Ruadhán Jones
Fr Eamon Roche Personal Profile
The pandemic and lockdown have brought out many skills in lay volunteers and religious previously dormant. For some, however, it was an opportunity to build on skills they already used. Fr Eamon Roche, a former computer programmer and one of the developers of Cloyne Diocese Bl. Carlo Acutis online project, fits into the second category.
Vocation
Fr Roche was a late vocation – born in 1970, he was ordained in 2015 after six years in the seminary. His family were practising Catholics who took the Faith quite seriously and Fr Roche says there was never a time that he stopped believing. His faith flourished when he went to University College Cork (UCC) to study engineering. The work was hard and this drew him closer to the faith of his childhood.
It was in that period in my early 20s, Faith pulled me through my degree course”
“To be honest, I think my faith grew enormously when I went to college, I studied electrical engineering at UCC,” Fr Roche explains. “I found college quite hard, the studies were hard, the engineering course was quite intense. I felt I needed support basically to get me through it. It took me a while to get through, there were a number of failed exams and that, I found it difficult. It was in that period in my early 20s, faith pulled me through my degree course. I met a lot of good people in UCC at that time, the Chaplaincy was going quite well.”
After college, Fr Roche moved away from the engineering field, completing a one year diploma in higher education. He started work as a teacher of maths and English at the Christian Brothers school in Cork in the mid-1990s. Though he enjoyed the jobs he did, he never settled long in any of them. By the end of the 1990s, he was on the move again, entering the IT field. After the IT industry, Fr Roche’s life slowly began to turn more directly to the works of the Faith. In his mid-30s, he connected with Youth 2000 and became a leader in Munster for them.
Faith matters
“At that stage, I had another increase in interest in Faith matters and that grew in me,” says Fr Roche. “After two years of being leader in Youth 2000, being responsible to start up retreats and prayer meetings, at that stage I heard the call to priesthood. What happened then was that I’d start waking up every morning and the thought of priesthood would be in my mind, as if it was waiting there as a kind of a new idea every morning.
“At that stage, because I was of a certain age, I didn’t get too excited one way or the other – I didn’t fight it, I just let it grow and see if it continued to grow. And that was what happened, it just grew and it was very easy to make the call to the diocesan office for vocations. The process was quite easy after that. It seemed very natural and right, right the way through even in seminary.”
Fr Roche now works in a parish as a curate and, five years in, continues to love the work. It has given him an opportunity to combine the skills he learned in his previous jobs with his new vocation as a priest.
The area of youth catechesis is one which Fr Roche is especially drawn to and one he believes is of vital importance”
“I’m loving it, every day is wonderful. I suppose the fact that I’d been adapting to the various roles I’d played all my life, it didn’t faze me at all to adapt to parish life. With the background I’ve had, I’ve learned different things, different skills which I’ve brought to my new role.
”I have used my IT skills quite a bit. I support the IT side of the diocese, the diocesan website and the website in my last parish. Whenever there’s a project, it’s very easy for me to build a website for it. I suppose in 2020 with Covid-19, the IT skills have certainly been very useful.
“One of the highlights of my ministry would be Camp Creideamh. It means ‘Faith Camp’ or ‘Belief Camp’, so every summer for two months I run these camps for teenagers. They’re residential camps basically, we normally go to Knockadoon in East Cork. And I would run one or two of those a year, in wintertime and one day meet-ups as well. That’s something I would have an interest in then, catechetics and youth faith development.”
The area of youth catechesis is one which Fr Roche is especially drawn to and one he believes is of vital importance.
“I would identify youth catechesis as being especially important, youth ministry is a kind of general term, it’s bringing young people into the Church,” Fr Roche explains. “That is important, but I’d be more specific – I do have an attraction to youth catechesis which is a specific area in youth ministry, which I think is lacking, is needed basically to give the youth an opportunity to discover what’s in their faith.”
The new Bl. Carlo Acutis project he has undertaken with the diocese of Cloyne is an online course which fulfils both his passion and his skills.
Church life
“The idea here is to engage teenagers and their families in Church life and activity in pandemic times,” Fr Roache explains. “The focus of it is for the teenagers to get an appreciation for the life and spirituality of blessed Carlo, especially his love of the Eucharist. Every Catholic needs to develop in their faith, to learn in their faith so there’s a catechesis component for this project. For someone who’s only partially practising the Faith, it’s a chance for them to know more.”