Welcome, Fáilte - Diocese of Cloyne

This is not a virtual candle. For those who wish to participate, a candle will be placed in the Cathedral in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament for your intentions.

For the month of November, the focus will be on remembering our deceased loved ones. “Indeed, the church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian Religion, has honoured with great respect the memory of the dead.” (Directory on Popular Piety and the liturgy, 251)

Themes will vary during the year, following to some extent the Liturgical Calendar but also including other celebrations and occasions as they arise.

Donations received will be used for the ongoing maintenance of St Colman’s Cathedral.

With gratitude always for your support and prayer.

Yours sincerely,

+ Wm. Crean
Most Rev. William Crean, D.D.,
Bishop of Cloyne.

Light a Candle at St Colman’s Cathedral

Light a Candle at St Colman's Cathedral

12 September 2024

Sunday 8th September, Mass was celebrated for the Indian Community in St. Mary’s Church, Carrigtwohill to celebrate the Birthday of Our Lady, followed by a Procession to Our Lady's Grotto and a celebration.

Munster Konkans, a community of families originating from Mangalore in South West India, and currently living in and around the Munster region, gathered together for the celebration of ‘Monthi Fest’ (Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) on Sunday, 8th September.

This is the biggest family feast of the year in the Konkan culture, and is also celebrated as a harvest festival, where the first fruits, vegetables, and grains of the season are offered to God in a gratitude for His blessings.

Carrigtwohill Parish - Mass celebrated for the Indian Community

Bringing Lourdes to the Faithful

September 15^th - 16^th 2024

The visitation of the holy relics is an opportunity to have Lourdes come to our diocese so that we can all experience the pilgrimage in Lourdes at home in Cloyne.

Petitions

There will be an opportunity for pilgrims to leave petitions and personal intentions to Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernadette.

Petitions should be written at home and brought to the churches. A petition box will be located at the Marian shrines in the churches.

Veneration of the relics ends at 9pm each evening in both churches.

Our Lady of Lourdes help our faith!

Visit of the Relics of St. Bernadette to the Diocese of Cloyne

23 August 2024

September 2024

Bishop William Crean, Bishop of Cloyne, has made the following new appointments which will come into effect on Saturday September 14th 2024.

V. Rev Jeremiah O’Riordan P.P. Donoughmore to retire and become Pastor Emeritus (P.E.)
Rev. Fr. Eamonn McCarthy, Spiritual Director, Radio Maria, Dublin, to become P.P. Donoughmore. Fr. Eamonn will also serve as Diocesan Co-ordinator of our celebration of the Jubilee Year 2025 with its theme “Spes non confundit” Hope does not disappoint.
Rev. Fr. Andrew Carvill C.C Mallow to be Administrator of Mourneabbey Parish while continuing to reside in Mallow
Rev. Fr. Brendan Mallon, Chaplain to Pobalscoil na Tríonóide, Youghal to serve as C.C. in the parish of Cloyne
V. Rev Michael Dorgan P.E. C.C. to retire and continue to reside in Ballycotton as Assistant Priest.
Rev. John Keane C.C. Macroom to serve as Assistant Priest in Youghal.
Mrs. Maureen Walsh, Sec. of the Diocese of Cloyne Safeguarding Committee to become Chairperson in succession to Mr. Willie Keane who has served in the role for 11yrs and for whose sterling leadership and commitment we are deeply indebted.

I, as Bishop, and the people of the Diocese are deeply grateful to our priests for their generosity of spirit and commitment.

I’m grateful to those involved in these new appointments. Change always involves uprooting from the familiar to new and less known people and situations. We are indebted to all for their generous spirit of service to the people of God entrusted to them.

Their ministry is a sharing in the commitment of so many people, priests, religious and lay women and men who quietly, yet so effectively, nurture faith and life in our parishes.

The Jubilee Year 2025 (Holy Year) has been designated a celebration of Hope – which never disappoints. Sadly, the lives of too many are marked by despair and darkness. Our faith enables us to be people of light. But we need each other to nurture that hope in and for one another.

We, in the Diocese of Cloyne, are blessed with the ministry of so many priests still. It is important that parish communities who have witnessed the decline in attendance wake up to loss of purpose and meaning that is taking place in and among us.

