Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

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

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Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

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

04 February 2026

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 2026

The Annual Lourdes Mass - Friday 13th February 2026

Church of the Immaculate Conception, Kanturk, P51 TY36 at 7.30pm
Bishop William Crean will be the Chief Celebrant of the Mass

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Knock - Sunday 10th May 2026

Parishes to make their own travel arrangements

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes 29th May – 3rd June 2026

All bookings for the Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes should be made through Joe Walsh Tours by telephone 01-2410800, online at 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 2026.

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes 29th May - 3rd June 2026

04 October 2025

Bishop William Crean meets Pope Leo on recent pilgrimage to Rome

Watch this short video clip

Bishop Crean meets Pope Leo

Pastoral letter from Bishop William Crean

on pastoral planning for the future

My dear people,

To live is to change, is a pearl of wisdom from St. John Henry Newman, a convert to the Catholic faith in the 19th Century. To live in the 21st Century is an experience of constant change, social, cultural and technological. Viewing “Reeling in the Years,” the television series depicting life in former times is a dramatic reminder of the extent of the change we have experienced.

The Church whose life and presence within our communities and parish has had to adjust to and
manage the change taking place in society. One particular pattern has been evident for some years
now is the decline both in profession of Christian faith and its practice through the attendance at Holy Mass,
which, for the believer, is an obligation in faith. The consequence of this generational shift from family and
parish community attendance has seen a similar decline in responding to the call to Priesthood and Religious life. Despite this pattern in the Diocese of Cloyne, in all the parishes there are faithful practicing prayer congregations who witness to and support one another in faith.

Pastoral Letter

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Latest Homily

3 May 2026 - "Living stones making a spiritual house"

Latest Articles

March 2026
- Fatima Pilgrimage 2026 - Carrigtwohill Parish
February 2026
- Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 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

Being Human

Conversation published in America on 11 May.
Gina Christian: You provided the reflections for the Lenten Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV , and in your final reflection, you focused on the theme of communicating hope. In the U.S. Read More

Coram Fratribus

Ascension

Acts 1:1-11: A cloud removed him from their sight.
Ephesians 1:17-23: That you may understand hope.
Matthew 28.16-20: I am with you always.
Liturgically speaking, this day marks the end of the first forty days of Paschaltide, corresponding to the forty days of Read More

Coram Fratribus

Commencement Address

Address given at St Mary’s graduation ceremony on 7 May 2026.
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me Read More

Coram Fratribus

Innocence Restored

Homily given as part of a day of recollection to priests at St Mary’s.
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth Read More

