breakfast, lunch and dinner each day
7 nights Hotel Steyler
Limited number of places
€1045 (single supplement extra) - limited single rooms, insurance is also extra
20kg baggage included with Aer Lingus flight.
Guided tours and full spiritual programme

Please make enquires to Fr. Patrick Winkle 021-4882439 or Joe Walsh Tours 021-2427190 or 01-2410800
Or book direct online with Joe Walsh Tours

2026 CARRIGTWOHILL PATRICK WINKLE 07 SEP CORK FARO Fatima Pilgrimage 2026

02 March 2026

Walking in the Bible for Lent - Carrigtwohill Parish

Gentle reflections with questions welcome
8pm – 9.15pm

As a Parish we wish to explore the Bible during Lent, looking at the readings for the Easter Vigil as a way of guiding the exploration. Interested in walking through the Bible with others: Bible for curious and faithful. Discovery the wonder of the Scripture. Tues 3rd March, Tues 10th March, Wednesday 18th March and Tuesday 24th March

All are Welcome

Venue - Parish Sacristy

TAIZE PRAYER
Friday evenings at 7pm in St. Mary's Church, Carrigtwohill

Walking in the Bible for Lent - Carrigtwohill Parish

16 February 2026

Baptised and Sent - Lenten programme in Macroom

This Lent, parishes, schools and groups across Ireland are invited to journey together through a set of reflective resources inspired by Baptised and Sent which is the preparatory document for the 2025 National Pre-Synodal Assembly in Kilkenny

Grounded in the conviction that baptism is the foundation of our identity, dignity and mission, these resources help us return to the heart of Christian life: being reborn in Christ and sent out by the Spirit in service of the Gospel

You are warmly invited to join with us each Monday evening during lent in St. Colman’s Church Parish Centre, Macroom from 7pm to 8pm

Each weeks’ Lectio Divina, offers us an opportunity to reflect on the upcoming Sunday Gospel, which is prayerfully linked to key insights from Baptised and Sent.

Facilitated by Bill Kelly

St Colman's Macroom

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Latest Homily

8 Mar 2026 - "Give me a drink"

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March 2026
February 2026
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

Finger of God

Luke 11.14-23: Every kingdom divided against itself will fall.
As people of faith, we take it for granted that God acts in the world; that, at Mass, real transformation of bread and wine happens through divine agency; that, in Confession, God’s Read More

Coram Fratribus

Come to Complete

Matthew 5:17-19: I have not come to abolish but to complete.
‘I have not come’, says Christ, ‘to abolish, but to complete’.
That motivation sounds strange in our ears, accustomed as they are to polarised agendas. In culture as in politics nowadays Read More

Coram Fratribus

God’s Heart

Matthew 18:21-35: The servant’s master felt so sorry for him
Christ our Lord is a wonderful story teller. He uses a range of rhetorical techniques. One such is exaggeration.
We find it in the contrast between the 99 sheep in the fold Read More

Coram Fratribus

Privilege

Luke 4.24-30: When they heard this, everyone was enraged.
Striking in this Gospel is the assembly’s rage.
Jesus has simply rehearsed two stories from Scripture. All those present will, in principle, have read those stories with reverent devotion. Yet here the telling Read More

Coram Fratribus

3 Sunday of Lent A

Exodus 17.3-7: You must strike the rock and water will flow.
Romans 5.1-8: The love of God has been poured into our hearts.
John 4.5-42: The water I shall give will turn into a spring inside him.
Human beings cannot live without water. Read More

Coram Fratribus

Finger of God Luke 11.14-23: Every kingdom divided against itself will fall.
As people of faith, we take it for granted that God acts in the world; that, at Mass, real transformation of bread and wine happens through divine agency; that, in Confession, God’s grace really forgives our sins.
What happens to this certainty once we cross the threshold of the church to step back into the world? Do we continue to live in God’s presence, confident in his action?
If God is God, omnipresent and all-powerful, he will not only act in controlled environments, at the altar and in the confessional. Then he will be present, too, when we are in our kitchen, in our car, in the woods, out shopping in town.
Today’s Gospel speaks of a specific manifestation of divine power. A dumb man, a man possessed, has been healed. He can speak. He is no longer subject to malign powers.
There is no doubt that a supernatural intervention has happened. Jesus’s enemies say: ‘Oh, it is just a matter of one demon replacing another.’ Jesus shows them, and us, how unreasonable such an attitude is.
Most of the crowd are in no doubt: God has acted. Jesus asks them to reflect on this perception.
He says: ‘If it is through the finger of God that I cast out demons, then know that the kingdom of God has overtaken you’: then the life of God flows not just within certain parameters, but everywhere; then it can give you joy and peace and strength, an make claims on you, everywhere.
In a few moments we shall say ‘Amen’ to the Body of Christ held up before us. May that ‘Amen’ resound through the rest of the day. It has power to transfigure our work, our encounters, our conversations, our silence.
Christ, present within us, makes everything bright. If we consciously live by his life, the kingdom of God is a reality here and now, a luminous blessing for us and for the world.
Detail of the ceiling in the cloisters of Stična.

