Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

12 April 2026

Pastoral Areas - Diocese of Cloyne

Dear Parishioners,

I write to share with you, the people of the Diocese, the outline and fruits of conversations that have taken place in parishes and deaneries over the last year or so.

The process began with my invitation to a group of priests and people to serve as a Diocesan Review Group. The first aim was to get a realistic picture of the current situation by way of religious practice, the number of priests in ministry and the other groups that serve in our parishes. The second goal was to develop a more effective pastoral service to all the parishes in the event of some parishes not having a resident priest.

Our hope has been that our discussion and discernment would have the outcome of development of a new structure in the diocese that would ensure the pastoral care of all.

Map of Pastoral Areas - Diocese of Cloyne

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

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Latest Homily

1 Apr 2026 - Joyful Fidelity

Latest Articles

April 2026
- "See I'm doing a new thing" Is. 43:19
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

Easter Octave

Acts 2.42-47: The faithful had all things in common.
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. Read More

Coram Fratribus

Humanisation ‘Without [a] demanding educational effort, passive adaptation to dominant paradigms will be mistaken for competence, and the loss of freedom for progress. This is all the more true in light of the spread of artificial intelligence systems, which increasingly shape and permeate our mentality and social environments. Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation capable of making visible the logic behind economics, embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses. Dear friends, you, however, are real persons! Creation itself has a body, a breath, a life to be listened to and safeguarded. It “groans and suffers” (cf. Rom 8:22), just as each one of us does.’ From Pope Leo’s life-giving discourse pronounced at the Catholic University of Central Africa this afternoon.

Coram Fratribus

A Poet This Monday, 13 April, marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of George Mackay Brown. He is present to me today, on the feast of St Magnus, as I re-read some pages of the novel he published in 1973 to tell the story of the Orcadian saint: ‘A light that once shone is never quenched. Can a diamond wither? Harder than precious stones are acts of piety and praise and charity. The saints hoard them against our coming.’ St Magnus, notes the poet, had once been at one with the rugged isles of Orkney, yet is now ‘in two places at once’. He lies immovable ‘with a terrible wound in his face in the kirk’. Simultaneously he is ‘pure essence in another intensity’, unconscionably alive, benevolently alert to the cry of the poor. The saints assist our living, recall us to the sense of existence, remind us of what lasts, what doesn’t.

Coram Fratribus

Sisters of Life Over the weekend, Sisters of Life have been in Trondheim, speaking at the spring conference of Mission2030, the project set up to prepare the millennium of the martyrdom which defined the Norwegian nation. Cardinal O’Connor of New York, who founded the congregation in 1991, defined it as follows: ‘This is the charism of the Sisters of Life: to mother the mothers of the unborn; to mother the unborn; to mother all those who are frail, all those who are vulnerable, all those who are ill, all of those who are in danger of being put to death, all those whose lives the world considers useless.’ God knows that mission is as vital as ever. It is worth watching this film that tells the story of how the Sisters of Life came into being. It is a story about God’s kind providence, about some very courageous women, and about a man who shows us what it is to be a bishop.