Coram Fratribus

Being Human Conversation published in America on 11 May.
Gina Christian: You provided the reflections for the Lenten Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV , and in your final reflection, you focused on the theme of communicating hope. In the U.S. there’s been a real interest in Nordic Noir films and books — often bleak and morally ambiguous — and a perception that Nordic culture is broadly the same. Do you find any irony in a Nordic bishop focusing on hope?
Bishop Varden: Well, your question makes me smile, because I’ve lived in a number of different countries, mainly in Europe, and I find that the more you move south in Europe, the more people have extravagant notions of the North, the more they assume that it is an area of the world plunged in perpetual darkness, where everyone is given to drink and excess, and where everyone is on antidepressants, and where people keep killing themselves with axes.
And it isn’t really quite like that. I think this idea of the long Norwegian winter powerfully impacts the imagination. But what most people don’t realize is the extreme luminosity of a Norwegian summer: exposure to light without any trace of darkness. That is intrinsic to our way of living the cycles of the year.
The phenomenon of Nordic Noir is interesting. I suspect that it is a genre that has arisen precisely because a few cunning authors have noticed that it corresponds to what people expect. And so they feed the stereotype because it sells, and because people find it entertaining in a slightly perverse sort of way.
But when you look at our own literature, poetry and music, it is to such an overwhelming extent a celebration of light and of spring. The amount of Norwegian poetry and music dedicated to spring, to the melting of the ice and the appearance of the first flowers, is fascinating.
By all means, I’m not trying for a moment to deny that there isn’t violence, too, in our story, that the Vikings weren’t brutal… But that wasn’t all they were about. I think that there is a constructed Nordic identity that spans centuries.
In your Lenten reflection about hope, you noted the modern tendency to either attach ourselves to our wounds or to airbrush them altogether. How do we avoid either extreme?
It’s largely because we absolutise our own experience that our wounds are so problematic. We’re drawn either to think, “I’m carrying this thing, and this is my great tragedy, and this is the drama of my existence.” Or to think, “Let’s make absolutely sure that no one suspects this wound that I’m carrying.”
We do that rather than looking around and saying, “Actually, being wounded is the human norm. And my wound may not be all that dissimilar from my neighbor’s wound.”
If I learn to live with my wound, and if I learn to believe and to entertain the hope that it might actually be healable, and if I pursue the correct sort of remedies, I may even be able to step beyond it.
And what will remain is a remembrance of healing.
There is so much around us that encourages us to live enclosed in ourselves, as if each of us were the only significant subject on planet Earth. Immersed in my own experience and its pathos, I forget to look around, and I forget to consider others’ experience, their exhilaration, and their suffering. And I shut myself off from the motor of compassion that enables community and even communion.
As a shepherd, how would you like to see community built in your parishes? What’s your master plan?
Well, I’m a little bit skeptical of master plans. I’m not sufficiently entrepreneurial. But I rejoice in particulars. I think of a study day we had recently at the cathedral parish in Trondheim. It was a very, very mixed crowd, lots of people came who didn’t know one another.
In the evening we had a supper together, and the room was absolutely heaving with conversation. I stood in a corner and could see all these little clusters of people who’d met one another that day, enjoying one another’s company, taking food and drink together, listening to one another, learning from one another — not even thinking of looking at their mobile phones.
The more our parishes and communities can foster that sort of togetherness, the more they will have an impact also beyond themselves, because that’s the sort of thing that draws other people in.
It has to be said that [the Trondheim cathedral parish event] had been a day made up of some conferences, but also of prayer. We’d had Mass, we’d celebrated the Divine Office together, we’d had a time of quiet prayer together.
Because our community of the day had taken both intellectual food and spiritual nourishment, had shared both silence and conversation that it could be so effective in such a short time. Those various elements have all got to be in place — the spiritual, intellectual, social and convivial.
