Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

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)

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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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22 Jun 2025 - Corpus Christi

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July 2024

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 28

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.
A brother who had taken Read More

Coram Fratribus

St Sunniva

The feast of St Sunniva, Norway’s portmartyr, is kept today, 8 July. This sermon was preached last Saturday during a pilgrimage to Selja.
Proverbs 10:28-11:11: The hopes of the wicked come to nothing.
Matthew 10:26-33: There is nothing secret that will not Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 27

Once again, Jamie and I gather to address questions raised by people who follow the series, questions that impress us by their insight and sincerity. Some of the matters we consider are these:
Why may anger be a more fundamental sin Read More

Coram Fratribus

Summer Break
Coram Fratribus will take a holiday for a couple of weeks. Thank you for visiting the site. I hope you get something from it.
With best wishes,
+fr Erik Varden
***
I remember one day in June.
The height of summer and the sun
still rising Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 26

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.
Two brothers went off to Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 28 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.
A brother who had taken leave of the world and distributed his possessions to the poor, while keeping a bit for his own use, came to see Abba Antony. Having heard these things, Abba Antony said to him: ‘If you want to become a monk, go to such-and-such a village: buy meat and place it on your naked body, then come back here.’ The brother did as he was told. As a result, dogs and wild birds tore his body apart. Once he had returned to the elder, the latter asked if he had followed his counsel. The brother displayed his lacerated body. Then Abba Antony said: ‘Those who take leave of the world yet want to hang on to riches are torn apart just like this by demons who wage war on them.’
From the Acts of the Apostles we learn how the early Church constituted itself after Pentecost. The Apostles, having received the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire, preached and exhorted people in Jesus’s name. But the Christian project was not just about proclamation. It sought to lay foundations for a new model of society. ‘Save yourselves’, Peter told Israelites who had first thought he was drunk, so quaint was his enthusiasm, ‘from this corrupt generation’ (Acts 2.40).
In what way was it corrupt? The word Scripture uses is suggestive. Peter calls ‘this generation’ geneá skoliá. To be skoliós is to be twisted or tangled. The ancient Greeks gave the name skolión to a special type of drinking song sung at banquets for it was picked up by reclining guests following a zig-zag course. A generation described in these terms is one that can’t walk straight. It is not the Apostles, it turns out, who are sozzled; it is the world, wearily drunk on its self-sufficiency, pragmatic pleasure-seeking, thrills, and aimless meandering.
What the Church holds out instead is the prospect of a community that has a goal. Acts tells us how this course was defined: ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts’ — all quite admirable: the Christians’ example earned them the esteem and goodwill of all. To stick to such a standard over time, though, costs. It just does not come naturally to us to share stuff, not to mention cash, with others. How can we know that they are really needy, and so deserving? How can we be sure they will loyally stand up for us when we have needs? It is tempting, and seems so sensible, to keep a little stash of private resources tucked away for rainy days, just in case.
And so we find the luminous reality of the first Jerusalem Church ominously darkened by the shades of Ananias and Sapphira. The two, whose story is told in the fifth chapter of Acts, were idealists set on pursuing the observance which the Christians practised and preached, laying their goods ‘at the apostles’ feet’ so that all might be held in common. That is how the early Church could be ‘of one heart and one soul’: people’s money was where their mouth were. Ananias and Sapphira, though, had through property sales come into some funds they somehow thought lay outside the apostolic covenant. While surrendering most of the money, they kept a certain sum back. It brought them to a bad end. When Peter confronted Ananias with his lying, Ananias promptly fell down and died. Three hours later Sapphira, Ananias’s wife, returned from running errands. Peter gave her a chance to put things right. He asked, ‘Did you and your husband sell the land for such and such a price’, that is, the amount given over to the community? Sapphira answered, ‘Yes, we did!’ Peter said, ‘Not, but you didn’t!’ Then she, too, fell down and died. ‘And great fear’, writes St Luke, ‘seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.’
Peter’s reproach was not motivated by pique that all the couple’s money had not been given to the firm whose managing director he was. He told Ananias: ‘While [the land] was yours, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal?’ Ananias could have done anything with it, that was his business. The scandal lay in the fact that he had pretended to make a total gift, yet had not.
This is likewise the essence of the story of the young man who came to see Antony. Antony asks with characteristic courtesy: ‘Do you want to be a monk?’ If the young fellow didn’t, he could carry all the shekels he liked. If he did, though, even a slight retraction of the oblation on which his life was premised would compromise him at every level. It would make of him a man torn apart, a man with a divided heart whose treasure may have been partly in heaven, yet partly fixed, too, in his pocket. The drastic lesson Antony taught was not by way of punishment. It offered enlightenment, saying: ‘Look, this is what you are doing to yourself! Stop while you can!’
St Paul writes in one of his letters: ‘Each of you must give as you have made up your mind’. If you want to throw a small coin into a beggar’s hat, that is estimable; but do not pretend to give all you have if you are giving only a part. There will, then, be no gratuity in your gift, or joy, or fecundity. This holds for any one who has made vows of consecration, whether in priesthood, religious life, or marriage.

