Category: Abbey | Latest News

Visitors to the Abbey cannot but notice the word ‘PAX’ over the castle archway, an invitation and hope that all may find, experience and dwell in peace in our monastery. A longer version of this Latin motto for the Benedictines is ‘pax inter spinas’, meaning ‘peace among thorns.’

Much like Saint Benedict himself, we are living in a thorny time. The prickly days of our founder saw him seek refuge from the decadence of Rome and the collapse of its Empire, whilst in our time we find ourselves haunted by the memory of pandemic, appalled by scenes of intercommunal violence on our island, dismayed by political instability across the ocean, and concerned by the bloody conflicts raging in Europe and the Middle East.

The temptation – especially for monks – is to pull up the drawbridge and keep the problems of the world at the gate. It’s not just the chaos of the world that we sometimes wish to flee from, but also growing trends such as secularism, moral relativism and hostility to the Christian faith. In such a scenario, some advise detachment from the world and rejection of our popular culture, with the American conservative writer Rod Dreher going as far to ask:

‘could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again?’ [1]

Dreher goes on to propose small communities exile themselves from the popular culture in order to construct their own counterculture of shared Christian life, values, and worship.

Appealing as it might sound, such a course of action isn’t an option for those of us who are called to be a leaven of the Gospel in the world around us. Benedictine life was forged in the chaos of the Roman Empire’s collapse, and whilst it was countercultural it was never meant to be escapist. Indeed, according to Cardinal Basil Hume OSB, there has always been a tension on the question of whether the monk ‘is a person who withdraws into the desert to pray and be alone with God, or is he someone who goes out into the marketplace to mingle with and serve the people?’ [2]

Monastic life isn’t a call to isolation, but rather to presence: a stable, faithful presence in the midst of the world’s suffering, questions, and hopes. The monastery is not so much an ark set adrift from society, but a lighthouse rooted on the shore — lit not for our own sake, but to guide others through storm and darkness, and to serve the world around by our prayer and work.

It may be for this very reason that Abbot Columba McCann OSB recognised: ‘the worst days of the pandemic brought home to us just how interconnected we are on our planet, even at a spiritual level. Part of our task as monks today is to keep rediscovering what it is we bring to the Church and the world, and what God wishes to bring to others through us.’ [3]

Living in the Middle East these past four years, I’ve come to witness first-hand the thorns of this region and the need to seek, establish and share peace between these prickles. Monasteries have always sought to be places of peace, order, and communion that ripple outward, and thus it seems our task as Benedictines today might be to take seriously the intention of our motto, ‘pax inter spinas’, and dwell among the thorns of our time, offering a witness of peace to a world badly needing it.

The ‘PAX’ we seek is peace with God, with ourselves, with our brethren, and with the world around us. Amidst the thorns of his life, and the thorns of his community and the world outside, the monk seeks peace and radiates it according to the instruction of Saint Benedict: ‘let peace be your quest and aim.’ [4]

We all live amidst thorns of one sort or another, and Saint Benedict has provided us with a model so that we may dwell in peace among them. To live ‘pax inter spinas’ is to refuse to despair, to persist in love, and to trust that even in the most tangled and bloodied places of our world, peace can take root.

May all who pass under the archway into our Abbey find peace, and have the courage to carry that peace beyond our walls.

Saint Benedict, pray for us.

Justin Robinson OSB

[1] Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 12.

[2] Basil Hume, Searching for God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 9.

[3] Columba McCann, “Abbot Columba receives abbatial blessing.” Glenstal Abbey, November 2024. https://glenstal.com/abbot-columba-receives-abbatial-blessing/. Accessed 22 June 2025.

[4] Saint Benedict in Timothy Fry, ed. The Rule of St. Benedict in English (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1982), 16.

There was nobody more surprised than I was by the success of the Glenstal Book of Prayer nearly a quarter of a century ago. I was flicking through the Ampleforth Prayer Book in our tiny monastery shop when FatherPeter Gilfedder, then in charge, chided me, “It’s time we had our own prayer book, and isn’t it time you did something useful?”

I took the bait, and a committee went to work to produce the Glenstal Book of Prayer in jig time. It arrived in July 2001, which is apparently the worst month for publishing a book. Yet within a week it was keeping company with John Grisham on the Bestseller List. In another week it had passed him out, reaching the top. The phone was constantly ringing, multiple interviews with radio stations followed and when ABC Australia (their equivalent of the BBC) arrived on our doorstep – drawn by a best selling prayer book in Ireland – I knew something dramatic had happened!

