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to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

14 July 2025

Celebrating the World Day for Grandparents & the Elderly

Sunday 27th July 2025, National Grandparents Pilgrimage

For more information please click here

For those unable to join in person, can take part online at www.knockshrine.ie/watch

National Grandparents Pilgrimage - 27th July 2025

22 May 2025

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025, Ballyvaloo Retreat and Conference Centre, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Y21 X392

Join us for a nourishing retreat as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si' in the beautiful surroundings of Ballyvaloo. Be inspired by the richness of ecological spirituality

"May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope" (Laudato Si', 244)

€250 per person (accommodation and all meals included in price)

To register please email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Trocaire Raising Hope Retreat

13 February 2025

Cathedral drone pic original size St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh

16 January 2025

Pilgrimages for 2025

Pilgrimage to Knock
Sunday 11th May 2025. Parishes to make their own travel arrangements.

Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes 30th May - 4th June 2025
All bookings for the Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimage to Lourdes should be made through Joe Walsh Tours by telephone 01-2410800, online 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 2025.

Pilgrimages 2025

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Latest Homily

29 Jun 2025 - “I have kept the faith”

Latest Articles

July 2025
- Koinonia Cloyne
- National Grandparents Pilgrimage 2025 - Sunday 27th July
May 2025
- Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025
February 2025
- Recent picture of St. Colman's Cathedral, Cobh. Co. Cork
January 2025
- Pilgrimages for 2025
- Jubilee Pilgrimage to Assisi & Rome 25 Sep - 2 Oct 2025
October 2024
- Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral
August 2024
- Visit of the Relics of St. Bernadette to the Diocese of Cloyne
- New Appointments In The Diocese Of Cloyne - Sep 2024
July 2024
- Camp Creideamh Killarney - 7 Aug 2024

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 29

You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
An elder said regarding one Read More

Coram Fratribus

In Memoriam The latest issue of Pluscarden Benedictines, always readable, reprints Bishop Hugh‘s homily at the requiem for Fr Maurus twenty years ago, after he disappeared mysteriously. It is a beautiful, affectionate, shrewd re-reading of a remarkable life that blessed countless people. Who was Fr Maurus? An ‘energetic, self-possessed, single-minded, masterful man, sometimes severe, often hilarious, detached and so warm, rough and gruff but capable of heart-rending kindness, full of himself but never selfish, full of Christ, full of Mary, full of the Bible, full of stories, often frustrated, always content, silent and full of pithy, punchy words that went to your heart, sometimes uncannily perceptive, always with a mystery to him’ – above all one ‘visibly outstandingly faithful to prayer’. His disappearance after years of dementia, ‘already a form of disappearance’, was somehow characteristic: ‘He once said to me, I hate goodbyes’. ‘Fr Maurus, loyal as he was, was always bigger than what he did, more than what made him. He had prayed and built this community for 58 years, it was time to go to God.’ Requiescat!

Coram Fratribus

The Region Where One Loves In adolescent novels, no trespass is more dastardly than that of reading another’s intimate journal, all those entries beginning, ‘Dear Diary’, containing outpourings of contemplative hearts. There are diaries, though, written with a readership in mind, be it a future one. Such are those of A.C. Benson, son of E.W., archbishop of Canterbury, and brother of R.H., Catholic priest and apologist. A.C. decreed that his 180 personal notebooks should be locked away for fifty years post mortem. That term has long since passed: he died in 1925. D.J. Taylor recently wrote a splendid review of The Benson Diary just out, edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam. I smiled at cited character studies like those of Talbot Peel ‘in whose veins runs the blood of generations of maiden aunts’ or of a noxious brandy-swilling woman met on a train to King’s Lynn in whom A.C., as the train advanced, discerned a vulnerable person ‘so anxious & sore stricken at the perils of the journey, & so resolved to safeguard her own health & comfort’ that she needed a tot now and again. Really striking is this confession in the first person: ‘The only fine things come out of the lonely part of the mind – out of the region where one loves and hopes – the stale things come out of the place where one jostles & scores off people.’

