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Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

04 October 2025

Bishop William Crean meets Pope Leo on recent pilgrimage to Rome

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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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18 Jan 2026 - A Light to the nations ...

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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

The Pain of ‘Why?’

This conversation, which you can read online in Spanish here, was part of the presentation of Healing Wounds in Spanish.
How do you believe that contemplating the wounds of Christ can help human beings find comfort and healing in the midst of Read More

Coram Fratribus

2 Sunday A

Isaiah 49:3, 5-6: He formed me in the womb to be his servant.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he Read More

Coram Fratribus

The Pain of ‘Why?’ This conversation, which you can read online in Spanish here, was part of the presentation of Healing Wounds in Spanish.
How do you believe that contemplating the wounds of Christ can help human beings find comfort and healing in the midst of suffering?
To contemplate Christ’s wounds in the midst of our own pain does not necessarily bring instantaneous comfort or healing. Time may be required for these to happen. Time and patience. Let’s never forget that at the heart of the noun ‘patience’ is the Latin root pateor, meaning ‘I suffer’.
What contemplation of the sacred wounds can do at once, exercised in faith, is to let me find meaning in suffering. The most terrible part of pain can be the overhanging question ‘Why?!’.
A secular logic tells us that we ought not to suffer; and that if we do it is unfair. This can make us angry and bitter. We think things ought to be OK. When they’re not, we feel we’ve been cheated.
The Christian narrative is different. It sets out from the conviction that things in this world are not OK. God became man to heal our nature from within. In the early Christian centuries, the image of Christ as Healer was of great importance. The New Testament tells us that Christ healed the world, not by some wonder-remedy, but by suffering through our wounds, investing them with his grace in love, making them glorious. Even death is relieved of its terror. ‘By death he conquered death’, we sing during Lent. Experiences that seem to us, humanly speaking, as dead ends and deadlocks reveal themselves to be passages, open doors, ways forward.
When we contemplate Christ’s wounds, we remind ourselves that suffering, even when it happens by accident, need not be futile. It can be deeply purposeful. By owning my own suffering consciously as a member of the Church, Christ’s mystical Body, I can let my weakness be touched by Christ’s power; at the same time, my pain, little or great, can be oriented towards participation in his redemptive work, which continues till the end of time.
This opens a vast perspective of grace and hope. To glimpse that perspective may already be to a comfort, a beginning of healing.
In your book, you explore the idea that vulnerability can be a gateway to grace. How do you believe we can cultivate this vulnerability in our daily lives?
I do not think we need to cultivate vulnerability. It is simply there. What we need to do is stop nurturing the illusion that we are invulnerable.
Christianity offers a worldview and a self-understanding that let me accept my wounds with realistic hope — admitting them as they are, but not, so to speak, enclosing me within them. That is a great help in a cultural context in which we like to project constant strength, success, and health at every level, so that experiences of adversity risk knocking us out physically or psychologically. It also helps us negotiate the flipside of that same cultural context, which invites us to wallow in our own pain and to cultivate a strong sense of victimhood, reducing the suffering person’s identity to his or her pain.
What role do you believe faith plays in overcoming pain and suffering, and how can it be a source of strength for those who feel overwhelmed by adversity?
It plays an essential role, primarily because the woman or man of faith is relieved of thinking that his or her life is an isolated, monadic existence. Life in Christ, mediated through the Church, draws us into a great and palpable communion where, when my strength is limited, I can be carried by the strength of others; where, when my prayer is weak, I can be carried by the prayer of the Church. Such experience transforms a life over time. As one of the Prefaces in the Missal says: it makes the fainthearted courageous.
How do you believe the wisdom of the monastic tradition and patristics can be relevant to the challenges and questions of contemporary humanity?
The monastic tradition is relevant not least because it is deeply human. The early monks and nuns were unafraid to call a spade a spade. The sayings of the Desert Fathers are wonderfully specific in dealing with trials and temptations that are timeless because they pertain to the deep hunger of the human heart, and of human flesh.
The early monastics did not make this hunger into an abstraction. They faced it in the full conviction that God, by becoming man, has enabled the illumination and sanctification of every aspect of human life, including the most embodied.
That is a perspective we really need today, in a cultural and intellectual climate that is not only marked by a certain dualism, inclined to see spirit and flesh as two incompatible dimensions of the human condition, but which is faced with the Brave New World of the virtual, the artificial. What an opportunity to restate an intelligent, coherent Christian anthropology based on the theology of incarnation!
What message do you believe you are trying to convey to readers through “Healing Wounds,” and how do you believe it can help human beings find a path towards healing and redemption?
I wish to introduce readers to the richness and beauty of the Christian patrimony in its approach to the pathos of existence. I wish to show that an engagement with Christ’s wounds does not limit itself to sentimental dolorism, but in fact opens a perspective of hopefulness. Along the way I wish to propose practical and spiritual advice on how to deal with situations of pain.
To be a Christian is to live in fellowship. We need to extend a helping hand to each other when we can. And we need to reach out and seize the helping Hand Christ extends to us through the Church, through the rich legacy of her theologians and saints, through the sacred liturgy.
Crucifix in the parish church of Ciempozuelos.