What are your hopes and fears for artificial intelligence and its use to foster spirituality?
In terms of fostering spirituality I’m afraid I have absolutely no hopes at all for AI.
Anything can be used as a tool, but I don’t think AI is going to generate any spiritual renewal, because any spiritual renewal worthy of its name is one that pierces the human heart, and that is something that an algorithm can’t do.
Obviously there are things I can use in digital media and artificial intelligence that may save time and even make me discover useful things, but I have little faith in it as an agent of conversion.
You’ve previously spoken to the dangers of weaponizing Christianity for political aims. How do we stop that process, instead of continuing to admire the problem?
Good question. You do see this tendency all over the place; I see it in my own country as well.
First of all, I would stress that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an end in itself, an end that is significant of a goal. Any attempt to instrumentalize the Gospel for a subsidiary purpose, be it cultural or ideological or political, is suspect.
And we must beware of any attempt to brandish Christianity void of the message and presence of the Wounded and Risen One. Any presentation of Christianity that abstracts the scandal of the Cross or perversely uses the Cross as a weapon with which to strike others is veering toward heresy or even blasphemy.
So we must remain resolutely Christocentric and resolutely committed to following Christ and to applying his commandments, as well as his promises — first of all to ourselves. And beware of too much rhetoric, beware of too many words.
We must focus rather on living coherent lives.
Ultimately, that is how Christianity spread and that is how Christianity renewed a weary world in late antiquity. By all means, there was an element of preaching and teaching and catechesis. But what bowled people over and turned societies round was seeing a new way of being human, and a new way of creating and fostering community, seeing and recognizing the possibility of reconciliation, of forgiveness, and of building a society, a new city, on the basis of reconciliation and forgiveness.
And so when Christianity is invoked as a component of what is ultimately hate speech, we’ve just got to not jump on that train.
How do we ensure that we’re not falling into the danger of getting on that train, and how do we help others to disembark from it?
The foundational principle — which is an old one, it’s there in St. Paul — is to train ourselves to speak the truth in love.
To love those who make mistakes is not to pretend that the mistakes don’t exist, but it is to address them in a constructive way, instead of yielding to an exacerbation of conflicts.
So what matters is to speak the truth in love, to make sure I’ve really studied the truth, that I understand the truth, that I’m prepared to give an answer, that I’m prepared to give an account for the hope that is in me, and that I don’t just hold on to some tribal instinct. It’s really important.
The best thing all of us can do is to study the faith more thoroughly, to read the Scriptures, to become learned in the Scriptures, to understand and live the sacramental grace of the Church deeply, in order to speak from within that.
I’d say that presents the ultimate healing remedy that you addressed in your question, because when one sees the splendour of the Church as a community of the redeemed, living by grace and illumined by Christ’s love, instantiated in a concrete community, then that has an attractiveness and a beauty that makes any other allurement of allegiance just pale into insignificance.
Some of that weaponization of Christianity is an effort to “hasten the coming of God’s kingdom on earth” through human means. As Christians, how do we balance that tension between the present life and our hope for a future in heaven?
Above all, by practising patience, which is not a very fashionable virtue, and one that everything militates against — because we live now with the illusion that if I have a need or a desire, it must be satisfied immediately. There must be something I can download, or a number I can ring, or some delivery man who can come to the door with stuff in his rucksack that will give me what I crave, or what I long for, or what I feel I can’t live without.
Such satisfaction, though, will never be final. It works out to some extent, if we have money on our credit card; it can keep us fed and clothed, and to a certain extent entertained.
But a human life is a drawn-out affair. And things take time.
Great things take time. That’s a principle Newman liked to stress.
And to be a human is a great thing.
A Norwegian summer’s night – and it’s real, not a dream.

