Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

Over 50 parishioners gathered in Cloghroe last week for what turned out to be a fruitful evening of prayer, input and synodal dialogue on the theme of our Jubilee Year of Hope.
The evening began with 30 minutes of silent Eucharistic Adoration concluding with Benediction, a 30minute input by Fr Eamonn McCarthy, our diocesan co-ordinator for the year, by way of exploration of the Jubilee themes and the document, Spes non Confundit, followed by a further half hour of animated exchange and dialogue among those present.

Jubilee gathering in Cloghroe

Chaplain for the Deaf Community Munster

My name is John Patrick Doherty, and I am Deaf, communicating through both Irish sign language and oral. I am honored to serve as a lay chaplain for the Deaf community in County Kerry while working throughout the Munster region.

In my role, I provide spiritual support across various settings, including schools and colleges, and assist in the preparation for Sacraments. My commitment is to ensure that Deaf individuals receive the emotional and spiritual care they need, in hospitals, palliative care, hospice services, care homes and mental health facilities. I also visit isolated Deaf individuals in their homes, promoting connection and support within the community.

Chaplain for the Deaf - John Patrick Doherty

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16 Feb 2025 - "If our hope in Christ has been for this life only"

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Coram Fratribus

7. Sunday C

1 Samuel 26.2-23: I would not raise my hand against the Lord’s Anointed.
1 Corinthians 15.45-49: We will be modelled on the heavenly Man.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
Today’s collect bids us accomplish in word and deed that which is pleasing to Read More

Coram Fratribus

Give God Time

Genesis 8.6-22: The dove Noah sent out found no place to set her foot.
Mark 8.22-26: He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village.
When, after the flood, the waters receded from the earth, the Read More

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Monica Mondo

Monica Mondo’s weekly programme Soul is an institution in Italian television. I was honoured to be asked to be Monica’s guest recently. Our conversation was broadcast this weekend. You can find it here (in Italian).
In the Book of Daniel, the prophet Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 8

Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
An Read More

Coram Fratribus

7. Sunday C 1 Samuel 26.2-23: I would not raise my hand against the Lord’s Anointed.
1 Corinthians 15.45-49: We will be modelled on the heavenly Man.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
Today’s collect bids us accomplish in word and deed that which is pleasing to God. All of us wish to do that, in principle. But how?
The collect tells us: by constantly keeping in mind rationabilia — ‘semper rationabilia meditantes’. The Latin ratio gives us our word ‘rational’, which has to do with reason. Think of John Paul II’s encyclical from 1998, Fides et ratio, an essential text it is good to re-read from time to time.
The pope insists that faith and reason presuppose each other. Both issue from God’s Word. We who have faith, must comprehend what we believe in. Only in this way will we bear witness comprehensibly.
Likewise, reason needs to be perfected by faith in order to let us reach the depth of insight, so to intuit, not only how the universe works, but what the universe means. In this regard we often fall short.
For us, now, reason has to a large extent become a synonym for reasonableness, which we think of as calculable. When we speak of acting reasonably, don’t we tend to speak of action that is to our advantage? It isn’t reasonable to invest in shares that will lose value.
Precisely these days we ought to think carefully about that which is presented to us as ‘reasonable’. We are daily faced with pretensions to a new world order resting on the notion that a ‘reasonable’ solution to global tension is businesslike. It presupposes that everything, and everyone, has a price. What counts is to work out how much you are willing to spend.
We must be conscious of where such ‘reasonableness’ can lead, not least when we are no longer one of the negotiating parties at table, but the negotiated object — for a true businessman sees neither peoples nor persons, only objects of relative worth.
For us Christians, reasonable behaviour is steered by other criteria. We view purely pragmatic reason critically. We know from experience, painful experience, how ready we human beings are to use ‘reason’ as a means to justify ourselves. What a Christian wishes is to see the world with God’s eyes, in the light of a reason that transcends our own, conforming us to truth. For us the criterion of action and decision-making is the Word of God, his Logos, incarnate of the Virgin Mary. Christian reason is about putting on the mind of Christ.
Today’s Gospel shows us how far removed this mindset is from calculating self-interest.
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.
Is this not bonkers? Where would society go, should the offended sit around and blow kisses at offenders, should the violated bow down in reverence before their attackers? Before we indignantly shut our Bible with a bang, though, let us consider what our Lord is actually saying.
The first thing we must establish is this: Justice is a Biblical imperative. Bullies receive short shrift in Scripture, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Apocalypse. The Lord casts the mighty down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly; he gives food to the hungry; sends the rich empty away. Daily we repeat these promises when we sing Mary’s Magnificat at vespers. The revolutionary aspect of Christianity is real. But the revolution must be guided by light, not darkness. How often has history not shown that an oppressed man or woman, once in possession of power, turns in turn into a brutal oppressor? Bitterness and hatred blind us, poisoning even our noblest purposes.
That is why Christ bids us drive hatred out of our hearts. He bids us this who, innocently crucified, prayed: ‘Father, forgive them!’ And remember: ‘He who says, “I am in him”‘, who wishes to live in Christ, ‘must walk as Jesus walked’. Praying for his enemies, Jesus did not simply cancel their misdeed. Any sin, any act of violence, leaves a wound that must be repaired. Tradition tells us that one of the soldiers keeping watch on Calvary came to faith when Jesus died. This soldier, Longinus, spent the remainder of his life doing penance. The Lord’s grace, his love shown to an objective foe, illumined this Roman centurion as to his own injustice.
To love our enemies, to do well to those who hate us, is an unsentimental business. It is not a matter of warm feelings. It is a matter of wishing that the blind be given sight, that the lost be saved. In order thereby to extract the sting of hatred from our heart.
Let me give you a little example from experience. Ten years ago I was conducting a visitation in Cameroon. A long, tiring day had come to an end. We had sung compline. I had gone to bed. Then I suddenly heard a great noise of people shouting. It went on and on. Indignant, I thought: ‘Who on earth is in charge here?’ Then I realised: I am in charge here.
I got out of bed, put my habit on, went into the cloister. A brother was lying there, bleeding from his head. He had been attacked with a bottle. Another brother had been shot through the chest: he was already on his way to hospital. The two of them had been attacked by bandits. These armed people were still hiding in the woods surrounding us, in the middle of the countryside.
I sent the most valiant monks out to keep watch. I gathered the others in church to pray for our shot brother’s survival. There, before the Body of the Lord, I felt my own anxiety. I was distracted, angry. Then I suddenly heard one of the monks pray aloud: ‘Lord, look graciously on these men of violence! Show them your love, Lord! Let them not be lost!’ I admit that my own thoughts were in another register; but I realised what it means to respond as a Christian even when exposed and at risk.
To call down God’s life-giving power on those who serve the cause of death, to nurture a hope that goes far beyond what is reasonable: this is what it means to love one’s enemies, to begin to be a Christian. It is a prayer, and a form of reason, our world today needs badly. Amen.
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus,
ut, semper rationabilia meditantes,
quæ tibi sunt placita, et dictis exsequamur et factis.

Mathias Grünewald’s account of Jesus’s Passion with the Mother of God, Saint John, the holy women – and Longinus, the solider who had pierced Christ’s side and who underneath the cross found faith.

