Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

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

Light a candle at St Colman's

Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

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

10 February 2026

Eucharistic Adoration Cloyne Diocese

Day of Prayer led by Fr. John Keane - Diocesan Director of Eucharistic Adoration

Sunday 22nd February from 11:15am - 4:30pm, in Shalom Retreat Centre, Charleville (former Convent of Mercy)

Day of Prayer with Eucharistic Adoration, Testimony, Talk, Music and Eucharistic Blessing

Booking is essential please email bThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 083-4405359

Please bring a packed lunch. Tea and coffe will be provided

All very welcome

Day of prayer led by Fr John Keane

10 February 2026

Camp Creideamh, Catholic Faith Camps for teenagers, boys and girls, will take place again in Knockadoon (East Cork) over the dates 7th – 13th June. For those who are Post-Primary school age.

Activities will include catechesis, prayer, sports, hillwalking, kayaking, swimming, music, arts and crafts and other activities.

For bookings go to the website Camp Creideamh

For more information please call Fr. Eamon Roche on 086 9972539

Camp Creideamh - Knockadoon

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

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15 Feb 2026 - The Spirit reaches the depths of everything

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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

6 Sunday A

Sirach 15.15-20: If you wish, you can keep the commandments.
1 Corinthians 2.6-10: We teach the wisdom of God.
Matthew 5.17-37: Say ‘Yes’ if you mean ‘Yes’.
The Gospel we have heard is rich. It is about relationships, reconciliation, liturgy, marriage, desire, and Read More

Coram Fratribus

Caritas

A speech given at the opening of the new office of Caritas Tromsø on 12 February 2026.
“Caritas”, announces the webpage of Caritas Internationalis, is “the Church in action”. It’s a good phrase. Every Christian is called to action. Christianity can’t Read More

Coram Fratribus

Leavetaking Throughout the year, the acclamation ‘Alleluia’ structures our worship. Not only do we sing it each day at Mass before the reading of the Gospel; it resounds at the end of the introduction to all the day hours in the Divine Office. Then, on Ash Wednesday, it falls silent, remaining unuttered until the deacon solemnly announces its return at the Easter Vigil. It is an ancient, beautiful custom to take leave of the Alleluia on the threshold of Lent. The eleventh-century hymn Dulce Carmen, resoundingly Englished by John Mason Neale, was composed to accompany the ritual. I have just discovered this even earlier text from the Mozarabic rite that sings of mournful-hopeful leave-taking, summoning up the spirit of Shrove Tuesday: ‘Stay with us today, Alleluia, and tomorrow thou shalt part. When the morning rises, thou shalt go thy way. Alleluia, Alleluia. The mountains and hills shall rejoice, Alleluia, while they await thy glory. Thou goest, Alleluia; may thy way be blessed, until thou shalt return with joy. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia’.

Coram Fratribus

A Good Teacher No one forgets a good teacher. I have been fortunate to have many. None, perhaps, has marked me more than John Sweet. John taught me exegesis throughout my undergraduate years. He opened up to me the Biblical text in all its complexity and beauty. Like John Sentamu, I fondly remember his cold room and warm kettle, his fingerless gloves, his supply of ginger biscuits. But these things just evoke the setting. Sentamu writes: ‘Many of us were taught not only Greek and the New Testament, but also a way of being in the world marked by graciousness, kindness, generosity, courtesy – old-fashioned values all too rare these days.’ John was the epitome of the scholar-priest, stern with regard to truth’s requirements yet concerned to communicate them kindly. Asked how one might best evangelise, he would say: ‘Attend to people.’ He taught and ministered, notes the obituary in The Times, ‘with a spirit of total, selfless dedication’. That is a noble epitaph.