Coram Fratribus

Ascension Acts 1:1-11: A cloud removed him from their sight.
Ephesians 1:17-23: That you may understand hope.
Matthew 28.16-20: I am with you always.
Liturgically speaking, this day marks the end of the first forty days of Paschaltide, corresponding to the forty days of Lent. The two periods are like giant waves flowing up to, then away from, Easter: ebb and flow.
Easter changes everything. It makes the bitter water sweet. It stills the storm of despair. The waters that, before, threatened to drown us, carry us now. The dark abyss of death and chaos is illumined and made peaceful by Christ’s victory. Having set out with tears, we now sing songs of joy.
When Jesus first appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday, displaying his resurrection, they were terrified, overwhelmed by emotion. The grief they had felt had created an inner tension that made them respond with disbelief, even, in Thomas’s case, with defiance. Gently, the Lord reassured them, making them see, ‘It is I’. Little by little, they got used to him again.
Life seemed to continue much as before. ‘For forty days’, we are told by Luke, ‘he continued to appear to them.’ His mode of appearance was baffling, true, but nonetheless reasonably predictable. Christ continued to go in and out among them. He ate and drank with them. And what did he say? He continued ‘to tell them about the kingdom of God’. ‘Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.’ He spoke also of the coming of the Spirit, but in the main this forty-day time was a time of consolidation, a time for remembrance, for calling to mind. The disciples were made to reflect in depth on the ancient experience of Israel, first; then on what they themselves had lived through. At ever new junctures, they came to exclaim, ‘Ah! That is what this means!’ The first forty days of Easter were a time of reassurance.
All that changes with the Ascension, on the fortieth day. What a disconcerting feast this is, even at a distance of two thousand years! Jesus had barely finished charging his own to bear witness to the ends of the earth when ‘he was lifted up, while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their sight’. With retrospect, in the light of theology, St Paul presents the Ascension as victory: ‘When he ascended to the heights, he led captivity captive.’ To the tiny, fragile Church, however, the event must have seemed different, as if Christ were taken captive, snatched away, leaving a piercing, painful void behind.
Today’s liturgy keeps the Ascension with shouts of Alleluias. The disciples greeted it with silence, staring up into heaven, perplexed, hurting once more, asking, ’What now?’ This fortieth day introduces a new dimension in the Church’s Easter faith. It calls for a widening of hearts and minds, for an explosion of categories. There are new things, now, to remember: the veiled promises of Power from on high. So far the disciples have looked back to the Passion and Rising of Christ. Now they look ahead, to the bestowal of the Spirit. The time after Ascension is marked by recollection, silence, and expectancy. Again we sense a hint of fear, as we, too, tend to be anxious before anything radically new.
The Ascension marks Christ’s going away. It is likewise a pledge of his return. ‘This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’
Do we think of this as much as we ought? Do we expect the Lord? Do we long for his coming? Do we beseech him to accomplish his work of redemption in our own lives and in history, crying out, ‘Maranatha!’?
It is essentials that we, as Christians, consider the universe and interpret it on the basis of the mystery we celebrate today. ‘Creation’, writes St Paul, ‘groans in birth pangs’. New life is waiting to be born. For all its loveliness, our world stands for something incomplete and temporary. We may be more aware of that today than people have ever been before. Let’s remember, then, when anxiety threatens: Christ is Alpha and Omega. He is the goal towards which all things tend.
And he tells us: ‘Fear not!’
The Ascension is no abduction. It does not signify the Lord’s removal to some other place, away from us. Nor does it equip him, as it were, for infinite bilocation, enabling him to be momentarily present in moments of emergency all around the world, like some celestial paramedic summonable by frantic calls of 999. Fist and foremost, the Ascension reveals the Lord Jesus, whom we dare to call our brother, as our God. In him ‘we live and move and have our being’. In him ‘all things were made’. These Scripture verses are no pious platitudes. They are the hermeneutical key to right understanding of reality. Christ ‘ascended far above all heavens in order that he might fill all things’. All things. That includes my life, and yours: our souls, our minds, our bodies.
The Ascension shows us Emmanuel, God with us, in his fullest realisation. During his earthly life, Jesus showed us what it means to walk with God. Today he says, ‘the journey continues’. He is with us always, even to the end of time, in the most intimate way possible, in a presence to be sealed nine days hence by the sending of the Spirit. Let us use these days to go deep, to take on board what Christ means when he says, ‘I will not leave you orphans’. He invites us to live in union with him, to love him and be loved by him, to know the transformative power of his grace.
‘May the eyes of your hearts be filled with light’, writes St Paul to the Ephesians, ‘that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you’. That is likewise my prayer for you and for myself. For, beloved, if we come to knowledge of that hope, we shall know and understand everything else. Then we shall have a wonderful gift to bestow on our world, a gift the world needs urgently. Amen.

The Mystery of Christ’s Ascension ‘to where he was before’ (John 6:62) presupposes his eternal generation from the Father in the Spirit, as the creative Logos by which the world was made. Thus this icon of the ‘Creation of the World’, painted in 2019 by the Ukrainian iconographer Lyuba Yatskiv, provides visual focus for our meditation today.

Coram Fratribus

A Sense of Sense The Stations of the Cross Henri Matisse painted for the Rosary Chapel in Vence leave me pretty cold. The ensemble is schematic, crowded, unbeautiful. I am just not able to see it as a high form of essentialism. One might be forgiven for thinking it was work the painter did one afternoon he had indigestion or was suffering from the heat. It is remarkable to realise how painstakingly, and over what a period of time, the ensemble was prepared. An exhibition currently on display in the Baltimore Museum of Art shows eighty or so sketches chronicling the process. Through them one senses that Matisse had a real sense of what he was portraying. This Deposition, for example, not only displays formal and architectural perfection, but is deeply affecting. Why is this depth so insufficiently, at least to my eyes, rendered in the finished work? So many other aspects of the chapel are exquisite. I am mystified, though a degree of light is shed by this documentary about the Vence project, Matisse’s last great work.

