Greg Daly
“We invented this”: Capuchin Fr Dermot Lynch being handed a cappuccino by volunteer Amanda Wolf. A Cork coffee shop will be on the coalface of Catholic evangelism in the city, writes Greg Daly
“How good, how delightful it is for all to live together like brothers,” begins Psalm 132 in the traditional Vulgate numbering, while for those committed to Catholic hospitality, Hebrews 13:2 might seem even more to the point. “Remember always to welcome strangers,” it urges, “for by doing this, some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”
The two Biblical references serve as suitable inspirations for Cork’s newest coffee shop. Brew132, which opened last Saturday, is a perhaps unlikely example of how a host of different religious orders and a batch of organisations for young Catholics can work together to shine Christ’s light in urban landscapes that can at times feel deeply hostile to Faith.
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The idea comes in part from Galway’s Christian coffee shop An Tobar Nua, according to Brew132 manager Courtney Holbrook.
“It’s a Christian cafe, basically what they do is run as a cafe, and as they get to know people they try to share their Faith story, they try to bring people to help them understand. It’s ecumenical, so not necessarily just the Catholic Church, but Christianity more generally,” she says.
Necessity has in an important way been the mother of invention where the Catholic coffee shop on Cork’s Washington Street is involved, she adds.
“It was also just the idea that there’s plenty of people who would never go inside a church, who would probably never go into a prayer meeting, who would feel very uncomfortable in that area, but who might come to a café,” she says. “They might start talking to the staff, and they might start being a little bit more open to hearing about the Gospel.”
Originally from Dallas, Texas, Courtney has been in Ireland on-and-off for about three years, having spent her first two years in the country working with NET ministries. When training alongside fellow staffers Caoimhín and Siobhan at An Tobar Nua for her new role at Brew132, she was struck by how the Galway café’s emphasis on relational ministry chimed with her previous experience at NET.
“With NET we’re also a relational ministry – we would never start off with ‘Hi have you heard of Jesus?’, but we would start by getting to know someone, getting to know their story, and seeing what their questions are – and that’s something that I definitely noticed at An Tobar Nua,” she says.
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Starting with how the Galway café makes sure that people are greeted at the door, she says this is about more than simple business. “I guess for any coffee shop that’s smart from a business perspective, but for them it’s also no, this person is a child of God and they are treated with dignity and respect from the moment they come in the door,” she says.
Fr Maurice Colgan, prior of the Dominican community at St Mary’s on the city’s Pope’s Quay, says the approach adopted from An Tobar Nua is best described as ‘pre-evangelisation’, which is about laying groundwork for people to be open to evangelisation.
“It’s very much pre-evangelisation – ‘evangelisation lite’,” he says. “The main thing is that when you’re serving a coffee people notice something different about this coffee shop, and what they should notice is a sense of Christian joy in the place.
“I don’t want to sound too pious, because I’m sure in Starbucks and Costa and all these other places the staff are very nice,” he continues, “but there has to be something different about the service and the atmosphere. There has to be something different about the atmosphere in the shop that gets people questioning.”
Just looking around the shop should make this pretty obvious, he says, explaining that one feature of the shop will be a small but distinctly Christian library.
“There’s going to be a library in it, probably about 100 books,” he says. “It’ll be mainly Catholic authors – there’ll be Dostoevsky, even though he’s Orthodox, and Lewis, and there’ll be Chesterton, Tolkien, maybe Graham Greene, people like that. That’s important, because when I say pre-evangelisation, it is still openly a Christian venue and that would be part of creating that Christian atmosphere.”
Art by Catholic artists would be another feature of the shop, Courtney explains.
“We’ve been in contact with different young Catholic artists around, so we’ve had a friend up in Donegal donate a few pieces, there’s a girl from Texas who has made a print we’re going to use for the wall – it’s very simple at the moment, but we’re hoping to have people keep donating and giving pieces to give young Catholic artists a chance to shine,” she says.
Stressing that the relational aspect of An Tobar Nua is the biggest thing about the Galway café Brew132 is hoping to emulate, Courtney hopes that the decidedly Catholic atmosphere will help pique the curiosity of young customers on their way between the city centre and University College Cork.
“It’s just down below from UCC and we’re hoping that we might get some of the university students in on their way to school, and get to know them a little bit – what they’re studying, learn their names,” she says. “And as they come in and walk around the place they might notice there’s a St Brigid’s cross on the wall, there’s a lot of Catholic books in here on the bookshelf, and hopefully they would ask us ‘hey, what’s the deal with this place?’ And then we can start a conversation that way.”