Coram Fratribus

St Sunniva The feast of St Sunniva, Norway’s portmartyr, is kept today, 8 July. This sermon was preached last Saturday during a pilgrimage to Selja.
Proverbs 10:28-11:11: The hopes of the wicked come to nothing.
Matthew 10:26-33: There is nothing secret that will not become known.
In the Gospel our Lord tells us: ‘Have no fear’, ‘Be not anxious’, ‘Do not be afraid’ (Mt 10.26, 28, 31). We live, though, in fearful times. Mental health is parlous. Many are deeply troubled in body and soul. Ongoing wars open apocalyptic prospects. Strong migration, coupled with the fact that Europe just isn’t reproducing itself, makes the future uncertain: what sort of society is being formed? Then there is ecological menace. We have read about it for years. We know that the Poles are melting, but they are far away. The last few days’ extreme heat in Europe, causing illness and terrifying fires, brings the question closer: what will happen when parts of the earth become uninhabitable?
Spontaneously we might think that what is needed is money, sufficient means to work out a genuine political project, civilising enterprises, inventions that will let nature recover its balance. But is money enough?
You would expect, wouldn’t you, a bishop to ask a question like that, then to point towards spiritual values. By all means: I believe in spiritual values. I am happy to point towards them. But what causes this query to niggle me today comes from a different, frankly undevotional source.
The other day I listened to a long conversation Ross Douthat conducted on 26 June with Peter Thiel. Thiel is not just one of the world’s richest people; he is a sharp analyst, interesting to listen to. It impressed me, therefore, that he, who has cash enough to purchase anything he wants, kept expressing deep worry: worry concerning too slow technological advances, worry about societal tendencies and culture. Thiel is not the only one to feel this way. He referred to a recentish exchange with his colleague Elon Musk (richer still), and noted that Musk has lost hope in expeditions to Mars as a political project. Musk is said to have exclaimed, distraught: ‘There’s nowhere else to go!’
A confrontation with finitude and attendant risk, capital notwithstanding.
The fact that our time’s most moneyed men, who embody what most people would think of as spectacular good fortune, can look around, contemplate the world, and experience a kind of despair, feeling caught, makes me thoughtful. It challenges me as Christian to show concretely that I wish to live on different terms.
Those terms are shown us by the holy woman in whose honour we are gathered here on Selja.
Sunniva was an Irish princess raised a Christian, heir to the harvest of faith sown in her country by Gallic monks settled on rocks along the coast to sing Christ’s praise and by faithful bishops who taught the fullness of faith with wisdom and grace.
Sunniva’s father died while she was still young; it became her task to govern the land. She became an object of desire for strivers. We read that a viking chief, one of our ancestors, sought to conquer her — a significant detail in the light of the story’s development. Sunniva declined this man’s advances. Not only was he an uncouth heathen; Sunniva had, like St Cecilia and other Virgin Martyrs we name in the Roman Canon of the Mass, consecrated her life to the Lord. She had resolved to live and die a virgin. The viking went berserk. Unable to charm Sunniva, he tried to compel her. He robbed and pillaged in her territory. Sunniva saw that she had, for the sake of the people, to get away.
The way Sigrid Undset retells the story, Sunniva gathered her people around her. She had had enough, she said, of heeding the whims of ‘all those people who crave the passing pleasures of this brief life’. She did not wish, by remaining in Ireland, to put at risk those for whom she was responsible. Therefore she made a weighty decision: ‘I will no longer be a thrall carrying grief and anxiety on account of such things as my enemies can steal from me or devour by fire. I will rather act as befits a noblewoman. I declare myself free and surrender myself to the power and care of my Lord, Jesus Christ.’ On that basis she abandoned herself, as St Olav would do on Stiklestad a couple of hundred years later, into the Lord’s hands.
She and her retinue went on board ships that had neither sails nor rudders. Providence should be free to bear them where it pleased. And so she ended up here, in this inhospitable place, where she became a seed of Norwegian Christianity.