Coram Fratribus

Commencement Address Address given at St Mary’s graduation ceremony on 7 May 2026.
Your Grace, President, honoured Faculty, ladies and gentlemen, dear graduates!
Thank you for inviting me to share this day of joy with you. Thank you for the encouragement you give me in honouring my work with a degree. I am thrilled to be with you and to get to know in person this venerable house, from which many ardent apostles have gone forth nurtured by sound devotion and solid learning.
While looking forward to my visit, I found my anticipation illumined from an unexpected angle. A few weeks ago, a kind acquaintance — who could not have known of my appointment here — sent me a copy of Willa Cather’s novel published in 1927, Death Comes for the Archbishop. I had long wanted to read it, but the title, I suppose, makes any prelate a bit wary of taking it into his hands: one just never knows. Anyway, there it suddenly was, dropped into my mail box.
The novel, as you know, sets out from Baltimore. In the prologue we find three curial cardinals and a missionary bishop gathered in the Sabine Hills outside Rome in 1848 to discuss a request from Baltimore’s Provincial Council for an Apostolic Vicariate in New Mexico. Amid descriptions of a delicious supper, obligatory in narratives evoking Italy, the qualities needed in a Vicar are discussed. The Irish-French Bishop Ferrand, who knows America, stresses that the appointee will direct ‘momentous things.’ New Mexico, he explains, was evangelised in the sixteenth century, but allowed to drift. It might call itself Catholic but is marked by superstition and malpractice. Its few priests, of scarce instruction, live tawdry lives. The Vicar-to-be ‘will eat dried buffalo meat and frijoles with chili’. The country ‘will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain. He will be called upon for every sacrifice, quite possibly for martyrdom.’ He must be, then, ‘of strong constitution, full of zeal, and above all, intelligent’. One of the cardinals, taking all this in, puts it to Ferrand that such conditions surely call for a German? Ferrand says: ‘No!’ The Vicar has to be French. ‘Oh’, he says, ‘the Germans classify, but the French arrange!’
The scene is set for the novel’s hero, Monsignor Jean Marie Latour, to ride onto it — for a bishop without a horse is of no use at all in this story. Latour is appointed Vicar in 1851. As the novel unfolds, he visits Baltimore repeatedly. It is hard to think that he wouldn’t have stopped at old St Mary’s down in Paca Street. After all, Cather constructed her fictional Monsignor on the basis of the factual Jean-Baptiste Lamy, born in Auvergne and trained by the Sulpicians of Montferrand. Both the bishop of the novel and his historical double would have found at St Mary’s sweet scents and sounds of home, and, who knows?, perhaps even a beneficial draught of Bordeaux.
At first sight it might seem odd that a Sulpician formation should be thought to equip a man for the trials that await the Vicar Apostolic as Cather tells them: dirt, deserts, and beans; folklore, idolatry, and violent feuds; a life in the saddle.
As a student at Montferrand Lamy will have been formed according to the Examinations of Conscience of Louis Tronson, third superior of Saint Sulpice. Tronson collated the Society’s patrimony. He edited its constitutions. His Examinations distil its spirituality. They are a guide to conscious Christian living and self-discipline.
Reading them now, one is struck by the fact that they seem to leave no aspect of existence to chance. They tell a good Sulpician with what disposition of soul he should get out of bed in the morning, how he should eat his lunch, at what speed he might appropriately walk – strictly on devout errands, of course – about town. They instruct him to make sure that his surplice is spotless and that he is ever able, at a nod from his superior, faultlessly to intone a complex Gregorian antiphon.
The charism of Saint Sulpice is urban. It is ordered. The society educated Christian gentlemen. Its customs appear to presuppose the backdrop of a quiet French provincial town with cobbled streets, neat gardens, and the Angelus sounding melodiously at dusk.
Such a setting contrasts with the one the Vicar Apostolic in Cather’s novel meets one night as, making his way to Mora, he seeks shelter in a wretched homestead. The farmer, an American, is described as ‘gaunt and ill-formed, with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small, bony head’. He is quite as odious of character as he is of appearance. He snarls and menaces. The poor Mexican girl he keeps as a house-slave lets the visitors understand that he is dangerous. She signals to the bishop and his priest-companion to ride away as quickly as they can.
Now, how on earth would the formal regimentation of Saint Sulpice prepare a man to face a situation like this, straight out of an old-fashioned Western movie?