Let this Year of Jubilee be a graced time for us to put fresh heart into our families, schools and parishes.

Let us pray for those taking on new assignments. We pray the blessing of contentment upon them.

+ William Crean

Bishop of Cloyne

Further information: Contact Fr Jim Moore

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Perspective One day it’s enough,
you feel, to view the world
through the common lens
of history, content
with no vision wider
than that of the obvious.
Next day, caught by
a tumult of longing, you search
among the straw and
chaff of things for the golden
corn of meaning.
From Fr Read More

Coram Fratribus

32. Sunday B

1 Kings 17:10-16: The jar of meal was not spent.
Hebrews 9:24-28: Christ, offered once to bear the sins of many.
Mark 12:38-44: She put in everything she had, her whole living.
Our second reading expresses the heart of our Christian faith Read More

Coram Fratribus

Discovery In an interesting interview already ten years old, Tamara Rojo speaks of her first experience of ballet, at the age of five. She’d been brought into the school gymnasium out of the cold while waiting for her mother to pick her up. A dance lesson was going on: ‘There was this quietness and harmony, it felt perfect, like a world I’d never seen. I didn’t want to leave. When my mother finally came, I said: ‘But we need to stay and watch this to the end, whatever it is!’ Because I didn’t know what ballet was. I didn’t understand that ballet was a performance.’
The precocious, mysterious insight small children can have regarding their call, the way they must follow. It calls for reverence.

Coram Fratribus

32. Sunday B 1 Kings 17:10-16: The jar of meal was not spent.
Hebrews 9:24-28: Christ, offered once to bear the sins of many.
Mark 12:38-44: She put in everything she had, her whole living.
Our second reading expresses the heart of our Christian faith with density. It calls for attentive reading. The redemptive action of Christ is presented in three aspects. First, we are told he offered up himself ‘to put away sin’. With this formula, the RSV translates the Greek verb ἀτίθημι quite literally, but we may get a clearer view of what it means by considering the Vulgate’s imaged, even poetic rendering, ‘ad destitutionem peccati’. On this reading, Christ’s Passion robbed sin of its resources, rendering it ‘destitute’, with no securities to hold on to. All spiritual and existential capital pertains henceforth to Christ’s cross, in so far as we let its grace take effect in our lives; in so far, that is, as we ‘bear’ the cross and seek to be conformed to it. The second aspect of Christ’s work follows on from the first: having accomplished his mission on earth, he is at work, now, before the face of his heavenly Father, where he ‘appears on our behalf’. He is our advocate and intercessor, the one who pleads our cause. Having shared the human condition — though without sin — he knows the fragility of women and men; he knows the trials to which we are exposed, the vulnerabilities we have to negotiate. These he presents to the Father with a plea for mercy. When, at the beginning of each Mass, we turn to the Lord and plead, Kyrie eleison, we ascend towards this dialogue of compassion between Father and Son, our prayers carried up by the Spirit. This cry for pity will resound until the end of the world, when Christ, as the third aspect of redemption, returns with glory to judge the living and the dead, to ‘save those who are eagerly waiting for him’. Our great task as Christians is to position ourselves within this dynamic of expiation, intercession, and impending judgement. How do we live in such a way? That is the question we must ask, to which the other two readings of our Mass in some ways provide an answer.
Both speak of widows who gave their all. The widow of Zarephath was affected, with the rest of Israel, by a drought brought on by the Lord in retribution for the people’s idolatrous excesses under King Ahab. The widow, being just and god-fearing, suffered as an innocent, paying the price for the evil done by others. Pain endured for the wickedness others have committed is rarely ennobling. Little is more likely to induce righteous indignation bearing fruits of bitterness. The widow resists this destructive tendency. Even though the famine of the land was sent by God, she believes in God’s goodness and for his sake consents to share her last morsel of food with a stranger, in obedience to Mosaic law. This act of faith on her part (a faith we can surely call heroic) enables a miracle of grace to take place. Having given everything she had to live on, she finds that more is provided, her meal-jar and her oil-cruse filling up by divine intervention. Offering up her livelihood that someone else might live, she finds that life is bestowed, as free gift, in abundance.
The widow in the Gospel is likewise unsparing. To give glory to God and to provide for the poor of the land, she ‘put in everything she had’ as an offering to the Lord. A case could be made for a still more radical rendering. According to the Greek text, she gave ἐκ τῆς ὑστερήσεως αὐτῆς, which means literally, ‘out of her want’, ‘out of what she didn’t have’. A good financial adviser would call her reckless, irresponsible — in fact, he would probably ask that she be placed under tutelage, as being unable to administer her resources. Christ portrays the situation differently: this, he tells us, is the way to live, to give without counting the cost, to surrender ourselves as an oblation, to risk poverty, death even, to abide by the Law’s injunction of charity, to be supremely free, not only with regard to our possessions, but with regard to our life, ready to lay it down in the sure hope that, in Christ, we will take it up again. The sublimely theological vision of Hebrews becomes, by means of these examples, a lesson to live by, by which to construct our lives, individually and in common.
In the collect this week, we pray to be kept ‘from all adversity, so that, unhindered in mind and body alike, we may pursue in freedom of heart the things that are [God’s]’. Real adversity, our readings tell us, is not illness, poverty, and death, though these are bitter. Real adversity is resistance to Jesus’s call to give all, to seek our riches in things of this earth that, on the Cross, he despoiled, instead of following the oblative logic of the Passion, to be conformed to Christ and so made one with him. If we dare to adopt this perspective on life — and courage is called for! —, we find that every moment provide opportunities to make a choice for or against salvation, for or against Christ’s cause. To live in this way is demanding, but it’s the way to be set free, to be rooted in truth, in reality the way it really is — and where freedom and truth intersect, joy is never far away. May God grant us the widows’ great-souled, generous grace so that we, like them, may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.
Marc Chagall, Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta. From his ‘Desseins pour la Bible’.