It touches me that the Godpleasingness of Sunniva was revealed, after her death, by two sensible signs: the first was a strange perfume emanating from the grotto right behind us, where she had died; the second was a gentle, kindly light that rested on this island. ‘I am the light of the world’, says our Lord; St Paul exhorts us to carry abroad ‘the fragrance that comes from knowing [Christ]’ (2 Cor 2.14). It isn’t aways a great deal of talking that will best witness to Christ’s grace. More compelling is a given life, a life lived faithfully unto death.
Sunniva was free to choose and act, and thereby graced with fecundity, precisely because she did not fear death. She had acquired the essential consciousness that defines a Christian: the certainty that death has lost its sting and is therefore nothing to make such a fuss about. What matters is not just to survive for a shorter or longer time. What matters is to live the measure of our days here on earth fully and in truth, in order to be readied to enter eternal life.
I thought of St Sunniva when Peter Thiel, in the interview, mentioned a freezing party he had attended in the early noughties, presenting offers to deep-freeze people until such a time when science, hypothetically, would have found an ambrosia that might ensure them endless existence. And it struck me how absurd our sophisticated, frightened, godless epoch appears when considered through the lens of the saints’ sovereign, strong testimony to liberty.
Let us follow their lead, then, and make right decisions in matters both great and small.
St Sunniva and her companions as Gösta af Geijerstam, a friend of Sigrid Undset’s, imagined them.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 27 Once again, Jamie and I gather to address questions raised by people who follow the series, questions that impress us by their insight and sincerity. Some of the matters we consider are these:
Why may anger be a more fundamental sin than lust?
What does it mean to speak of redemption as somehow communal?
How might one endure persistent temptation without despair?
How can a life of radical prayer be at one with solidarity for all mankind?
You can watch the episode here, or find it as a podcast where you like to listen to such things.
Photograph: Mateusz Opila, EWTN Norge.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 26 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.
Two brothers went off to the market to sell their wares. Having parted company, one of them fell into lust. When the other brother returned, that one said to him: ‘Brother, let’s go back to our cell!’ But he said: ‘I’m not coming’. The other besought him saying, ‘Why, brother?’ He said: ‘When you left me, I fell into lust.’ His brother, wanting to gain him, said: ‘The same thing happened to me, too, when I left you. But let us go! Let us forcefully repent, and God will forgive us.’ They went and told the elders what had happened. The elders prescribed how they should do penance. And the one did penance for the other, as if he himself has sinned. When God, after a few days, saw what pains he took for love’s sake, he revealed to one of the elders that he who had sinned had been forgiven on account of the great love of him who had not sinned. This is what it is to give one’s life for one’s brother.
The fathers ate their bread in the sweat of their brow. To live, they had largely to be self-sufficient. They made saleable stuff, the production of which was compatible with their contemplative purpose: mats or ropes. Having built up a stock, they sold it. Trips into the city were called for. In this way the interface between desert and ‘world’ remained vibrant. It could lead to salutary encounters. At the same time it posed challenges. Alexandria did not provide the ascetic safeguards of Scetis. A monk out of his cell had to rely on his virtue being interiorised. It was not always.
This situation-bound story provides a parable into which we can easily read ourselves. Most of us conduct our daily lives within predictable parameters. We learn to negotiate these. Familiar boundaries steer our behaviour and choices. We know where temptations are, and occasions of sin, so take prudent precautions. Life seems safe enough. But what happens when we find ourselves in unfamiliar, unbounded places: alone on a trip, say, away from our community or family; sauntering unrecognised through a metropolitan red-light district; or just finding ourselves before an unguarded, unobserved computer? Is our virtue then reliable and firm?