Very well, it turns out. The bishop responds with great presence of mind. He is courteous yet firm. When the serpent-headed fellow starts swearing he draws from his pocket, not a rosary, but a pistol, saying: ‘No profanity, Señor!’ Then he rides off. Sulpician discipline is clearly not incompatible with resourcefulness. This incident in Death Comes for the Archbishop is reflected in countless examples from real life.
It seems appropriate to pinpoint this paradox as I address those of you who, today, graduate from St Mary’s University. During your years of study you will have read lots of books, written many essays, sat many exams. You will have acquired knowledge and practical skills. Some of you will have produced original research. All this is capital, precious capital, for whatever work, whatever duties lie ahead.
Even more essential, though, are the discipline of mind and formation of character you surely will have benefited from in this Sulpician house.
Nowadays there is a tendency to think of universities as degree-factories. People sign up for courses they are not really terribly interested in. They follow lectures online while doing their ironing, produce a few written assignments with the discreet collaboration of ChatGPT, then emerge with a hood and an acronym after their name, hoping to further their career and salary prospects. There is nothing wrong about this in the sense that it is morally culpable. But this approach is hardly likely to generate intellectual joy, intellectual freedom.
And that is what education is about.
Saint John Henry Newman, whom we now rejoice to honour as a Doctor of the Church, put it even more audaciously in The Idea of a University published in 1852, just as Bishop Lamy was getting himself sorted out down in Santa Fe, the HQ of his newly established New Mexican vicariate. The result of genuine education, Newman insists, is the ‘perfection of the Intellect’. He understood that phrase to point towards
the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural clarity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres.
Dear graduates, your time at St Mary’s will have given you a taste for such ‘perfection’. Make sure you keep your appetite for it alive. Be determined to awaken it in others. That will be a most noble and effective expression of Christian charity.
Our world is in dire straits. I think most people would consider this an uncontroversial affirmation at the moment. Few are those with patience to pursue an overview of ‘all things’ to see particulars in perspective. Hardly anyone, now, knows any history; it is risky to formulate even rudimentary notions of human nature, for we might upset those with divergent views; littleness and prejudice seem to be enjoying a heyday; people are highly startlable. Much societal discourse depends on keeping others’ fears alive.
Your education equips you to step into this reality as benevolently ordering presences, awakened as you are to a contemplative vision of things.
When the bishop in Willa Cather’s novel wonders how he might bring order into his diocese, a wilderness spread out before him, a friend tells him: ‘Don’t begin worrying about the diocese. […] Establish order at home.’ Order, the ‘beauty of order’, spreads like rings in a calm forest lake when you have plopped a pebble into it. Order develops marginally from the energy of an orderedly impacted centre.
To order the world around us, we must be ordered. For that, we need to know how we fit into the universal order of things. In Monsieur Tronson’s Examinations, that great Sulpician manifesto, each apparently mundane observance presented for consideration is preceded by an act of adoration. The study of theology helps us — ought to help us — to regard all things in the light of God’s majesty, that is, to see them as created in love, destined for greatness, their wounds reparable by grace.
To hear the music of the spheres is to note the cantus firmus voiced in all creation: in the helix of a DNA molecule as well as in the galaxies above. The music is that of God’s Creator Word singing itself as praise to the Father through the Spirit. It resonates, too, in the heart and mind of Christians washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb.
Dear graduates, you go forth from Baltimore, much like the Auvergnat Vicar of New Mexico in 1851, with a grand task ahead. The specifics of the task will be unique to each of you; its essence, though, is the same. You are to carry clarity into catastrophe; to bring ordered, bright intelligence to bear on a world in sombre chaos; to give Christ’s love coherent expression in your words and deeds. That is what you have been educated for. It is what the world hopes for from you, what the Church expects. It is an arduous task, but a glorious one. I pray it will fill you with gladness.
Listen out for the music of the spheres. Let it resonate in you. Become its instruments. Then you cannot go far wrong. You will proceed quietly, not having to dread sudden needs, menacing occurrences, or even outright threats. You will be ready for the sacrifices that are part and parcel of your task. Your heart-searched lives will be blessed. And you will be for a blessing.
Set out, then, in humble confidence, with gratitude, in Christ’s name.
Thank you for your attention.

