Religious Formation Ministry Programme Loreto House
Overview Team Participants Admission		July 2nd Jubilee Celebrations
Contact us Practical New Premises Home		On or about the fourth year of the pontificate of His Holiness, John Paul 11 (the latter having visited Ireland a short time previously, reflected on the experience and doubtless profited therefrom), while Ronald Reagan was president of the United States and Gorbachev had not yet been heard of and the Berlin Wall still divided the world into two great blocs Ireland being then a poor and mono-racial country, in the autumn of the year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Two there assembled in a building in Blackrock known as ‘Loreto House’ under the direction of Patricia Sweeney, Eleanor Dorgan and Brendan Staunton, supported by the Conference of Major Religious Superiors, a band of some twenty-five persons, most of the Irish, intent on preparing themselves for the ministries of religious formation and leadership thus giving birth to Loreto House. In this jubilee year, we, their heirs, supported now by the Irish Missionary Union together with past staff, past participants, supporters and friends gather to remember and give thanks. Loreto Credo We believe that the one who looks outside dreams while the one who looks inside awakens.              We believe in fidelity to the journey inwards, the journey downwards, the journey from head to heart, the journey of transformation.      We believe in the present moment where Christ is working with us to create something of beauty worthy of the Reign of God.                             We believe in continual, prayerful discernment – that our path is not given readymade, but is made by us as we walk it. We believe in continual growth and conversion of heart, continual reworking by the Great Potter, till that final moment of abandonment and transformation. We believe in the struggle to maintain our human freedom against every external or internal foe that would seek to rob it from us. We believe in the lifelong effort to become who we really are, knowing all the while that everything, even our very being, is gift received moment by moment from the hand of our gracious and loving God. We believe we are called to both a contemplative inwardness and at the same time a struggle for a more just world. We believe in the larger Cosmic Story, in our interdependence with all of creation and our responsibility as conscious beings to care for it. We believe in unrestricted table fellowship where the stranger is ever welcome. We believe we are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it. We believe in the sustaining support of the Lord and of our friends as we experience the pain of the pilgrimage into the depths towards the fullness of resurrection.