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 29 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
An elder said regarding one of the brothers that he possessed a single Gospel; then that, having sold it and given the value of it for the feeding of the poor, he uttered this memorable sentence: ‘I have sold the very word that said to me: “Sell your possessions and give to the poor”’. […] A brother put a question to Abba Serapion, saying: ‘Tell me one word.’ The elder said: ‘What have I to say to you? You have taken what belongs to widows and orphans and put it on this window ledge.’ For he saw that it was full of books.
There is a scene in Sydney Pollacks’s Out of Africa, the story of Karen Blixen’s life in Kenya, that has haunted me since I first saw the film in a small-town cinema at the age of twelve. Astutely it touches a weakness of mine. The scene occurs in a club in Nairobi. It is Karen’s wedding day. Fresh out of Denmark, she has tied the knot with her flitting cousin Bror. Seeing him flirt with other women, she flairs what is in store for her. At nighfall, she wants to set out for her farm ‘at the foot of the Ngong Hills’, so slips upstairs to change. She finds the door of a club room open. The room is lined with bookcases. Unable to resist, Karen goes in to have a look, then is surprised by the arrival of Berkeley Cole, a friend of the room’s resident, Denys Finch Hatton, the future love of Karen’s life. The role of Karen is wonderfully played by Meryl Streep, who exclaims in a mock-Danish accent: ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m afraid… I’m afraid you’ve caught me snyooping.’ Michael Kitchen, who plays Cole, retorts, ‘Well, it’s not my room; it’s Denys’s room, and Denys won’t mind; it’s the thing about Denys, he doesn’t mind.’ Karen says: ‘He has lovely books! Does he lend them?’ Then Berkely tells this little story: ‘We had a friend, Hopworth. He got a book from Denys, and he didn’t return it. Denys was furious. I said to Denys, “You wouldn’t lose a friend for the sake of a silly book, would you?” And he said, “No! But he has, hasn’t he?”’
It happens often enough that people who generally do not cling to material things or comforts, people who do not much mind, are furiously tied to their books. Finch Hatton could manage for weeks in the bush with a single shirt, but defends with a lover’s jealousy the honour of a volume of Keats. This pattern can repeat itself in monasteries, too. A monk may get contentedly by on cold gruel, wear a tattered habit, sleep on a sagging mattress of straw; he may be gentle, patient, and kind, yet spontaneously show his teeth if anyone draws too close to his bookshelf.
There is something admirable about this. A good book is a treasure. It carries a presence. Books can be comforts in sorrow, guides in perplexity, lights in darkness. Monks have always valued books. Much monastic literature is made up of reading lists. Saint Benedict speaks for the tradition when he writes, ‘For anyone hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, there are the teachings of the Holy Fathers […]. What page, what passage of the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not the truest of guides for human life? What book of the holy Catholic Fathers does not resoundingly summon us along the true way to reach the Creator?’ Then he sets specific texts. The Fathers were not anti-intellectual. We have seen how the likes of Arsenius and Antony had cultivated minds. Evagrius was an outstanding scholar.
Monastic collectors of books enabled preservation through dark times of literature that would otherwise have been lost. In the Latin Middle Ages, an abbey’s books were kept in an armatorium, a word that means ‘arsenal’: books give us weapons we need to fight illusions and temptations. The Word made flesh, divine Intelligence incarnate, told us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. For that purpose minds must be mended and nurtured.
What Serapion condemns is not reading, but the storing of books as trophies. Our possessive tendency easily shifts from material objects to spiritual goods. Even the exalted realities given us as instruments by which to attain the truth may be turned into idols before which we pay obeisance, be it in the candle-lit austerity of a monastic cell. We may not have to follow literally the example of the monk who sold his Gospel to feed the hungry, but it should trouble us.
Do I live by the enlightenment I seek in what I read? Or do I bask in its reflected glory, hugging it as if it were a possession due to me, present in the books that adorn my own window ledge?
I think of someone I was blessed to know who provided a counterpoint to proprietorial bibliophilia. Margaret Wileman, a fine Cambridge academic, was the university’s first female head of house. In her old age this gracious woman who lived to be, like Antony, 106, established a ritual. Anyone invited to her home for lunch or tea would be asked on leaving to choose a book from her library, any book. Knowing what books had meant in Miss Wileman’s life, I was touched by this gesture. It revealed great inner freedom. Books are given us for a time, to feed and form our lives; then they are to be passed on. The call to take all we own and give it to the needy will face us all on our deathbed. It is good to get some practice in advance.

Coram Fratribus

Nightingale The ancients had an affinity for birds. Unexposed to our modern registers of fancy which let us broadcast our own voice, which let us fly, they were sensitive to birds’ fragility and strength, enchanted by the strangeness they bring near human society. I marvel at this poem in which Alcuin of York (740-804) mourns the disappearance of a nightingale that used to cheer him at night. Alcuin knew the greatest, most influential people of his age, including Charlemagne. He is said to have been the learnedest man of his generation. Yet he took the trouble to write this epitaph to a vanished wild creature. Thanks to it, we can hear the echo of its singing yet.
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Alcuin-De-Luscinia.m4a
From Mediaeval Latin Lyrics by Helen Waddell.

Coram Fratribus

Christian Politics What do Christian politics look like? The question concerns us all. I thought of it while watching this recent Q&A session in the German parliament. One question (at ’49) concerns the controversial nomination of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf as judge in the Federal Constitutional Court, emblematic of confrontations taking place in many countries throughout the western world. Mrs Brosius-Gersdorf has a stated a priori position that human dignity does not apply wherever human life exists; on that basis she supports, for example, the provision of abortion until term. In the Q&A the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who represents the Christian Democratic Union, is asked whether he can in conscience support the nomination to this critical position of an individual for whom a nine-month-old foetus two minutes before birth has no human dignity ascribable to it. The chancellor answers monosyllabically: ‘Yes’.
And I was led to reflect, with regard to the question with which I set out: Surely not like this.

Announcement!!!
Guess what? Our Season of Creation 2025 guide is ready! 🌳 💚
Pease download at these for free on the link:
https://seasonofcreation.org/ 2 Likes

Posted: Yesterday

Today we celebrate Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The Carmelite communities inherit the early hermits' devotions to Elijah and his solitary prayer, and to Mary under this title of Mount Carmel. 3 Comments

Pray for us .🙏Amen 🙏🙏Amen

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Posted: 2 days ago

Photos from Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference's post 5 Likes

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Photos from Knock Shrine's post 4 Likes

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Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Benedict. He was a sixth-century abbot who gave Christian monasticism its lasting foundation in Western Europe.
St. Benedict was declared a co-patron of Europe (along with Saints Cyril and Methodius). St. Benedict is also Read More 1 Comments

HAPPY FEASTDAY SAINT BENEDICT OF NURSIA, PRAY FOR US!!!!!
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

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Posted: Last week

National Grandparents Pilgrimage 2025 - Sunday 27th July

Celebrating the World Day for Grandparents & the Elderly

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025

Raising Hope Retreat 13th - 15th September 2025, Ballyvaloo Retreat and Conference Centre, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Y21 X392

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

Pilgrimages for 2025

Pilgrimages for 2025

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