Coram Fratribus

Innocence Restored Homily given as part of a day of recollection to priests at St Mary’s.
Wednesday: Remain in me (John 15.1-8)
Although I know it by heart and look out for it in advance, the collect set for today, Wednesday in the fifth week of Eastertide, never fails to jolt me. It begins startlingly with the affirmation that God not only loves, but restores innocence.
The loveability of innocence is clear to everyone. We’re aware of it not least when faced with innocence lost and the sadness that results.
The thought that innocence might be restored, however, seems just extravagant.
We human beings might do our best to repair effects of lost innocence, but however hard we try, we can’t restore it. The restoration of innocence amounts to a re-creation. That is God’s prerogative, and his alone.
Today’s collect is linked to that for Thursday in the second week of Lent.
Both begin with the same formula: ‘God, restorer and lover of innocence, direct the hearts of your servants towards yourself’. At that point, though, their ways part.
The Lenten prayer continues aspirationally. It asks that, ‘caught up in the fire of your Spirit, we may be found steadfast in faith and effective in works’. This corresponds to the atmosphere in which we get ready to celebrate Christ’s Pasch.
Today, illumined by Easter, our intention is more essential. We pray, after the introduction, that those ‘set free from the darkness of unbelief may never stray from the light of [God’s] truth’. Those words recall the prayer we pray secretly before Communion: ‘Free me by your most Holy Body and Blood from all my sins and from every evil; keep me always faithful to your commandments, and never let me be parted from you.’
We are children of light. We cannot turn back into darkness. And why would we want to?
Christ exhorts us: ‘Make your home in me!’ He reminds us that he is the vine, we are the branches. Then he states the obvious: ‘A branch cannot bear fruit all by itself’.
Any Christian is, by baptism, grafted on to Christ, the true vine. Still, we who rejoice in the wonderful gift of being Christ’s priests are bound to him in a singular way. We have been ordained to act in his stead, ‘in eius persona’ (CCC 1558). That has been, from the day of our consecration, the whole point of our existence.
Such is our sacramental union with Christ that we may speak the words of Absolution in his name, not because of some magic aura we’ve acquired, but because Christ chooses to exercise his grace through us. It is an astounding thing to be, in this way, instruments of his restoration of innocence, able to say to a penitent forgiven: ‘Nothing binds you anymore! You have been set free, made new!’
The more we realise the vast grace of priestly ordination, the reach of the promises entrusted to us, the more we shall be determined to live up to it, firmly rejecting anything that might make us stray even slightly from Christ’s side.
This means we must surrender ourselves to him unstintingly, unconditionally.
The image of the branch joined to the vine is inseparable from the image of the grain of wheat sown to give life through dying.
Exactly a week ago I found myself praying before the relics of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis at Marijampolė in Lithuania. Let me conclude with something that model priest and confessor of the faith wrote in 1913 to a young man mustering up the courage to be ordained:
You must not be afraid to take a chance for the glory of God. Christ clearly says: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone” (Jn 12.24). Only when it has fallen to the ground, died and decayed does the grain bring forth new life and fruit from itself. Do not wish to protect yourself so very much. Do not be afraid to immerse yourself in God and die to yourself for God’s sake — then, when you become a priest, you will give forth much fruit.
May we be priests of such mettle, generous, gentle and strong, faithful to the innocence won for us so that we may, on Christ’s behalf, joyfully restore it in others.
Amen.
Archbishop Jurgis Matulaitis-Matulevicius (1871-1927)
***
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda servorum, ut, Spiritus tui fervore concepto, et in fide inveniantur stabiles, et in opere efficaces.
Deus, innocentiæ restitutor et amator, dirige ad te tuorum corda famulorum, ut, quos de incredulitatis tenebris liberasti, numquam a tuæ veritatis luce discedant.

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