Coram Fratribus

Come to Complete Matthew 5:17-19: I have not come to abolish but to complete.
‘I have not come’, says Christ, ‘to abolish, but to complete’.
That motivation sounds strange in our ears, accustomed as they are to polarised agendas. In culture as in politics nowadays we are surrounded by institutions and individuals that promise, if only they get the upper hand, to cancel what went before. The fact that ‘cancellation’ has become such an important term in public discourse says a lot.
Ours has become a culture of discontinuity. Everyone seeks to make their mark by establishing contrasts, quite as in our cityscapes, where any thought of harmonious design is considered hopelessly old-fashioned. Developers are concerned to leave their signatures. They will last for a couple of decades, maybe three; then they will fall, or be pulled down. Who, now, builds anything intended to last for centuries?
God works differently. For him a thousand years is like a single day.
His concern is to unite, to piece together, to enable coherent wholeness. He is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. His love is everlasting; his mercy is sure; his plan of salvation is linear. Lent gives us a chance to review our bitty lives in the light of God’s constancy.
Why don’t we ask ourselves whether there are, in our personal story of salvation, gaps to be breached, damages to be repaired?
God, who restores innocence, can create perfect works of art out of fragments. His providence is sure, infallible. It is more than able to realise itself also through fallible means and changing circumstances.
A mosaic artist at work in the Fabbrica di San Pietro. Photo: Vatican News.

Coram Fratribus

God’s Heart Matthew 18:21-35: The servant’s master felt so sorry for him
Christ our Lord is a wonderful story teller. He uses a range of rhetorical techniques. One such is exaggeration.
We find it in the contrast between the 99 sheep in the fold and the one that is lost; in the parable of the marriage feast, where not a single invited guest can be bothered to attend; and, perhaps most powerfully, in the story we have just heard.
There is such a contrast between the immensity of the steward’s cancelled debt and the few cents he extorts from his colleague, between the kindness received and the cruelty shown, that we are drawn into the action, and feel outraged.
This is how our Lord intended it. There is much to be learnt from the sheer imbalance. We are moved to think about how we ourselves respond to grace.
We must not forget, however, what is the heart of the message proclaimed.
When the indebted servant threw himself at his master’s feet, we are told, the master ‘felt so sorry for him that he let him go and cancelled the debt’.
He felt so sorry.
In the logic of the story, the master represents God. The story affirms that God is touched by our misery. His divine heart is vulnerable to our misfortune.
When I commit sin, when I betray my promises, when I turn my back on God, I do not merely offend against an abstract, impersonal standard of justice. I strike a blow at my loving Father’s heart.
That is something to reflect on often.
The image of Christ’s Sacred Heart, here held on a cloth by an angel in a fifteenth-century woodcut, is indicative of a divine mystery that was consummated on Calvary, but has an even more immense reach.

Coram Fratribus

Privilege Luke 4.24-30: When they heard this, everyone was enraged.
Striking in this Gospel is the assembly’s rage.
Jesus has simply rehearsed two stories from Scripture. All those present will, in principle, have read those stories with reverent devotion. Yet here the telling of them causes an eruption of violence. The mob is prepared, not just to lynch Jesus, but to put him to death.
What are people so angry about?
They abhor the suggestion that they are not the sole retainers of divine privilege, that God may freely distribute his gifts also beyond fixed boundaries.
This passage displays a tendency alive and well in our own day.
Within the Church there are factions, here and there, subscribing to a tendency we can, with reference to Church history, call ‘Donatist’. This tendency proclaims: ‘We, and only we, are true believers! We, and only we, are pure! All the rest, hoi polloi, have had it. They have compromised themselves. They are unworthy of us. Phew!’
If only we could see, not only how unbiblical such an attitude is — but how silly; and how silly it makes people look.
God ‘desires all people to be saved’ (1 Tim 2.4).
This is not to say that the communion of the elect is not surrounded by a sacred precinct. There are truths to be confessed, precepts to be kept. But God’s, and so the Church’s, concern is to invite people into this communion, not to shut them out.
Further, if we have the slightest degree of self-knowledge, we shall be astonished, and humbled, to consider ourselves member of it.
God desires all people to be saved.
Today we may usefully ask: Do I? And if so, do I help them?
Am I humbly, lovingly grateful for the salvation offered me — or do I consider it a well merited badge of honour that entitles me to hiss at my neighbour?
Is the cross for me a prism that enables me to look out on the world with love, or is it a portcullis I draw down and hide behind?