Coram Fratribus

6 Sunday A Sirach 15.15-20: If you wish, you can keep the commandments.
1 Corinthians 2.6-10: We teach the wisdom of God.
Matthew 5.17-37: Say ‘Yes’ if you mean ‘Yes’.
The Gospel we have heard is rich. It is about relationships, reconciliation, liturgy, marriage, desire, and pledges. We may feel a bit out of sorts after hearing it. We think of faith as a source of comfort and peace. Presented to us here is a list of obligations. They’re pretty stern. We’re reminded that words and actions have consequences. There are things we might say and do for which we’d have to answer ‘in hell fire’. The gentle Christ isn’t always gentle.
We see how some who heard him in person could say: ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ We see how some who sought to be confirmed in their own options ‘drew back and no longer went about with him’ when they awoke to what it really means to be a disciple of Jesus (cf. John 6.60-66).
We must ask, then: What about me? Will I be a Christian on the Gospel’s terms, or have I fixed my own, getting upset when these are challenged and I am summoned to answer to a higher standard?
Consider what Our Lord says about offerings made at the altar. It is a remark about liturgical practice, something many are interested in.
It is important to celebrate the liturgy worthily and well. If we believe that God is God, we must worship him with intelligence and beauty, focused on essentials. We can’t fidget about and improvise. At the same time, if we believe that God is God, we can’t pretend he’ll be impressed by spotless choreography if the heart’s intentions are dark. He is, we read in Sirach, ‘all-seeing’.
Therefore: if, before the altar, on my way to seek reconciliation with God, I perceive that I am unreconciled to another human being, I can’t abstract one relation from the other. How can I pray, ‘Lord, forgive me!’ if, in my heart, I think with regard to others, ‘To hell with them!’?
Our Lord knows how hard it can be to forgive. He knows that it hurts, sometimes, to be human being. We are able to hurt one another terribly. A wound can run deep; it can paralyse us; it can make us feel dead. But the Gospel proclaims, precisely, the possibility that the dead may rise, the lame have movement restored to them, wounds be healed.
God can renew our lives. He can recreate our reality. He can bring light into darkness. For that to happen, we must let him act freely. Our ‘Amen’ to God’s work of atonement, communicated to us in the Body and Blood of Christ, must be an ‘Amen’ without deceit, a ‘Yes’ that is whole-hearted.
This brings us to the crux of today’s Gospel, which sums up all the specific elements: ‘Say “Yes” if you mean “Yes”, “No” if you mean “No”. Anything more than this’, remember, it is the Lord who speaks, ‘comes from the evil one.’
In the Our Father we pray: ‘Deliver us from evil’. The prayer refers to metaphysical and, for that matter, personal Evil. It refers, too, to the evil hidden in my heart. On the basis of what we’re taught today, one dimension of the prayer is: ‘Free us from ambiguity.’ This interpretation chimes in with what the priest prays after the Our Father at Mass, when he beseeches God to free us from sin and all confusion, a peccato et ab omni perturbatione. Christian conversion is movement from disarray to clarity, from illusion to truth, from an immersion in fog to a bright existence under a blue sky made resplendent by the Sun of Righteousness.
God shows us the way by inviting us to follow his commandments. He sets fire and water before us, life and death. He asks us to choose what will bless us. But he does not force our hand. With maternal wisdom the Church lets today’s Gospel be introduced by a passage from Sirach, a late book in the Old Testament. It synthesises the teachings of patriarchs and prophets in pregnant aphorisms. We read: ‘If you wish, you can keep his commandments. Faithfulness is within your power.’
At all times people have tended to think themselves determined. In Antiquity, many thought they were determined by fate, or the stars. Totalitarian regimes make us think we are determined by the State or Big Brother. These days a lot of people think they are determined by things they’ve experienced, or not experienced, or by their psychological make-up.
Scripture challenges such assumptions. It tells us: ‘No, you’re no one’s prisoner. You are free. Use your freedom!’
Circumstances may condition us. All of us carry some heavy stuff in our luggage. But what conditions us does not determine us. If we wish, we can let the Lord act in our lives, for his gracious will so to act precedes ours. If we wish we can be set free from captivity, healed of illness and iniquity, raised from the slumbering dead.
That’s the perspective the Church opens up for us on this last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Let us choose freedom and life. Let us choose to do what is right and good. In Christ’s name!

Coram Fratribus

Near Music The Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last week’s Dag og Tid, in connection with a review by Eva Furseth of the ‘very well composed’ Karsten exhibition currently on at the Munch Museum in Oslo: ‘Restless‘. The review points out how broad Karsten’s references are: ‘There are pointillistic works built up with splotches of colour as well as virtuosic paraphrases of known canvases by, for example, Rembrandt and Watteau; others are inspired by Van Gogh, Matisse and Cézanne.’ The Norwegian aesthetic medium is European. Furseth writes: ‘The many journeys [Karsten] undertook can seem to indicate restlessness, yet I do not find restlessness in the works themselves. What they have in common is the centrality of the composition of form, combined with a well-developed sense of colour.’ One can integrate much and refine it into original expression if one has a keen sense of form.