In the Ireland of that time, there was something in the zeitgeist that needed a prayer book. The church was reeling from scandal, losing its grip and a raw, untended, spiritual felt-sense coincided with a ripening nostalgia for an ‘old time’ prayer book. This coincidence of need and nostalgia fuelled a buying frenzy.  The book sold out and the publishers couldn’t keep pace. They ran out of books. Easons were furious – they demanded extra copies… now!

Almost a quarter of a century later, the nostalgia of 2001 has gone and now a prayer book is more likely to be considered a novelty item and prayer a vague, unfamiliar practice from a distant past. And here we go… a new edition of The Glenstal Prayerbook and with a publisher hoping for a second bonanza.

People’s attention is harder won and the competition stiffer than in 2001 – technology’s ubiquity, consumerism, and the all encompassing entertainment industry dulls our ancient spirit-hunger. The God-shaped hole is now filled with ‘stuff’ as we try to quench our nagging ‘not enoughness’ but it simply doesn’t suffice.

But we keep up appearances – it cost a fortune to get us here – and it’s way too late to jump ship with family, career, mortgage. Behind the scenes, we are busily backfilling that God-shaped hole with all kinds of spiritual bric a brac from around the world and from varied spiritual traditions. Amazon keeps the ‘stuff’ rolling in, as we do our best to spend our way out of spirit-poverty. Once again, a sort of famine stalks our land.

Our world has become “a kind of spiritual kindergarten,” says Edwin Arlington Robinson, “where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.” And in this kindergarten we spend our new found wealth developing our minds and minding our bodies in education, health, fitness – things we can measure.

Responsibility is handed over to institutions with their roll call of experts: vast universities, schools, extra-curricular courses, night courses busily at work on our minds – hospitals, primary care centres, fitness centres, sports facilities and diet centres cater for our reappropriated bodies. On the south side of Limerick, we have the ever expanding, yet always inadequate, University Hospital (UHL), while north of the Shannon, there is the huge University of Limerick campus. Cathedrals and churches, still prominent in our cities, towns and villages, are ghosts of their former selves, standing as ancient monuments to a bygone era.

The one time spirit-carers cast aside, the Spirit drops out. Those who feel a need for a spiritual life cobble together a spiritual practice; check into a yoga class, do some breath work or adopt a spiritual practice from India or elsewhere, whereas going to church or using a prayer book is not on the menu. One could argue that we are paying for this ‘dropping out’ of spirit with pervasive and growing mental health issues. The Spirit hasn’t gone anywhere and won’t be ignored – it hits back and in ways we don’t understand. “What is wrong with us,” we ask. We never had it so good for goodness sake. Cars and homes, undreamed of comfort and entertainment 24/7, holidays in the sun, weekend breaks to wherever we like. And in 2025, “I don’t want anyone telling me how to run my life, spiritual or otherwise!”

“Not much room for a prayer book here,” you may be thinking… It won’t make us feel any less lonesome inside. All a publisher can reasonably expect is a brief shelf life for a new prayer book and likely as not, John Grisham will be, once more, speeding up the bestseller chart.

And yet here we are with The Glenstal Prayerbook. Why? Because in the end we have to deal with God if we want to be who we are as human beings. The alternative, idolatry, is the oldest sin in the business – the worshipping of lifeless, tempting idols, found on our screens, in our homes and living rooms doesn’t do it. And the devil sits back and laughs – he never had it so easy! “Our world is populated with atomised ‘godlets,’”writes George Buttrick, and everyone is having a great time, on Facebook at least. But behind the scenes misery and emptiness lurks, anxiety and depression ferment. Being ‘gods’ gutters in on itself and fails us. Living out of our cramped and expensively ‘put together’ self, loneliness has become epidemic and our spirit is gasping for air, cut off from its source…

And so we must return to keeping company with God, and so we pray. A prayer book can help us. Herbert Butterfield, an Oxford historian says that prayer is more important in shaping history than war and diplomacy and more significant than technology and art. He worries about the disappearance of monks in the Protestant tradition. “If I desired to say perhaps one thing that might be remembered for a while, I would say that sometimes I wonder, at dead of night, whether, during the next fifty years, Protestantism many not be at a disadvantage because a few centuries ago, it decided to get rid of monks. Since it followed that policy, a greater responsibility falls on us to give something of ourselves to contemplation and silence and listening to the still small voice.’”