Coram Fratribus

Give God Time Genesis 8.6-22: The dove Noah sent out found no place to set her foot.
Mark 8.22-26: He took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village.
When, after the flood, the waters receded from the earth, the process took time. God did not pull the plug to drain the planet as if it were a bathtub. He let the waters draw back following a natural rhythm, patiently re-establishing boundaries set on the third day of creation.
He tends to proceed likewise when, from our lives, he drives away chaos and infirmity.
We have heard about Jesus’s encounter with the blind man of Bethsaida. Note the courtesy of the proceedings. Jesus takes the man’s hand, a gentle gesture, and leads him away from the crowd. The intimate process of healing must take place confidentially, away from curious eyes.
The incarnate Word of God, in whose image man was made, applied his life-breath to the man’s eyes in the form of spittle, letting his hands (‘his sacred hands’ as we say in the Roman canon), rest on them a while. Thus the restoration of sight begins. It passes through stages, letting the man get used to engaging with reality afresh.
Is it not often the case that we, healed of an ill that has plagued us, feel, in addition to relief, a kind of bereavement?
We can come to identify ourselves so fully in terms of an infirmity that we do not know, when it goes, who we are. We need time to find out. Perhaps we have then, like the man from Bethsaida, to stay outside the village a while, alone with ourselves before God, in order to rediscover our place in the world, and our task.
For God heals us for a purpose. Having stood before him blind crying, ‘Lord, that I may see’, we must first of all let let him act freely, applying his remedies. Then we must learn to ask, our sight restored, ‘Lord, what would you have me do, where do you have need of me?’
Christ healing the blind man. Statue from the cloisters of the cathedral of Burgos.

Coram Fratribus

Charles V The resignation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1556 is the stuff of myths. He, one of the modern world’s most powerful rulers, withdrew to the monastery of Yuste in Extramadura, where he hunted and fished and rode his horse practically into his apartment, yet lived a retired, penitent, prayerful life, with a view onto the Hieronymite monks’ high altar from his bedroom. The mere idea that absolute power might in fact be relative, subject to a higher good and a higher aspiration, challenges us – and is a salutary subject for reflection in the world right now. August von Platen-Hallermünde wrote in a poem dramatising Charles’s retirement: ‘The head that stoops unto the scissors now/Under the weight of many crowns did bow.’ The tonsuring may be a legend. The image remains pertinently real, immortal. The German text is here.
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Von-Platen-Karl-V.m4a

Coram Fratribus

Conversation with Monica Mondo Monica Mondo’s weekly programme Soul is an institution in Italian television. I was honoured to be asked to be Monica’s guest recently. Our conversation was broadcast this weekend. You can find it here (in Italian).
In the Book of Daniel, the prophet is referred to as vir desideriorum, a man of desires. This image has always represented the archetype of the monk; it is not less the archetype of the apostles, and of every Christian.
For a full list of previous broadcasts, follow this link.

