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

30 October 2024

My friends,

I wish to draw your attention to the new “Light a Candle” feature on the Diocesan Website.

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

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Latest Homily

8 Feb 2026 - "We don't know ourselves"

Latest Articles

February 2026
- Cloyne Diocesan Pilgrimages 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

Candlemas

We confess our faith in God as ‘Maker of heaven and earth’. God is the origin of everything. He is eternal, which is to say that he is beyond any limitation of time and space. He is Spirit, which is Read More

Coram Fratribus

Beyond Opaque ‘I have to believe that people simply are capable of whatever profound question or intuition or whatever it is that we live with, with the idea of God. And I think we do everything to distract ourselves from it. I think distraction is secondary to anxiety about the intuition that is really a profound part of experience for many, many people. I think we have that tendency to see people as less profound creatures than God made them. And on the basis of what is really a superficial response to them, we make generalisations about them – or even important decisions about them, about how to present religion to them, or whether there’s any point in trying to. I often teach the Bible to writers, and people are very interested and almost shy that they attach great importance to these texts and traditions, and yet have no approach to them. That kind of longing veils itself: it’s rare that we have the opportunity to address the profound seriousness of the human situation as it is manifested in people who are opaque to us.’ Marilynne Robinson’s lucid insight, in a conversation you can follow up here.

Coram Fratribus

Simple Words We’ve such a need for simple words like
‘bread’, ‘love’, ‘kindness’
to keep the blind from losing their way
in the dark.
We’ve such a need for silence – silence! –
in order, through the air and in our thoughts,
to hear the voice,
the murmured, modest voice,
of pigeons, ants, human beings, human hearts
and their cry of pain amid all that is
not love, not kindness, not bread.
Halina Poświatowska

Coram Fratribus

Prayer and Sleep ‘Rejoice always’, says St Paul, who adds: ‘Pray continually’ (1 These 5.16f.). The Fathers took this counsel seriously. They insisted it also applies when we are asleep. How can we pray when we sleep? The question has always interested me. I found the indication of an answer in the last issue of Vita Nostra, which traces an engaging profile of some of the foundresses of Vitorchiano. One is that of Madre Maria Gentilini (1917-81), a nun who lived immersed in the liturgy; who was graced with patience; who kept the monastery’s flower garden and made lovely bouquets for the sisters’ feasts; who had intelligently interiorised the Scriptures, living within them. The nun who was next to Madre Maria in the dormitory once heard her say in her sleep: ‘Lord, do show me how you make a carnation!’ Oh to have a heart so full of the mystery of God that it fills my consciousness, my intelligence even when my mind is not awake!

Coram Fratribus

Roma It was only after watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma that I looked up the review by Peter Bradshaw (whose analyses are always sharp) in The Guardian. I found myself agreeing with him: the film is ‘thrilling, engrossing, moving’. The male characters of significance are perfect scoundrels. Fermín’s humiliation of Cleo is terrible. All the more luminous is her dignified humanity, utterly credible. I don’t know what it means to say that Yalitza Aparicio, who plays the part, is a ‘non-professional’. Her acting is thoroughly convincing and seems connatural. There’s a weird moment in the middle of the film. During a forest fire out in the Mexican plain a man dressed as a porcupine removes his headpiece and sings, in resounding Norwegian, this song, a hymn to our mountainous homeland. I am still trying to work out what that means in the context.

Coram Fratribus

Candlemas We confess our faith in God as ‘Maker of heaven and earth’. God is the origin of everything. He is eternal, which is to say that he is beyond any limitation of time and space. He is Spirit, which is to say that he cannot be delimited by matter. God is the source of all that exists. All that exists points towards him; but no existent thing can contain him or hold him captive. There is a chasm between the world as we experience it, we creatures wounded by sin, and the ultimate Reality God constitutes.
Sacred Scripture – what a wonderful treasure it is! – tells us how our unfathomable God gradually makes himself known to his creation. He reveals himself to the patriarchs by a call that bids them transcend themselves by moving towards a new horizon and by fire that consumes their sacrifices.
He reveals himself to Moses in an unfathomable name. In the wilderness, on the way from Egypt to Canaan, he teaches the people to know him through the law, which enables a new kind of society. They glimpse him in a pillar of cloud by day, in a pillar of fire by night, a vertical axis arising from the Ark of the Covenant, making Israel lift up its heart.
When the temple is consecrated under Solomon, God’s glory descends upon it. The divine fullness the people had admired at a distance when it crowned the top of Sinai is now in their midst, in the city of David: the Lord has chosen to dwell among his people. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, each in his way, testify how wondrous God’s glory is, and how unendurable for those who have not been purified by fire.
God dwells among his people because he wants to, in order to save and sanctify them; but he remains divinely free. When the people is faithless, the glory departs. It is hopeless to try to keep God hostage. At such times of absence, faithful women and men long intensely for his return. The promise we read of in the prophecy of Malachi, ‘The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple’, corresponds to Israel’s most passionate hope.
Today it is fulfilled. Today we walk with burning candles as representatives of the believers of any age as we confess: ‘Yes, he is here; the Lord is in our midst; we have seen his glory!’
The strange thing is that it does not consume us. By his holy incarnation, by becoming a man like us, God has found a way of displaying his glory that does not overwhelm us. He adapts himself to our limitation with divine courtesy.
At Candlemas we see how God lets his saving purpose be realised over time. It happens with linear clarity and with great peace. We are asked to peaceful witnesses to his works. In the Lord Jesus God comes to his people in peace, as peace. It is given us to adore him peacefully and to let his splendour of glory burn away our violence and inner darkness.
Today the Lord comes to his temple as ‘God from God, Light from Light.’ He comes, too, as the Lamb to be slaughtered: the Church reminds us of this fact in the prayer over the offerings.
Our God is a God who pours himself out. He is almighty and at the same time immeasurably humble. That is how he makes himself known; that is how we come to know him.
Let us not forget that, by the grace of Christ’s incarnation, we are enabled to become God’s temple. He would make his dwelling in us. The Lord Jesus gives us the grace to have our sins forgiven, to do penance and to be sanctified, to live just lives. He gives us grace, too, to see the world the way it truly is, the way God wishes it to be, for our beatitude.
As today, with Simeon and Hannah, we worship the Child who will be ‘for the fall and rising of many’, let us pray especially for lucid vision to see ourselves and the world with the eyes of Jesus, on Jesus’s terms, in order, thereby, faithfully to do our bit for the revelation of his gladsome light.
Amen.

The Annual Cloyne Lourdes mass celebrating the Feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes and World Day of the Sick will take place in the 𝐂𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐈𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 in 𝐊𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐤 this coming 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐲 the 𝟏𝟑𝐭𝐡 of February at Read More 1 Comments

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