Coram Fratribus

Caritas A speech given at the opening of the new office of Caritas Tromsø on 12 February 2026.
“Caritas”, announces the webpage of Caritas Internationalis, is “the Church in action”. It’s a good phrase. Every Christian is called to action. Christianity can’t be privatised as ideology or a devotional project. When Christ enters public ministry, he proclaims: ‘Follow me!’ That call contains two complementary exhortations: the exhortation to ‘walk as Christ walked’, mercifully helping others, showing them careful attention; next, the exhortation to build up a community.
The crowd of individuals who followed in Christ’s footsteps were gradually formed into the colourful, complex, generous community we know as the Church.
Caritas, in is present organisational form, was founded in the 50s. Two world wars had shown people in North and South, East and West just how destructive man can be to man. One had seen the total collapse of societal order.
During that same period, the Italian chemist Primo Levi, deported to Auschwitz in 1944, sat working on a book that would be published with the title If This Is a Man in 1958. The book, presented as ‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’, is an analytical presentation of concentration-camp hell. We read in the introduction:
Many people, many nations, can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. […] It is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human fact. […] The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man.
When we consider the world we live in now, and hear the political message spouted in various quarters, it is striking that the principle, ‘every stranger is an enemy’, has gained fresh currency. The infection is spreading. Many refuse to be vaccinated.
We need Caritas, then. Caritas stand for the opposite principle. It is blessedly revolutionary. Caritas works on the conviction that every stranger can become a friend. It reminds us that ‘the stranger’ is not necessarily someone else. ‘The stranger’ can be I.
The stranger obliges me if I wish to call myself a Christian.
Shortly before he entered into his Passion, our Lord said: ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me’ (Mt 25.42-4). That is something we can’t live with. St Benedict, Father of monasticism in the West, who laid the foundation for civilisational renewal when the remains of the Roman Empire fell, prescribes that any guest turning up at the monastery, no matter where he’s from, no matter how poor and confused, should be received ‘as Christ himself’, with utmost reverence.
These are the terms on which Caritas must work. This is how Caritas becomes ‘the Church in action’.
Caritas is founded on the Gospel. In addition, Caritas is self-consciously and gratefully Catholic. What might that mean in the circumstances? The word ‘Catholic’ is Greek. We can translate it as ‘all-embracing’. To be a Catholic is to have a broad outlook that fathoms the earth and looks into heaven. Yet to be a Catholic is no less to have local roots — in a church, a parish; in sacred places and things, signs that God’s timeless grace passes through time, leaving traces.
To live and relate as a Catholic is to subsist in tension. The Catholic community is grounded in specific soil. It wishes, following the example of St Elizabeth, to give joy and comfort to people here and now. Christian charity must manifest itself palpably. To reduce it to talk is tiresome. At the same time the Catholic community knows it is part of something greater. There is no such thing as Norwegian, or, for that matter, Northern-Norwegian, Catholicism. To speak about ‘the Norwegian Catholic Church’ would be absurd. The local church represents the Catholic Church in Norway, in Tromsø, in the parish of Our Lady, or wherever, but as part of a boundless communion which is, amazingly, differentiated yet the same whether you meet it in Borneo or on Spitzbergen.
Voices in our time proclaim that we must choose between the local and the universal; that we must either extinguish all boundaries or burn all bridges. One is asked to follow one tendency. The least nod in the other direction is perceived as treason.
There’s no future in such an outlook. That has been proved before. It will be proved again.
The particularly Catholic challenge we must present to our time is about explaining, and demonstrating, that it is possible to say, with Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘Both, please’. It is possible to be a Tromsøer 100%, a Mack loyalist and a TIL supporter, while recognising that we are not self-sufficient, while hospitably opening our doors, of our house and heart, to that which and those who come to us embodying a larger context. That context may turn out to reveal the sense of our existence. It can be for a blessing.
That is the sort of open door Caritas Tromsø is to be. I congratulate all of you who have worked hard to prepare this great day. I wish you joy in your service. May it be fruitful.
Twelfth-century Spanish mural, now in The Cloisters in New York, of Christ healing the blind man.

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Baptised and Sent - Lenten programme in Macroom

Baptised and Sent - Lenten programme in Macroom

Eucharistic Adoration - Fr. John Keane 22nd February 2026

Eucharistic Adoration Cloyne Diocese

Day of Prayer led by Fr. John Keane - Diocesan Director of Eucharistic Adoration

Camp Creideamh - Knockadoon 7th - 13th June 2026

Camp Creideamh, Catholic Faith Camps for teenagers, boys and girls, will take place again in Knockadoon (East Cork) over the dates 7th – 13th June. For those who are Post-Primary school age.

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 2026

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 2026

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