17 July 2021

Praying in Ordinary Time 2021:
49, Saint Cronan’s, Roscrea

The Romanesque doorway at Saint Cronan’s Church, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, once the cathedral of a short-lived diocese (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During this time in the Church Calendar known as Ordinary Time, I am taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week, my photographs are from seven cathedrals or former cathedrals in the Diocese of Limerick and Killaloe. Earlier in this series, I have looked at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick, Saint Flannan’s Cathedral, Killaloe, and Saint Brendan’s Cathedral, Clonfert. My photographs this week are from Aghadoe, Ardfert, Emly, Gort, Kilfenora, Kilmacduagh and Roscrea.

The High Cross at the site in Roscrea (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Since my appointment as Precentor of Limerick, Killaloe and Clonfert in 2017, I have tried to visit all the cathedrals and former cathedrals in the diocese. This morning (17 July 2021), my photographs are from Saint Cronan’s Church, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, once the cathedral in the short-lived Diocese of Roscrea.

Roscrea originally stood on the ancient road that ran in part from Tara to Cashel. This location may explain why Saint Cronan founded a monastery there in the early seventh century, and why the monastic site briefly served as the episcopal seat in the short-lived Diocese of Roscrea in the 12th century.

Today, the site monastic site includes a round tower, a much-worn High Cross, an isolated Romanesque door, and a 200-year-old Church of Ireland parish church.

Both the Church of Ireland parish church and the Roman Catholic parish church in Roscrea are named Saint Cronan’s Church, in honour of the founding saint of these ecclesiastical sites, which I visited last week on my back to Co Limerick from Kilkenny.

Saint Cronan, who died in 640, is seen as the abbot-bishop and patron of the short-lived Diocese of Roscrea, which was later incorporated into the Diocese of Killaloe.

Saint Cronan was born in the territory of Ely O'Carroll, Ireland. His father’s name was Odhran, and his mother came from west Clare. After spending his youth in Connacht, he founded a number of monastic houses before returning to his native area ca 610, when he founded a monastery and school in Roscrea or ‘the wood of Cré.’

The Annals of Tigernach and the Annals of Ulster describe Saint Cronan as ‘Bishop of Nendrum.’ The Acts of Saint Cronan abound in miracles, including the legend Dimma, one of his monks, transcribing the Four Gospels without rest in a period of 40 days and 40 nights.

Saint Cronan of Roscrea is said to have died in the year 640, and his east is celebrated on 28 April.

In the confusion that followed the Synod of Rath Breasail in 1111, an attempt was made to establish an independent Diocese of Roscrea. However, there was no Bishop of Roscrea at the Synod of Kells and Mellifont in 1151, although it is later listed as one of the dioceses in the Province of the Archbishop of Cashel, probably incorporating areas that had previously been in the Diocese of Killaloe.

Isaac Ua Cuanáin, Bishop of Roscrea, died in 1161, and nNo more is heard of the Diocese of Roscrea after that. It was subsumed once again, along with the Diocese of Scattery into the Diocese of Killaloe, and the cathedral church became an Augustinian friary and later a parish church.

All that survives of the ancient monastic site are the Romanesque gable of the 12th century cathedral church, a high cross and a round tower.

The once beautiful sandstone gable is now very badly weathered from pollution and age. It includes a tangent gable, blind arcades, a doorway of three orders, with the figure of an abbot or bishop above, and rosettes. It has been compared with similar doorways in Cormac’s Chapel in Cashel and Saint Brendan’s Cathedral, Clonfert.

The distinctive 12th century High Cross displays a figure of a ‘clothed’ Christ om one side and Saint Cronan on the other.

The round tower in Roscrea is first mentioned in 1131, when it was struck by lightning.

The remainder of the church or cathedral in Roscrea was demolished in 1812, and many of the stones were used to build a new Saint Cronan’s Church of Ireland parish church.

Saint Cronan’s is a single-cell, gable-fronted parish church, with five-bay side elevations to the nave, a four-stage tower and porch at the south-west elevation, and a vestry at the south-east elevation. The original building was funded by the Board of First Fruits with a gift of £100 and a loan of £775.

This church is a fine example of early 19th-century church architecture. The features include crenellated parapets, stone pinnacles at the gable ends and on the porch, a tower with crenellations and pinnacles, diagonal buttresses, pointed-arch windows with stained glass, and a timber battened double-leaf door.

The church was designed by a Roscrea-born architect James Sheane, whose name is inscribed on a datestone in the tower. He was buried in the churchyard when he died in 1816. His other known churches and glebe houses are in Modreeny and Kilrushall, in the Diocese of Killaloe.

The porch was added around 1813 by John Bowden (d. 1822), and the church was restored in 1879 by Sir Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-1899) of Woodward and Deane.

The grounds include a graveyard and a replica high cross, enclosed by a rubble stone wall, cast iron gate and railings.

Meanwhile, the neighbouring round tower is said to have been inhabited as late as 1815.

Until the M7 motorway was built, the main road from Limerick to Dublin cut through this monastic site, between the Round Tower on one side and the Romanesque doorway and the High Cross on the other side.

Despite the motorway taking traffic out of the centre of Roscrea, this is still a busy road with a blind and sharp bend, and I have felt I was taking my life into my hands when I have tried to cross the road from the road tower to the site of the church.

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Saint Cronan’s Church, the Church of Ireland parish church in Roscrea, was built in 1812 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 12: 14-21 (NRSVA):

14 But the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.

15 When Jesus became aware of this, he departed. Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, 16and he ordered them not to make him known. 17 This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

18 ‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen,
my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.
I will put my Spirit upon him,
and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
19 He will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.
20 He will not break a bruised reed
or quench a smouldering wick
until he brings justice to victory.
21 And in his name the Gentiles will hope.’

