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Welcome

Fáilte, Welcome

to the website for the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland

Bishop William Crean

27 September 2025

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

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February 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

Caritas

A speech given at the opening of the new office of Caritas Tromsø on 12 February 2026.
“Caritas”, announces the webpage of Caritas Internationalis, is “the Church in action”. It’s a good phrase. Every Christian is called to action. Christianity can’t Read More

Coram Fratribus

Near Music The Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last week’s Dag og Tid, in connection with a review by Eva Furseth of the ‘very well composed’ Karsten exhibition currently on at the Munch Museum in Oslo: ‘Restless‘. The review points out how broad Karsten’s references are: ‘There are pointillistic works built up with splotches of colour as well as virtuosic paraphrases of known canvases by, for example, Rembrandt and Watteau; others are inspired by Van Gogh, Matisse and Cézanne.’ The Norwegian aesthetic medium is European. Furseth writes: ‘The many journeys [Karsten] undertook can seem to indicate restlessness, yet I do not find restlessness in the works themselves. What they have in common is the centrality of the composition of form, combined with a well-developed sense of colour.’ One can integrate much and refine it into original expression if one has a keen sense of form.

Coram Fratribus

Caritas A speech given at the opening of the new office of Caritas Tromsø on 12 February 2026.
“Caritas”, announces the webpage of Caritas Internationalis, is “the Church in action”. It’s a good phrase. Every Christian is called to action. Christianity can’t be privatised as ideology or a devotional project. When Christ enters public ministry, he proclaims: ‘Follow me!’ That call contains two complementary exhortations: the exhortation to ‘walk as Christ walked’, mercifully helping others, showing them careful attention; next, the exhortation to build up a community.
The crowd of individuals who followed in Christ’s footsteps were gradually formed into the colourful, complex, generous community we know as the Church.
Caritas, in is present organisational form, was founded in the 50s. Two world wars had shown people in North and South, East and West just how destructive man can be to man. One had seen the total collapse of societal order.
During that same period, the Italian chemist Primo Levi, deported to Auschwitz in 1944, sat working on a book that would be published with the title If This Is a Man in 1958. The book, presented as ‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’, is an analytical presentation of concentration-camp hell. We read in the introduction:
Many people, many nations, can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. […] It is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human fact. […] The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man.
When we consider the world we live in now, and hear the political message spouted in various quarters, it is striking that the principle, ‘every stranger is an enemy’, has gained fresh currency. The infection is spreading. Many refuse to be vaccinated.
We need Caritas, then. Caritas stand for the opposite principle. It is blessedly revolutionary. Caritas works on the conviction that every stranger can become a friend. It reminds us that ‘the stranger’ is not necessarily someone else. ‘The stranger’ can be I.
The stranger obliges me if I wish to call myself a Christian.
Shortly before he entered into his Passion, our Lord said: ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me’ (Mt 25.42-4). That is something we can’t live with. St Benedict, Father of monasticism in the West, who laid the foundation for civilisational renewal when the remains of the Roman Empire fell, prescribes that any guest turning up at the monastery, no matter where he’s from, no matter how poor and confused, should be received ‘as Christ himself’, with utmost reverence.
These are the terms on which Caritas must work. This is how Caritas becomes ‘the Church in action’.
Caritas is founded on the Gospel. In addition, Caritas is self-consciously and gratefully Catholic. What might that mean in the circumstances? The word ‘Catholic’ is Greek. We can translate it as ‘all-embracing’. To be a Catholic is to have a broad outlook that fathoms the earth and looks into heaven. Yet to be a Catholic is no less to have local roots — in a church, a parish; in sacred places and things, signs that God’s timeless grace passes through time, leaving traces.
To live and relate as a Catholic is to subsist in tension. The Catholic community is grounded in specific soil. It wishes, following the example of St Elizabeth, to give joy and comfort to people here and now. Christian charity must manifest itself palpably. To reduce it to talk is tiresome. At the same time the Catholic community knows it is part of something greater. There is no such thing as Norwegian, or, for that matter, Northern-Norwegian, Catholicism. To speak about ‘the Norwegian Catholic Church’ would be absurd. The local church represents the Catholic Church in Norway, in Tromsø, in the parish of Our Lady, or wherever, but as part of a boundless communion which is, amazingly, differentiated yet the same whether you meet it in Borneo or on Spitzbergen.
Voices in our time proclaim that we must choose between the local and the universal; that we must either extinguish all boundaries or burn all bridges. One is asked to follow one tendency. The least nod in the other direction is perceived as treason.
There’s no future in such an outlook. That has been proved before. It will be proved again.
The particularly Catholic challenge we must present to our time is about explaining, and demonstrating, that it is possible to say, with Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘Both, please’. It is possible to be a Tromsøer 100%, a Mack loyalist and a TIL supporter, while recognising that we are not self-sufficient, while hospitably opening our doors, of our house and heart, to that which and those who come to us embodying a larger context. That context may turn out to reveal the sense of our existence. It can be for a blessing.
That is the sort of open door Caritas Tromsø is to be. I congratulate all of you who have worked hard to prepare this great day. I wish you joy in your service. May it be fruitful.
Twelfth-century Spanish mural, now in The Cloisters in New York, of Christ healing the blind man.

Coram Fratribus

Time Standing Still ‘God is sweating blood. The world’s salvation is played out. And you, whoever you are, go about whistling? The contrast is immense, but recognizable. We have all experienced something of the kind: when someone we love has died, when we have received a serious diagnosis, when we are betrayed in friendship, when we have done something despicable: time seems to stand still. All our attention, all our powers of soul, are absorbed by this one, all-embracing reality; yet the world carries on regardless. We cannot fathom it. Are people around us then deaf and blind? Grief and rage can arise in us at such times as from an erupting volcano.’ From Healing Wounds, which has just come out in Polish.

Coram Fratribus

Presence The story of Benedict’s and Scholastica’s final conversation at Monte Cassino (in chapter 33 of the 2nd Book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues) shows that even the consummate saint may need a sister to put him in his place now and again. It also shows us the importance of meeting face to face. Scholastica took the evening bell seriously; she was a nun, after all. She also knew that the two of them had essential things to say to each other, and that time was short. The Lord confirmed her priority by means of bad weather. So that, too, can be a sign of celestial benediction.
We whose pockets are filled with gadgets that beep, purr, flash, and stir are constantly pulled away from where we are. Scholastica reminds us of the importance of being present, of giving priority to encounters.
It was Scholastica’s ‘greater love’, Gregory tells us, that made her prayer well-pleasing. Am I someone who loves? Do I even know what love is? Or is the word to me an abstraction? These are questions we might ask ourselves today, on Scholastica’s feast day.

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.

Sincere thanks to Bishop Crean for celebrating such a lovely Mass this evening in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Kanturk. 🙏
A special word of thanks to Canon Toby and the Kanturk & Friends Lourdes Hospitality Group for hosting the Read More 3 Likes

Posted: 11 hours ago

Photos from Cloyne Diocese's post ❤️Today we celebrate the Feast of St Valentine.
❤️St Valentine, officially known as St Valentine of Rome, is a third-century Roman saint. His heart is resides in golden box in a shrine dedicated to this saint in Whitefriar Church, Dublin. Read More 20 Likes

Posted: 15 hours ago

Photos from Parish of Blarney, Whitechurch, Waterloo & Rathpeacon's post

Posted: 23 hours ago

Cobh Parish Ash Wednesday Mass Times:
10am and 7pm in St Colman’s Cathedral
#ashwednesday 1 Likes

Posted: 23 hours ago

"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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