Coram Fratribus

3 Sunday of Lent A Exodus 17.3-7: You must strike the rock and water will flow.
Romans 5.1-8: The love of God has been poured into our hearts.
John 4.5-42: The water I shall give will turn into a spring inside him.
Human beings cannot live without water. We are fearfully conscious of that now, as climate change alters patterns of precipitation, making large areas of the world unsuitable as places for agriculture, even for human dwelling. Water shortage is an important cause of migration. Some strategists think that, in the future, major world conflicts will arise over access to wells.
So it is natural that wells play a big part in the Biblical story.
Human life begins around a well in Eden, where a fountain arose that provided water to water the face of the earth (Gen 2.10ff.). Adam awakens from sleep to set eyes on Eve close to this well, an image of the fecundity they were asked to pursue: ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ (Gen 1.28). Abraham spent his life digging wells throughout the promised land, to enable thriving for his children. Enemies stopped them up to make life impossible for them; but Isaac, Abraham’s son, remembered where the wells were, so could dig them again (Gen 26.17f.). Isaac’s marriage to Rebekah, which sealed the fulfilment of the promises to Abraham, was ordained at a well (Gen 24.12ff.). Likewise, Moses, Israel’s legislator, found his wife Zipporah at a well, as she came to draw water (Ex 2.16ff.).
These memories form the backdrop to our Gospel, which is more than just the story of a man who is thirsty after a long morning’s walk under a fierce sun.
The meeting at the well of Sychar, explicitly linked to the patriarch Jacob, that is, Israel (Gen 32.28), fits into a series of well-encounters that determine the working-out in history of God’s covenant with mankind, directed by the law, tempered by mercy.
On the face of it, the meeting could turn out conflictual. The disciples, when they eventually appear, are amazed it has taken place at all. The two who come together represent such different worlds. One is a man, the other is a woman. One is an Israelite, the other is a Samaritan. One is a rabbi, a teacher of the law, the other is a public sinner. One is utterly pure, the other feels dirty, which is why she comes to fetch water in the heat of midday, when everyone else stays indoors and she can avoid the neighbours’ looks of contempt.
One is a wounded human being, carrying regrets and disappointments as well as hope for a fresh start, a person like you and me; the other is ‘God from God’.
Notice how Jesus introduces this meeting of unequals. He asks for a favour. When we stand before God, we may feel we have nothing to offer. Especially now, during Lent, when we take stock of our lives, we may be so conscious of missed opportunities, of graces not acted on, of sins committed, that we feel paralysed, like the poor lame fellows on stretchers Jesus encounters in the Gospel. Yet he says to us, as to them: ‘Rise! I have a task for you. I need your assistance’.
Simple occasions to serve, to perform some gesture of kindness, be it just the pouring of a glass of water, may be a providential means to let us realise that we have, for all our failings, something to give. Let us make sure we do not miss these occasions, which can restore our sense of dignity and purpose.
It becomes clear from the Gospel that Jesus knows the Samaritan woman’s complex history: her series of broken relationships, the imperfect nature of her present union. This is not what he talks to her about, however. Having gained her trust by asking for her help, he speaks instead of the wonderful gifts God wishes to give her. The well by which they are sitting, he says, is a symbol of what she herself can become: within her is hidden a spring of living water that, once found, can well up to eternal life.
Jesus recalls what human nature was like at the beginning, when Adam and Eve, by Eden’s fountain, were filled with the life of God. He recalls the example of Isaac, who dug afresh sources of good, fresh water that had been filled with rubbish by the Philistines. He recalls the nuptial compact that can be made at such wells, sources of happiness and new life.
Jesus does not ignore the disorder that marks the woman’s life. But he shows her, and us, that for order to be restored in us, we need a pattern to work by, a goal to reach. Jesus calls us out of our collusions with sin, of our compromises and tepidity, by showing us what we can become. He is our pattern and our goal. He extends his hand to us, offers us his friendship, and says, ‘Rise! Why be unfree? Why be unhappy? Break your fetters, then come to eat and drink at my wedding feast, where the Church is my beloved bride!’
We do not know what happened next to the Samaritan woman; but we do know that the encounter with Jesus disarmed her and softened her heart, making a new life possible, unstopping her inner well.
That can happen to us, too.
Christ and the Woman at the Well by a follower of Poussin, a painting now in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts.

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Evangelium is hosting a one-day Catholic apologetics conference for young adults (18–40)

Fatima Pilgrimage 2026 - Carrigtwohill Parish

Carrigtwohill Parish Pilgrimage to Fatima 7th - 14th September 2026

Lent 2026 - Carrigtwohill Parish

Walking in the Bible for Lent - Carrigtwohill Parish

Baptised and Sent - Lenten programme in Macroom

Baptised and Sent - Lenten programme in Macroom

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