The Round Tower in Roscrea is first mentioned in 1131 and was inhabited until 1815 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (17 July 2021) invites us to pray:

Lord, we pray for the work of international institutions in promoting and enacting justice.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

The arch of the Romanesque doorway at Saint Cronan’s Church, Roscrea, is of three orders (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

A child of the Holocaust and
a poet with a vision for
England’s place in Europe

A Holocaust memorial at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin … Tisha B’Av, beginning tomorrow evening, recalls major disasters in Jewish history, including the Holocaust (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Tomorrow evening (17 July) marks the beginning of Tisha B'Av (תִּשְׁעָה בְּאָב‎), literally the ‘Ninth of Av,’ the annual fast day in the Jewish calendar recalling many disasters in the course of Jewish history, mainly the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.

Tisha B’Av, which this year lasts throughout Sunday (18 July) is regarded as the saddest day in the Jewish calendar and it is associated with many other disasters in Jewish history.

Traditionally, the day is observed through five prohibitions, including a 25-hour fast. The Book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem, is read in synagogues. This is followed by kinot or liturgical dirges that lament the loss of the Temples and of Jerusalem and recall events such as the murder of the Ten Martyrs by the Romans, massacres of mediaeval Jewish communities during the Crusades, the expulsions of Jews from Spain by the Inquisition, and the Holocaust.

For example, Jewish tradition points out that Himmler formally received approval from the Nazis for the ‘Final Solution’ on 2 August 1941 (9 Av), and the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 23 July 1942 (9 Av).

For these and many other reasons, many religious communities mourn the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av, adding the recitation of special kinot related to the Holocaust.

During the week, I read the news that the poet Michael Horovitz had died earlier this month (7 July 2021).

He was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt on 4 April 1935. When he was two, the family managed to escape Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in 1937.

‘My father fought for Germany in WWI and received an Iron Cross for bravery,’ he would recall. ‘He was totally plugged into German society. It took one of his clients being illegally arrested and persuaded to hang himself in his cell pre-trial by the SS to bring home to him the irredeemable dead-ends that were under way.’

Avraham Horovitz was active in brokering deals to transport Jews out of Nazi Germany. But he found he was unable to practice as a lawyer in England, the family fell on hard times, and some of Michael Horovitz spent some of his formative years in abandoned farmhouses and flood-prone cottages in the Thames Valley and Home Counties as bombs rained on London.

In many ways, despite his avant garde reputation and his associations with the Beat Generation, this refugee child became a quintessential English poet. His guiding light was William Blake, the subject of his abandoned post-graduate work at Oxford. For most of his life, he inspired outsiders and raged against the machine.

In the early 60s, he was a key figure among artists, actors and bon-vivants in the Soho venues of the time, including The Establishment Club, Ronnie Scott’s and The Partisan – the café in Carlisle Street that was a constant venue for CND meetings and jazz poetry evenings.

He was instrumental in 1965 in organising the first International Poetry Incarnation at The Royal Albert Hall – the single largest poetry event ever in Britain – and his anthology Children of Albion was published by Penguin in 1969.

‘Albion was William Blake’s name for the soul of England,’ he once explained. ‘England as internationalist; England as a joining of all the nations ... as the spiritual Jerusalem. All the Albion anthologies share that Blakean impetus for internationalism.’

Much of Horovitz’s poetry is concerned with radical politics, capitalist consumer culture and the machinations of war. His magnum opus, A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth At Nillenium (2007) is an epic tirade against war and political mendacity and an astute and brilliant reworking of TS Eliot’s classic The Waste Land (1922).

In later life, he fronted the William Blake Klezmatrix band, which performed, among other things, the Nigunim and songs that filled his head from synagogue and Shabbat tables until he left home for Oxford in 1954.

Although Wolverhampton Wanderers gave their name to an anthology in 1971, he was a devoted Arsenal fan and he was a true European too. But the appalling and racist behaviour of some English fans after Sunday’s UEFA Euro final have nothing in common with his understanding of ‘the soul of England’ … ‘England as internationalist; England as a joining of all the nations … as the spiritual Jerusalem.’

A child refugee, it is probable he would never have qualified as a legal immigrant under the new legislation being introduced by Priti Patel a part of the programme of Boris Johnson’s government that continues to dismiss public actions against racism as ‘gesture politics.’

As I reflect on this Friday evening, I think of the many events that Tisha B’Av recalls, including the Holocaust, and I am reading Opening Sections of Synagogue Music, in which Michael Horovitz recalls his father’s experiences, how he was forced to flee the Holocaust, and how he retained his identity:

A sound arrests my blood, then quickens it
a pin-prick of memory that sparks a fuse
straight back to the austere blue-black stitching round the edge
of a white satin High Holy Day tallith bag
from my childhood and early teenage years
– years that I have tried to disown since as mawkishly mis-spent
on a treadmill of insincere religious postures, galley slaving
under the yoke of relentless rabbinic rules
– continually shlepping (except when I managed to skive away)
in and out of synagogue, choir practice, Hebrew classes – gruelling timetable
of duties, prayers, rehearsals, soul-searching and insatiable laws
– imagination hemmed in,
cowed – prodded like a young beast not yet ripe for slaughter
to follow, troop, parade, bleat and bray with the hated herd
– hated for its unquestioning sheep-eyed conformities.

Half a century on,
I hear again the solemn strains of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei
on the radio and recall
the trembling exultation of my father singing it – believing every word –
his impassioned tenor trills soaring from the heart
of the pristine Yom Kippur kittel
that now beshrouds his bones.

Shabbat Shalom