Coram Fratribus

Down the Mountain A rereading of Mann’s The Magic Mountain leads George Packer to a conclusion that seems to me exact: ‘In driving our democracy into hatred, chaos, and violence we […] grant death dominion over our thoughts. We succumb to the impulse to escape our humanness. That urge, ubiquitous today, thrives in the utopian schemes of technologists who want to upload our minds into computers; in the pessimism of radical environmentalists who want us to disappear from the Earth in order to save it; in the longing of apocalyptic believers for godly retribution and cleansing; in the daily sense of inadequacy, of shame and sin, that makes us disappear into our devices. The need for political reconstruction, in this country and around the world, is as obvious as it was in Thomas Mann’s time. But Mann also knew that, to withstand our attraction to death, a decent society has to be built on a foundation deeper than politics: the belief that, somewhere between matter and divinity, we human beings, made of water, protein, and love, share a common destiny.’

Coram Fratribus

Stranezza Ostensibly the account of a writer’s block endured and overcome, Roberto Andò’s film La Stranezza develops into a kind of parable. The intensely particular becomes an image of universals: the film is really about what it means to be human; what is more, it is a humanising film. I watched it during a transatlantic flight, in the kind of half-stupor such passage induces, and am astonished to find that a number of scenes and dialogues not only remain fresh in my mind but present themselves as carriers of happiness. The ‘strangeness’ to which Luigi Pirandello is subject (a circumstance well known from the author’s life, dramatised with imaginative freedom) is at once constricting and liberating, enabling insight and representation without precedent, born of cordial encounters. Life as theatre: this is what the story is ultimately about. Gently and companionably, Andò prompts a question, addressed to each of us: And you, are you really playing your part?

7 Nov 2024 - Diocesan Assembly of Priests and Deacons, Killarney - Diocese of Cloyne https://cloynediocese.ie/failte/homilies/7-nov-2024-diocesan-assembly-of-priests-and-deacons-killarney 1 Likes

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Today we celebrate the feast of St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr.
He was Bishop of Polotz, worked for the reunion of Ukrainian Catholics. His murder by those who opposed it brought about many conversions. 4 Likes

Posted: 16 hours ago

Today November 11th we celebrate the Feast of St. Martin of Tours- Bishop of Tours, Apostle of rural Gaul, Founder of monasteries, patron of France, the poor, soldiers, conscientious objectors, tailors, and winemakers.
St. Martin of Tours pray for us. 15 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Today is the feast of The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica.
The church of St. John on the Lateran in Rome is 'Mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world'. It is the cathedral church of Read More 4 Likes