Coram Fratribus

Learned Levites I happen to own a life of St Francis de Sales published in 1928 by Eugène Julien, bishop of Arras. It carries the epigraph, ‘A mes prêtres, ce beau visage de Prêtre’, ‘To my priests I propose this beautiful type of a Priest’. We need beautiful examples of people whose holy lives we desire to emulate. For a bishop to put forward such an example is truly a pastoral initiative. When King Henry IV offered Francis de Sales preferment that would take him from Geneva to a wealthier see, he replied: ‘Sire, I pray Your Majesty to forgive me, but I cannot accept his offer. I am a married man. I have married a poor woman, and I cannot leave her for one who is richer.’ Herein lies a whole theology of episcopal ministry. To his priests, this humane and approachable bishop said: ‘It is not enough for clerics to strive to be holy; they must also become learned in the science of their state. In priests, ignorance is more to be feared even than sin, for by ignorance one does not merely lose oneself, one dishonours, disgraces the priesthood. […] In a priest, learning is the eighth sacrament of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The greatest misfortunes of the Church have come when the ark of learning has been found in other hands than those of the Levites.’

Coram Fratribus

Magic, Moving Chains The internet can be serendipitous. Looking for Imogen Cooper’s 1989 recording of Schubert’s Impromptus, I happened upon this remarkable lecture she gave in Oxford in 2014. I listened to it on a train, entranced. Never have I heard a performer engage with her call so eloquently, so movingly. Cooper speaks of music’s ‘quite extraordinary power to pinpoint and localise both the numinous and the dark-shadow areas of the human soul and to give them voice. Such voicing’, she says, ‘brings wonder, pain, relief, performing a role that is quite uniquely cathartic.’ She points out that great geniuses need catharsis as much as the rest of us. How did Beethoven, Schubert deal with their anguish, illness, and isolation? ‘They worked. They went inside themselves and plucked sounds from their imagination to string together into magic and moving chains.’ These are liberating chains. We can enter them.

Coram Fratribus

Full of Schubert On Sunday evening Dame Imogen Cooper gave her last solo recital at Wigmore Hall, playing Schubert’s Impromptus. In a noble speech at the end, after the Duke of Kent had presented her with the Wigmore Medal, she said she felt overwhelmed on account of the occasion, but also because her ‘heart was still very full of Schubert’. It is a moving thing to witness a great artist perform works that have been the object of a lifetime’s study, analysis, dreams, and backbreaking labour. I have long known and admired Cooper’s recording of the Impromptus from 1989. The way she orchestrates the piano is extraordinary. Sunday’s performance was different, more inward, perhaps.
What we give our hearts to grows with us.