The new Glenstal Prayerbook is to help us keep company with God – to help us to pray, to help us to listen to the still, small voice calling us to life, speaking to and from the God-shaped hole, below the noise and hullabaloo of our taut, stretched and often edgy selves.

We need to listen and answer God, we need to unblock the God-shaped hole and  then, and only then, will we find peace and life – life and more life. And with our spirit nurtured, we can still rise from the dead, back from the brink…

Get your copy of The Glenstal Prayerbook here.

Simon Sleeman OSB

Abbot Christopher Dillon: We have received three very different scenes from Holy Scripture to celebrate this extraordinary feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Melchizedeck, that mysterious figure, blessing Abraham, “brought bread and wine”, we are told.

St Paul describes the scene at the Last Supper, where Jesus identifies the bread and the wine as his body and his blood in an action which we are to re-enact in his memory. And St Luke presents us with the miraculous multiplication of loaves to feed the thousands who were hanging on his words, reflecting, perhaps, the miracle of the sacrament and the generosity of its availability to all comers. 

But, “Why” you might ask, “do we need a special feast to celebrate the Eucharist, when we can celebrate it almost every day of the year?” We have just completed our celebration of Easter with Pentecost. And we followed that with the meditation on the mystery of God as the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit. Today we review the wonder of Jesus Christ’s gift to us of himself under the appearance of bread and wine. And, at the end of this week, the Church will celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a kind of summing up of the whole reality of God’s unlimited love for us and for all creation. 

Love is what it is all about; God’s love for us, so vast in its implications that it needs to be expressed from various different angles, for us to begin to understand it and to appreciate its gracious generosity. This annual review of these feasts offers us the opportunity of gaining an ever better and deeper insight into the mystery and its marvels. 

Today’s feast expresses the totality of God’s gift of self to us, his creatures, but also his beloved adopted children. Jesus gives us his very life as expressed in his body and blood, so that in this sharing of himself, we may become one with him and so be loved by the Father as the Father loves him as the Son. This is an absoluteness of intimacy which is peculiar to this sacrament and it both invites and evokes a response of astonished gratitude on our part. At the same time, it hints at the mysterious future reality which beckons at the end of this life, when we are promised, like the Good Thief, that we shall be with Jesus in Paradise, sharing God’s life, living God’s joy for all eternity. 

 More words will add nothing; we need only to reflect in silent and wondering gratitude and behave ourselves accordingly. In so doing, we will make our essential contribution to spreading God’s peace in our troubled world.

Fr. Jarek Kurek OSB: This year feels so much under the shadow of the 2025 Jubilee Year, with all our travelling to Rome, going through the Holy Door and so on.

But it should not escape our notice that it is also 1700 years after a very important council which took place in Nicaea. This was a very significant moment in the history of the Church, and so it is not by chance that this place has been chosen by our new Pope, Leo XIV, as the destination of his first papal visit.

What was the Nicaea about? 318 bishops from all around gathered to discuss the most fundamental issues of the Christian doctrine. The most lasting legacy of the assembly is what we commonly know as the Nicene Creed, the foundational statement of our faith in God as Trinity, which, with some additions, we proclaim so often in our churches.

In 325 Nicaea, which is situated in what is now the north-western part of Turkey, was a part of the Christian empire. But when Pope Leo goes there in November, he will visit a Muslim country. 

I do think it’s becoming more and more essential that we grasp the dynamics of the Christian-Muslim interreligious context. So this morning I would like us to look at the Most Holy Trinity, this key element of our belief that we are celebrating today within this frame, through the lens of a certain Benedictine abbot, called Peter the Venerable.

Why him? Because this French abbot realised, and we are talking about the 12th century, that there was an urgent need to reach out to the Muslim world, to get to know about their beliefs. So he commissioned the first translation of the Quran into Latin and also composed very important works about Islam, which includes addressing the Muslim believers themselves. 

In his dialogue with the world of Islam, he was rather outspoken, to put it mildly. And the idea that mattered to him most was precisely the concept of God as Trinity, distinctively missing in the doctrine of the Muslim faith. 

That was the first thing he dwelt upon, clearly very important to his penetrating mind. 

Now the question: do we ever reflect upon this great mystery, the mystery of the Trinity in God?