Coram Fratribus

Easter Octave Acts 2.42-47: The faithful had all things in common.
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. ‘In the beginning’ God created heaven and earth in seven days. The days in Genesis are not measurable units; but the creation narrative helps us measure time. The seven-day pattern corresponds to cosmic order. Divided into weeks, our anthill existence fits into a rhythm corresponding to the course of the sun, moon, and stars. Our experience of time is conditioned by the seven-day cycle. That’s good for us. To suffer time without predictable divisions is a burden that can make us mad. It is torture to shut a person up in a soundproof, windowless room without a watch. The vaguer our notion of time, the more we are vulnerable. Deprived of contours, time weighs crushingly on us. The seven-day pattern shapes our existence until the hour of our death.
And then?
To a Christian, death is a threshold leading into God’s eternity where time ceases. There, one day is like a thousand years, a thousand years like a day (cf. 2 Pet 3.8). The eighth day points towards the encounter that will take place when time is done. It reminds us that time, after all, is temporary. That is why the Church keeps her most solemn feasts with an octave. The octave helps us recognise that the purpose of time is to equip us for eternal life. By Christ’s victory over death, God has brought eternity into time. If we live in Christ, the Risen One, we can savour eternity now. The Easter Octave tell us: ‘You are made to live boundlessly! Your river of weeks flows into the open, sun-bathed sea!’
The Easter Octave has many names. It is called Dominica in albis, ‘Sunday in white’, since our neophytes still wear the white garments received during the Easter Vigil, at the font, where they were reborn of water and the Spirit. It is also called Quasimodo Sunday. That has nothing to do with hunchbacked ringers, whether our reference is Disney or Hugo; the expression comes from today’s introit, which begins with the words, ‘Quasi modo geniti infantes’, a verse from 1 Peter (2.2) that reads: ‘Like newborn children, desire rational milk without deceit.’
I beg your pardon?
Milk can be fresh, sweet, sour, out of date. But can milk be rational, and without deceit? The image is a daring one, but we can, I think, understand what the Apostle is getting at. He tells us: You, too, like your brethren in white, have received baptism. You, too, have been reborn to new life in God, to purity and blessedness. Do you live accordingly? Do you take sustenance that nurtures your Christian call, or do you subsist on junk food?
Our times are nutrition-conscious. We avoid cholesterol, take vitamins, buy crème fraîche light, eat avocados. But it seems we’re less cautious when it comes to the nourishment we take from papers, the internet, Twitter, and TicToc. Is my media consumption rational and guileless? Thus paraphrased, St Peter’s two thousand year-old exhortation doesn’t sound so daft after all.
At Easter in 2000, John Paul II added a further title. He declared this day ‘Divine Mercy Sunday’. The declaration coincided with his canonisation of Sr Faustyna Kowalska. The pope let us see that the message of divine love flowing from Jesus’s pierced Heart has universal relevance. It is a treasure for the whole Church. It’d be wrong, though, to think that John Paul II reduced the Easter Octave to a particular kind of devotion. The title he proposed does not narrow the Octave’s significance; it deepens it. It helps us interpret today’s Gospel, of Thomas’s meeting with the Risen Lord on the eighth day.
Thomas, the generous friend who, when Jesus went to face his enemies, said, ‘Let’s go with him to die with him’, had been out on an errand when Jesus appeared to Peter and the others on Easter Day. He no doubt trusted his apostolic colleagues; but the testimony of others was not sufficient to make him believe. Thomas, who had been so close to Jesus, wanted concrete proof. He thought: ‘If Jesus is really alive, it must have real, tangible consequence!’ That’s a healthily Catholic approach to the business of believing.
On the eighth day, the day of accomplishment, Thomas gets what he asked for. Jesus does not reproach him. He says: ‘Peace!’ Then he lets Thomas place a hand in his still open side, saying: ‘Be faithful!’
This is how mercy manifests itself in the wake of Christ’s Easter victory: wounded, realistic, peaceful, summoning us to fidelity. Thomas is allowed to to touch the fount of mercy to be made into a bearer of mercy. He would go further than any other apostle. There’s good historical reason to believe that he did in fact bring the Gospel to India.
People who profess Christianity prove themselves Christians in so far as they humbly bear their wounds, are clear-sighted, bring peace, stay faithful. It’s important to insist on this now, as more and more people instrumentalise faith in the interest of presumption, illusion, division, and ego-idolatry.
By God’s mercy we have been born anew to eternal life. Let’s, then, live as is seemly: mercifully, rationally, without deceit — and rejoicing in the fact that life is a free gift we receive in order that we, in turn, may give it.

Stained glass window by Ninian Comper at Downside Abbey.

Coram Fratribus

In-between-ness ‘Walking towards the Father’s house, drawn by the light we know shines from it, listening out for the singing within, we must accept the fact that our pilgrimage proceeds nocturnally, or at least defined by shadows. Shadows have their form, too. Cistercian architecture of the twelfth century, as we can admire it still at Pontigny, for example, is celebrated for its luminosity. The absence of stained glass and scarcity of decoration make the play of light a structural aesthetic element. But there were rainy days in the twelfth century too. There was twilight. And there was night. The formative impact over time of praying day and night in a Cistercian church comes from the interplay of light and shadow. The world we have made full of glaring lights and those maddening fixtures that switch themselves on at the merest twitch of a spider, making an option for subdued light impossible, can cause us to forget what it is to be at ease in such in-between-ness. Bright light is not always what is needed to reveal an object’s perfection. The gloss of oriental lacquerware shows to best effect in flickering candlelight; gilded medieval statuary takes for granted the flux of dawn and dusk. In the glare of a spotlight the gold just looks vulgar.’ From Alight with Hidden Glory, due out in May. The Italian version was published for Easter.

Today is the feast of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes to whom our Lady appeared at the grotto in Lourdes.
Bernadette suffered from sickness all of her life so we ask her intercession today for all who are sick and Read More 3 Comments

We pray for St.Bernadette Amen 🙏🙏🙏

21 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday (also known as the Feast of the Divine Mercy).
It is celebrated on the Second Sunday of Easter, which concludes the Octave of Easter.
It is originally based on the devotion to the Divine Mercy Read More 3 Comments

Youngchurchcandles ❤️🕯️🙏

18 Likes

Posted: 5 days ago

Join us for a celebration in honour of St. Catherine of Siena on Wednesday 29th April at 7:30pm in St. Saviour's Dominican Church, Limerick.
Along with Gregorian Chant & Medieval Polyphony music, we will dive deeper into her life and her Read More 3 Likes

Posted: Last week

Photos from Cloyne Diocese's post May the joy of the Risen Christ fill your hearts and home. A Very Happy and Holy Easter to you all. 3 Comments

Glanire Commercial Cleaning Proper job on the display, keeping the standards high for the Bank Holiday crowds is a sound move.

32 Likes

Posted: Last week

#Holy #Saturday, Easter Vigil: this night is one of vigil for the Lord. Saint Augustine called it ‘the mother of all vigils’. The Gospel of Saint Luke reminds the faithful to have their lamps burning ready, awaiting their master’s Read More 1 Comments

Iam passing the light of christ

1 Likes

Posted: Last week

"See I'm doing a new thing" Is. 43:19

Pastoral Areas - Diocese of Cloyne

Fatima Pilgrimage 2026 - Carrigtwohill Parish

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

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 2026

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 2026

Bishop Crean meets Pope Leo

Bishop William Crean meets Pope Leo on recent pilgrimage to Rome

Search

Latest Homily

Latest Articles