Coram Fratribus

2 Sunday A Isaiah 49:3, 5-6: He formed me in the womb to be his servant.
1 Corinthians 1:1-3: Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle.
John 1:29-34: I did not know him myself.
‘No’, says the Baptist, ‘I did not know him.’ Indeed, he says it twice in reference to Jesus’s apparition in Bethany, beyond the Jordan, where John was baptising. How may we understand this statement? Surely if anyone knew Jesus, John did?
In Luke we read how Mary, shortly after Christ’s conception, went off to stay with Elisabeth, her kinswoman, likewise pregnant. When Mary arrived, and Elisabeth heard her voice, her baby ‘skipped in her womb’. To describe the reaction of John, still unborn, Luke uses a verb with deep Biblical resonance. We find it again in the Greek Old Testament version of a Psalm (Ps 114) which begins with the words: ‘When Israel went forth from Egypt’.
This Psalm is one of Scripture’s fundamental accounts of redemption. It tells us how the whole of creation rejoiced when Israel cast off Egypt’s yoke: ‘The sea saw it and fled; Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams.’
That is how the infant John skipped in the embryonic presence of Jesus. He knew, before he had seen the light of day, who the Redeemer was. At this he rejoiced. How, then, could he say, thirty years on, ‘I knew him not’?
Of course, we could explain this business away by saying simply that we’re dealing with different sources. The text we’ve read is John’s; the one about Mary and Elisabeth is Luke’s. Two traditions; two versions of the relationship between Jesus and the Baptist. Perhaps John didn’t have Luke’s text at his disposal? Or perhaps Luke invented the story of the meeting of the unborn to enliven his text?
Thus exegetes have argued for decades in voluminous, often dull commentaries. Thank God, we have made progress. We have passed beyond the certainty that we, blessed with critical skills, see everything more clearly than Christians have done for the past 2,000 years; that we are the first to recognise the challenge of reconciling Biblical texts, and therefore have a licence to bracket any awkwardness or simply to dismiss as invention what we do not understand.
This approach to the Bible is no longer permissible. We must take the text seriously as it stands. This is more demanding. It is also a lot more interesting.
Considering, then, John’s statement again, let us note this: at the Baptism, he does not say about Jesus, ‘I never set eyes on him before’. He says, ‘I knew him not’. Who among us has not experienced that someone we’ve had dealings with for years suddenly reveals a new side of himself or herself, forcing us to admit: ‘I thought I knew him (or her); but now I see I didn’t, really.’
There can be many reasons for such development. Our friend, or spouse, may have been battling with some difficult thing they have not shared with us, whether to spare us concern or themselves humiliation. Once our eyes are opened to what the other has carried secretly, we need to read our common history afresh. Everything appears in a different light. Certain realities we’ve never understood seem at once obvious. Others we thought were straightforward pose questions. We ascertain: ‘I knew him (or her) not. At least not the way I thought I did.’
We must be ready to enlarge our knowledge, to integrate the new thing we have learnt if we wish for a deeper, more truthful relationship. If instead we just hold on to what we thought was an adequate image of the other, our relationship, if it survives at all, will be built on illusion. We shan’t, in fact, be relating to another person, but to our notion of what that person ought to have been.
If we see the relationship between Jesus and John in this perspective, a lot is clarified. John’s apparently paradoxical statement, ‘I knew him not’, makes sense. The Gospel shows again and again what the Jewish people expected from God’s redemption. People hoped that the Lord, as in former days, would show his mighty arm, crush enemies, cleanse the Promised Land, and let each true Israelite enjoy his inheritance under his vine and fig tree.
This is a hope John the Precursor will have shared. It will have been impressed on his consciousness. That is why he skipped for joy, like the mountains at Israel’s exodus, when the Son of God was incarnate. John’s whole life was directed towards the freeing of Israel.
But what did he see when Jesus at last showed himself publicly? Not a sceptred warrior making of his enemies a footstool, but ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ — who takes them away by bearing them. The Lamb says, ‘My burden is light’. He bids us, ‘Bear my burden with me’.
We do well to ask ourselves: Do I choose to know Jesus, the Lamb of God, as he lets himself be known, or do I nurture an image of him born of my fancy? The Lord meets us here, in the sacred mysteries. The mysteries make the Lamb’s sacrifice present and draw us into that sacrifice. Let us ask for grace to see him and receive him as he is, to enter his broad and spacious joy, and not to stay hanging around outside, enclosed in our own, all too narrow expectations.
The Meditations of St John the Baptist, which you can see in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.

Posted: 8 hours ago

Today is the Feast of St Francis de Sales 1567-1622.
Bishop of Geneva & founder of the Visitation Sisters.
He worked with gentleness & love to rebuild the Catholic faith after the Reformation.
Patron saint of writers editors & journalists. Read More 2 Likes

Posted: 18 hours ago

Radio Maria have a stand at the Hope Conference happening tomorrow in St. John's Rest and Care Centre, Knock Shrine
Pop in and say hello, we would love to meet you. Hear from fantastic speakers, including Clint Valentine (who does Read More 1 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Day 6 of Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: Take a world map and find time to pray with others over the entire world for seven days..#wpcu2026 #wpcuwall
Explore daily resources : https://ctbi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WPCU-2026-English-Pamphlet.pdf.pagespeed.ce.bpppUVNRXj.pdf 1 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Day 5 of Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: Keep a journal for a week (or for seven days spread out over a period of time), reflecting each day on the meaning of your baptism or Christian initiation..#wpcu2026 Read More

Posted: 2 days ago

Bishop Crean meets Pope Leo

Bishop William Crean meets Pope Leo on recent pilgrimage to Rome

"Behold I'm doing a new thing" says the Lord (Isaiah 43)

Pastoral letter from Bishop William Crean

Recent picture of St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh. Co. Cork

Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral

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