We do not know exactly how the monk we read about ‘fell into lust’. Did he have an illicit encounter? If so, was he the seducer or did he succumb to seduction? Did he pursue porneia through some kind of pornography? Or was the sin of ‘lust’ a sudden conflagration in his mind that led to impure thoughts, and possibly deeds?
By not being specific, the apophthegmata exercise their pedagogy. These stories are not just historical exemplars; they are intended as mirrors of conscience. To work as such their applicability must be at once pointed and broad. The key thing to note is diabolical hopelessness induced in the brother. Looking at himself through the prism of what just happened, he thinks: ‘Good God! There is no way back!’ He is convinced that all his devout endeavours have been futile and insincere — else, how could he so easily have fallen? The thought of going back to the setting of his consecration, where once he pronounced a Yes! he had wished to be final, is unbearable. Not only does he feel, now, unworthy of his cell and the companionship of his faithful brother; the cell and the brother would be for him a reproach he reckons he could not endure. His mind is made up. He thinks: ‘I have rolled in mud: the mud is now where I belong’. Believing himself defined by his sin, he is sure he is beyond redemption’s reach.
This is where his companion comes to the rescue. This other fellow, returning from errands cheerfully and innocently run, sees his brother downcast. He instantly knows: something serious has happened. He owns at least to a degree a charism prized by the fathers: cardiognosis, the ability to read another’s heart in charity. He sees a humiliated man hurt in his convictions who thinks himself beyond repair, bound to remain an object of disdain. He knows: the only ointment that will work in this case is compassion — compassion not just by way of saying, ‘My poor friend, what an awful thing; still, pull yourself together’; no, compassion in the sense of taking on himself what the other carries, much as it was said about Antony: ‘He did suffer with the suffering’.
The enlightened monk knows it could be fatal, now, to look down on his brother. So he places himself at his level. Saying, ‘I did the same!’, he relieves him of thinking himself an outcast. Thus he inflames courage to repent, to start again. He assures his brother of God’s power and will to save. We may object: But did he not thereby tell a lie? Not if we adopt the fathers’ mindset. Antony said: ‘Our life and our death is with our neighbour.’ My brother’s burden is mine to help bear and repair. That is what life in the mystical body is like. In the intimate reality of monastic fellowship, or that of a married couple, this dynamic truly takes on flesh. Combined with the guilty brother’s confession and repentance, the pure monk’s vicarious penance was effective. ‘This is what it is to give one’s life for one’s brother’, a universal command. We read in Scripture that God ‘for our sake made him to be sin who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ That work carries on in the Church. It does not cancel justice, but infuses it with charity, letting the sweet aroma of Christ ascend as from a censer from the burnt coals of our life.
Koinonia – fraternal communion. An icon from the monastery of Bose.

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Kilian. He was an Irish missionary bishop and the Apostle of Franconia, where he began his labours in the latter half of the 7th century. 3 Likes

Posted: An hour ago

Today we celebrate the feast of St Anthony Zaccaria. An early leader of the Counter Reformation, St Anthony Zaccaria was also founder of a religious orders (Barnabites) and was a fierce promoter of the devotion to the Passion of Read More 6 Likes

Posted: 3 days ago

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

St Thomas, please pray to Jesus for us. Jesus I Love ❤️ you, Jesus I trust in you.🙏pray for us 🙏

10 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 12 Likes

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Today June 29th we celebrate the Solemnity of St Peter and St Paul. They are the solid rock on which the Church is built.
In a sermon in the year 395, St. Augustine of Hippo said of Sts. Peter and Paul: Read More 2 Comments

Pray for us Amen 🙏Amen.

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Posted: Last week

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

Jubilee Pilgrimage to Assisi & Rome 25 Sep - 2 Oct 2025

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