Sadly, as one contemporary theologian noted, there is nowadays a tendency to regard all the mysteries as mysterious, obscure, beyond our comprehension. So also the Trinitarian mystery has been relegated to the list of objects and concepts considered virtually useless for a practical dimension of our Christian life. This doesn’t help at all.

But how about the idea that the Trinity shouldn’t be considered only as the theoretical foundation stone of Christianity, a relic of the dim and distant past, but become the practical, concrete, and existential basis of our Christian life today? 

It is up to us, each of us attending this liturgy to make a choice. Am I interested in getting to know the deeper meaning of this mystery? Do I want to learn the truth about Trinity, as much as I can? Do I want learn more about God the Father, his Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit?

If you say yes to it, why not pay a special attention to it today while pronouncing the Creed, while it is sung by our congregation in a few minutes’ time? Why not take it up again at home, trying to penetrate the meaning of the words and their significance? 

In doing so, we will be well advised to take the powerful suggestion of Peter the Venerable given at the time to the Muslim brothers? To him the true knowledge of God should never be neglected. It must be investigated, debated and examined until the one who does not grasp it understands it.

Blessed Peter the Venerable was full of holy audacity in his attempt to penetrate the essence of God who is Trinity. May it become so also with us, may we strive to deepen our understanding of this mystery in the belief that the more we try to get it, the more it will be revealed to us, by God. 

Believe in the message of today’s Gospel, the Holy Spirit will declare those things to you.

Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman: Today is red letter day. The Holy Spirit is moving through the airwaves. You could be the person needed for a next move in plans for the universe. Each of us has been fitted with a connecting link inside our identikit. It is important to take time to look around inside yourself and find the switch; Especially if you are making life-changing decisions or sitting important exams; The help-line is there if you are humble enough to use it.

There are two ways of living in this world: on your own or in the company of those who made us. The word ‘company’ comes from the Latin ‘cum pane’ meaning ‘with bread’ – Panis Angelicus – we who eat the bread of life together are companions. Companions with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Companions with all those who have left us and who make up the company of the saints in heaven. They are all around us here this morning, we only have to reach out and touch them with our love.

The Holy Spirit is our Sat-Nav on this journey through life. The signals are often silent and always discrete. We have to listen carefully and stay awake. There is no attempt to force us or to impose. The invitation is private, privy sealed and personal. There is total respect for your free will and mine. It is always your choice, my choice. So, my advice is this: plug in; turn on; and do what you’re told. That, for me, is the recipe for happy, exciting, and meaningful life. 

‘Today, if you should hear this voice – harden not your heart.’

The annual Summer Retreat will take place on Wednesday 25th and Thursday 26th June, and we invite you to join us!

This day-long retreat gives an opportunity for prayer, reflection and renewal in the midst of the busy summer season and has been a feature of the Glenstal calendar for many decades. The theme of this year’s retreat is ‘Teach Us to Pray’ and the retreat talks will be given by members of the monastic community.

Please email events@glenstal.com or telephone 061 621005 for more information.

Just published! Get your hands on a copy of The Glenstal Prayerbook right here: http://shorturl.at/jYZkj

Fr. Simon Sleeman: A friend gave me some advice when I told him I was preaching at the Parents Day Mass. ‘Good luck with that’ he said….’I know you have a great message, a message of peace, of freedom and living without fear but, but your congregation will  have other things on their minds… BBQ’s and bacon, sunshine and showers, music and sports, prizes and awards. Here’s what you do.’ Make your introduction concise, the ending abrupt with nothing in between.” So here goes…

We are here on assignment. The Christian assignment is not about getting more, it is not about doing more or even knowing more.It is about ‘becoming more’. Bearing fruit. Fruit that will last. Growing up into the full stature of Christ.

‘Becoming more’ is not getting bigger – Pliny the elder said that the Romans when they couldn’t make a building beautiful, made it bigger. ‘Becoming more’ is not bulking up with steroids or weights.  It is not even becoming nicer… ‘Becoming more’ is, ‘growth in the sense of the other’ – be that other my neighbour, or my God. Space for the other.

Before your mind takes you down the rabbit hole of ‘do-it-yourself becoming’, or asking yourself, ‘how can I get this done with ‘just one click’?  know that this growth is the work of the Holy Spirit of God, the Divine Artist who teaches you everything – an almost impossible proposition to hear, convinced as we are, that we can self-engineer anything we want or desire.

Our assignment is to cultivate that delicate instinct that responds to the slightest movement of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives leading us to life… and then hold onto your hats.