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 8 Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
An elder said: ‘Let us practise meekness and forbearance and longanimity and love. For these are the things that make a monk.’ He further said: ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ [horos christianou mimēsis Christou].’
You know the old maxim, ‘The habit does not make the monk’. Here we are told what does. These sayings are typical of the Fathers’ economy of style. We must turn them over in our mind carefully to draw out the sense they carry. As foreign readers we are up, too, against challenges posed by translation. Since the Fathers used words sparingly, their choice is significant. It will be worthwhile to pause over a few specific terms.
To start from the end: when I put in my translation, ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ’, I paraphrased a little. I saw no other way. The saying in Greek is more elegant and denser. It juxtaposes two parallel formulations. First it speaks of horos christianou. A horos is an outward boundary. The horos of South Wales is the Bristol Channel. We get the image of the Christian as a formless landmass bounded by a demarcation line that gives him or her definitive shape, territorial integrity. This demarcation line is defined as mimēsis Christou. The word mimesis is now well established as part of the English language. We can responsibly render it by ‘imitation’, as long as we do not think of ‘imitate’ as ‘ape’. Mimetic imitation stands for the interiorisation of a pattern; mimesis conditions, potentially transforms, personality. What constitutes a Christian, what defines him or her in soul, mind, and body, is Christlike life, life in Christ. Our constant goal is this, nothing less.
Four qualities are listed as expressions of this kind of life. The first sounds hopeless. We have made of the word ‘meek’ a term almost of abuse. So let us remember: the term in Greek is that of the third beatitude, of those who will inherit the earth. This word’s resonance is wonderful, in fact. It suggests kind affability, clemency, serenity, characteristics born of strength, not weakness. We might grasp the sense of it best by way of an example. I think of a passage in the life of St Silouan of Athos, born in 1866. One day, while he was still a youth, he was out harvesting with his father. It was a Friday. It was the boy’s turn to prepare the midday meal.
Forgetting that it was Friday, he prepared a dish of pork for their lunch, and they all ate of it. Six months later, on a feast-day in winter, [his] father turned to him with a soft smile and said: ‘Son, do you remember how you gave us pork to eat that Friday in the fields? I ate it but, you know, it tasted like carrion.’ ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me at the time?’ ‘I didn’t want to upset you, son.’
This is an example of meekness: readiness to swallow a grievance and to retain a correction for months in order to deliver it peacefully and for it to be heard in peace. Silouan, a luminous paragon of monastic virtue, truly a modern Desert Father, said late in life: ’I have never reached my father’s stature. He was quite illiterate: he even used to make a mistake in the Lord’s Prayer which he had learned by listening in church. But he was a man who was gentle and wise.’ We are called to be like that.
The second quality I have called ‘forbearance’. In Greek it is anexikakía, literally: ‘strength to endure bad things’. Such strength is acquired through a right perspective. It is a curious fact that grand Byzantine emperors carried as part of their ornaments an object called anexikakía. On state occasions they carried it in their right hand while their left held the sceptre. The anexikakía was a cylindrical, purple silk pouch that contained a handful of dust, a symbol of its bearer’s transience. The emperor carried it as a reminder that status is fickle, that he himself would one day return to dust. To bear current tribulation, or heavy duty, with courage, aware that all flesh is grass, but that God’ s gracious promise endures: this is forbearance.
‘Longanimity’ comes next. I could have put ‘patience’, but opted for the Latinate, admittedly awkwarder term because it renders an element explicit in the Greek makrothumía. The word thumos stands for temper; makros means broad. A broad-tempered person is no longer a slave to his or her moods of the moment. He or she has learnt to contain a kind of temperamental extension allowing dust to settle, passions to cool, before what is inwardly felt is articulated in a word or action. Longanimity is connected with magnanimity. People who have learnt to structure their personality in this way become necessarily generous, and pleasant company.
The fourth quality is love, agapē. Self-control is no end in itself. It is a means to prepare oneself for gracious encounters, to be an agent of communion. We read in John’s First Epistle: ‘Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’ Life in Christ, mimēsis Christou, stands for entry into a divine mode of being. For all their devotion to the Passion and trust in the power of Christ’s Cross, the Fathers never forgot that the finality of human life is participation in God’s loving nature. That is why their words, even when they are stern, are light, and full of light.
The horos of South Wales! view towards Nash Point.

The Holy Rosary will be recited in St Peter’s Square, Rome, at 9pm Rome time - 8pm Irish time - for the health of Pope Francis and all who are sick.
Please join online via Vatican YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/live/z5zjiFNne_c?si=gRGGTDuglwwyJ-AK…
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MUNSTER! We are so happy to announce our spring Munster retreat will be 7th - 9th March in Knockadoon camp Co.Cork!
Registration is open now! 🧡 http://youth2000.ie/retreats/upcoming-retreats/
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Posted: 18 hours ago

Pope to deacons: ‘Be apostles of forgiveness and selfless servants’ - Vatican News Celebrating Holy Mass for the Jubilee of Deacons, Archbishop Rino Fisichella reads Pope Francis's homily in which he encourages deacons to be apostles ... 8 Likes

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Tonight we keep Pope Francis in our prayers, as he remains in a critical condition in hospital in Rome.
We offer our prayers in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You in the unity Read More 1 Comments

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Posted: Yesterday

Pilgrims of Hope 2025 - Jubilee Conversations

Hosting a Jubilee Conversation in your parish

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

Upcoming courses at the Dominican Retreat Centre, Tallaght

Chaplain for the Deaf Community in Munster - John Patrick Doherty

Chaplain for the Deaf Community Munster

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