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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October 2024
- Light a Candle at St. Colman's Cathedral

Coram Fratribus

Living within Love

Jesus said to them, ‘I will ask you a question, only one; answer me and I will tell you my authority for acting like this. John’s baptism: did it come from heaven, or from man? Answer me that.’ And they Read More

Coram Fratribus

Living within Love Jesus said to them, ‘I will ask you a question, only one; answer me and I will tell you my authority for acting like this. John’s baptism: did it come from heaven, or from man? Answer me that.’ And they argued it out this way among themselves: ‘If we say from heaven, he will say, “Then why did you refuse to believe him?” But dare we say from man?’ – they had the people to fear, for everyone held that John was a real prophet. So their reply to Jesus was, ‘We do not know.’
Christ’s words (Mark 11.27-33) to the chief priests, elders, and scribes touch a question specific to the circumstances in which they were spoken. But they carry timeless resonance.
If we take them to heart, they challenge us, now, to ask: ‘What are the coordinates by which my judgements are formed? What do I hold to be true?’
In so far as I face these questions squarely, I may find myself enlightened, and possibly a little humiliated, by them.
For I may find I’m not, in fact, living terribly coherently — that I’ll affirm something as being axiomatic in one setting only, just next door, to forget all about it.
When we come to Mass, we enter the church quietly and reverently genuflect. We stand and kneel according to the rubrics. We come to holy communion whole-heartedly saying ‘Amen’ to the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
But do we then recall, once we step back into Soho, or wherever it might be, that we are in effect a walking tabernacle, supremely blessed bearers of a supremely graced Presence?
‘Keep yourselves within the love of God’, writes Saint Jude. Those are profoundly encouraging words. They tell us that we can in fact subsist within that love.
God’s love has been poured out on us. All we need to do is to let it act, collaborating with it, enjoying it.
We shall also need, of course, to abandon all sabotage, be it conscious or unconscious, of the kind we commit when we leave God’s love behind for the sake of self-love. And after all, there’s not much delight to be found in that airless room.
Why not rather be joyful and free, astounded to be loved, and so made able to love?
Follower of Maarten van Heemskerck: Christ among the Pharisees, on sale at Sotheby’s.

Coram Fratribus

Transition Liszt’s Variations on a Motif by Bach from 1862 came about in tragic circumstances: the composer was dealing with piercing personal grief. Liszt found the motif he chose to develop in the achingly beautiful sinfonia of Bach’s cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (‘Weeping, Wailing, Cares, Trembling’), structured by descending semitones. Liszt developed and stretched it in all possible directions, seeking expression for the height and depth, length and breadth of deep emotion. The theme of wailing is not given the last word, however. The final transpositions lead into a proclamatory development of the F Major chorale (‘What God does is well done’) that concludes the Bach cantata. A disposition of determined faith could hardly have been made more explicit. The Variations are a bravura piece, fit to end a recital programme. This evening, at Wigmore Hall, Alexandre Kantorow, one of our time’s finest musicians, began with it, yet managed to maintain a rising curve. It was extraordinary.
This interpretation by Balázs Fülei, though very different from Kantorow’s, is also excellent.

Coram Fratribus

Authenticity Stephen Lloyd-Moffett’s book about Bishop Meletios of Nikopolis challenges the reader wholesomely. Here’s an example: ‘The older generations, although they lost the correct conviction, maintained a compulsory surface of decency, but one which could not be imposed upon the youth. Because the youth want authenticity! And when looking at the inauthencity of their elders, they rebel. Truly, they rebel. We, as Christians, and I, as a priest and spiritual father and bishop, say to all of them: “Attain authenticity, internal authenticity, because only this will help you attain all others. Not a façade, not a mask.” The young always have something deeper. They seek authenticity. And it is a shame that they have been found without a guide.’
As the Lord said to Abraham: ‘Walk before me and be entire [הִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ לְפָנַ֖י וֶהְיֵ֥ה תָמִֽים]’ (Gen 17:1).

Coram Fratribus

A Remarkable View One could be forgiven for thinking this the portrait of a languid lady bored with her needlework yet not quite having the energy to pick up a book, preferring instead to daydream. In fact it is the right half of a large canvas portraying ‘Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth‘. The lady isn’t whiling time away. She is intently watching a young man occupied with handiwork: seated on a stool plaiting a crown of thorns, he has stung his finger, drawing blood. Once you see what the topic is, the lady looks different, full of foreboding. You notice the tears running down her cheek. This painting, which belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art, is now on display in the National Gallery’s wonderful exhibition Zurbarán. Few painters affect me as deeply. As Charlotte Higgins wrote in a review: ‘It’s impossible not to think about the very act of painting when looking at this work. Painting as an act of devotion, wonder and prayer. Painting as a means of seeing the divine. Painting as a way of imparting visions that hover between the real and the unreal, the illusory and the tangible.’

Coram Fratribus

A Sign Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, once referred to his cousin Oscar as ‘a man who taught me not to despair’. He went on: ‘I learned much from him. He gave me a deeper insight into the religion of the Old and New Testament and inculcated a need for a strict, ascetic hierarchy in all matters of mind, including everything that pertains to art, where as a major sin he considered putting the second-rate on the same level with the first-rate. Primarily, though, I listened to him as a prophet who loved people’. I thought of that description when yesterday a kind person sent me this poem, appropriate for the time after Pentecost. Czeslaw Milosz wrote it at Berkeley in 1961. I suppose he could only frame the aspiration of the final lines because he had somewhere, dimly, already known its fulfilment.
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Milosz-Veni-Creator.mp3

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