For Fr Maurice, the other key purpose of the coffee shop would be to be a kind of social hub for Cork’s young Catholics.
“I’d say the main reason is for a hub for those who are involved in Catholic groups in Cork,” he says, “but also for those who feel isolated, that they can find out about this place and feel they can come along and meet their peers, and also for people who are new to the city or indeed new to the country, that they know there’s a place that they can be directed to that they can find out about anything from accommodation to whatever, in a Catholic sort of sense, you know.”
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Given Brew132 aims to be a hub for Cork’s various Catholic groups, it’s striking that over a dozen groups have come together to support it, with younger Catholics from the city’s newer organisations running the shop and playing their part on Cork’s evangelical coalface, while orders backing the project include Augustinians, Franciscans, Capuchins, Presentation Sisters, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, Bon Secours Sisters, Dominicans and Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.
“Most of the religious orders in town have contributed to the rent for the place, but then a lot of decisions are being made by the different peer-to-peer ministries in town,” Courtney says. “Jack Ryan has been involved on behalf of the UCC Chaplaincy, we have the Dominican prayer meeting called Ignite, we have a Juventutum group in town, there’s the Youth 2000 group as well, there’s Jesus Youth, and then the lads with Night Fever have also been. All of us together are trying to make this place something that we want for our peers.”
The Church is far better understood as a family of families or even a loose network of networks than it is the carefully regimented pyramid of popular lore, and for Courtney it’s genuinely impressive to see so many of Cork’s many Catholic families coming together to create this new Catholic hub.
“I know they’ve been trying to be united for a while,” she continues. “I can’t speak too much more because this is my first year in the city, but I know that they’ve been doing different things to try to come together and I think that’s really good because we are one body, we are the Church together, and these are our friends, our co-workers, and though a lot of our ministries look pretty different in the end we’re all Catholic together. I think it’s been a good way for us even so far just to get to know one another.”
One remarkable feature of the project, Fr Maurice says, is that the various groups involved in the project all immediately saw its potential.
“Bringing the groups together has been hugely important,” he says. “First of all, there’s no doubt about it, it’s been blessed: once the idea was mentioned to either one of the religious orders or one of the youth groups, everybody got it. There was no need for PowerPoint presentations, there was no need for any further explanation. Everybody got it, and everybody saw the need. Indeed, among the religious orders in particular there was a level of excitement around the idea.”
The whole project feels blessed, he continues. “It’s taken time to find a premises, but in seeking a premises and in getting the premises, and the people who have come on board to get involved, it’s been definitely blessed and I can see it having a very fruitful future,” he says, explaining that at the moment it will be a coffee shop rather than a sit-down café, but that getting planning permission for the latter is on the agenda.
This obviously has implications for the kind of welcome and pre-evangelisation that takes place at Brew132, but Courtney thinks the important thing is to start laying the groundwork.
“For now it’s going to be very counter-based relational, it’s going to be people coming in and out, and getting to know their names,” she says. “That’s something we’re going to really be working on. Then by the time we get seating, hopefully they’ll feel comfortable enough and will feel excited about the idea that we can get a relationship started.”
One way or another, she says, there’s a lot to be said for how such a diverse range of Catholic groups in Cork have come together to build Brew132.
“I would hope that people would be inspired by this,” she says. “I know I’ve been mentioning different contributions from people from all over the country, but one thing I have enjoyed about it is that it’s almost a home-grown effort: we’ve been working together for our city, for our town.”
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With Ireland full of towns and cities where Catholic groups could similarly work together, Fr Maurice thinks there is a lot of scope for similar joint projects throughout Ireland, and that cooperation between orders and groups is vital for the Church going forward.
“I think there’s no doubt. Let’s see how this goes, and let’s see the fruit of it and the mistakes that will be made, I’m sure, along the way,” he says. Pointing out that the religious orders involved in backing this Cork project have presences in many of Ireland’s towns and cities, he says many of them would have some awareness of the project. “So it’s a matter of let us do this, let us test the waters, and see what is the best way of doing it and what works, and then let’s bring it to elsewhere, because when you have all these groups involved, it makes it so much easier.”
One way or another, says Courtney, the lessons of Brew132 could be invaluable for Catholics elsewhere in Ireland.
“I’m hoping people will be inspired by the method and be able to start something on their own in their own town,” she says. “I don’t know if we would try to expand and make a chain per se, but I suppose from an evangelisation viewpoint I’d love for people to try different things like this to reach out to people who essentially don’t know what the Catholic Faith is anymore.”