“Jesus Was Dynamite”: Fr Eamonn Mulcahy on the Weekend That Could Change Everything

There’s a line in the middle of St Luke’s Gospel that Fr Eamonn keeps coming back to.

“I have come to bring fire to the earth,” says Jesus, “and how I wish it were blazing already.”

It’s a startling thing for Jesus to say. Not gentle. Not reassuring. Urgent, almost restless — a man on a mission who can barely wait. And for Fr Eamonn, that single verse cuts to the heart of everything he wants people to rediscover this May at Minsteracres.

“We’ve made Jesus too bland, too beige, too neutral,” he says, without apology. “If you go back to the Gospels — really go back — you’ll find he was anything but. He disrupts. He provokes. He afflicts the comfortable to wake them up.”

Fr Eamonn is not a man who deals in comfortable religion.

A Life Shaped by the World

He’s been a Spiritan priest for nearly 46 years. Originally from Manchester — “Irish parents, very simple people,” he says with warmth — he was sent to Central Africa at 24, before he’d even been ordained. No electricity. No tarmac roads. No telephone. Just a young man from suburban Manchester, dropped into a village in Congo-Brzzaville.

“When you live with people who have no running water, no regular electricity, and you experience their faith, their warmth, their energy — it shapes you,” he reflects. “You can’t be speaking the language of the Gospel and have it not connect with real life.”

He has spent years in Nigeria, Kenya, Congo, Italy, Scotland, and Ireland. He helps run a school for poor kids in the Kibera slum in Nairobi — one of the largest slums in Africa. Every Sunday in his current home parish in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, around 60 people sleeping rough on the streets come to the Parish Compassion Kitchen in for a hot dinner.

And somewhere in all of that, he has become a highly sought-after retreat leader

“I never set out to do this,” he admits. “Back in 1983, the superior at the seminary in London said: you’ve nothing to do while you wait for your Nigerian visa — will you give the annual retreat to our Seminarians (over 20 of them)? I’d never given a retreat before in my life. But people seemed to like what I had to say. And ever since, they keep on asking.”

The Problem with Familiarity

At the heart of this retreat is a challenge that Fr Eamonn believes affects almost everyone who has grown up with the Gospels: we think we know them.

“Familiarity breeds contempt,” he says bluntly. “You hear the opening line — ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho’ — and you switch off. You think: I’ve heard all this before. I know it off by heart. But you don’t. Not really.”

He wants to open the parables back up for us. All 43 of them. (Though we’ll only tackle a dozen of them during this retreat!

“Jesus was executed because he told stories,” he says. “His parables are dynamite. They are revolutionary. They reveal a completely new idea of who God is and who we are. And we’ve domesticated, tamed them.”

One of his favourite ways to illustrate the point is through numbers. “How many questions did Jesus ask in the Gospels?” he’ll put to a group. People guess. He lets them. Then he drops the answer: Jesus asks at least 307 questions.

“Jesus was always asking questions. Not providing answers — asking questions. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ And he wants you to answer alone. Not your priest, not your mother, not your tradition. You. Who do you say I am?”

And it goes deeper. The parable of the Unforgiving Servant, he explains, is not just a moral lesson about forgiveness. It’s a story of outrageous, almost comic exaggeration. The servant is forgiven a debt equivalent to a staggering amount, at least 150,000 years of wages. Then the same guy turns around and throttles a fellow servant over a paltry few pounds.

“Those things are lost on us because we don’t understand the original scale,” Fr Eamonn says. “I want to restore that scale. I want to make it come alive.”

What the Weekend Actually Looks Like

This is not a seminar. It’s not a lecture series. Fr Eamonn is clear on that.

He’s also not entirely sure we should be calling it a retreat.

“In English, retreat is a negative word,” he says. “You’re running away. You’re escaping. So actually — ” and here he pauses for comic effect — “I’m going to beg Minsteracres to remove the word retreat from the agenda. I think we should put the word assault … or attack… or advance.”

He laughs. But the point underneath the joke is serious.

“We don’t go on retreat to get away from the kids or the wife or the job. We go to face — to grow, to advance. It’s not about escaping life. It’s about stopping long enough to look at it honestly: Where am I in my relationship with God? With the people I love? With myself?”

The rhythm of the weekend will include two substantial reflective sessions each day — about an hour in the morning, about an hour in the late afternoon — with Mass, free time, and plenty of space in between. Fr Eamonn will be available one-to-one throughout the weekend for anyone who wants to talk, or share or who wants the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

“I want to give people something meaty,” he says. “Something that inspires. But this isn’t a classroom — I’m not going to bore the pants off people. I want it to be prayerful, meditative. And hopefully a little entertaining. I have been known to tell a story or two.”

He pauses. “And I am not going to put anyone on the spot. If you want to sit quietly in the corner and take it all in, you are absolutely welcome.”

Who Is This For?

Everyone, Fr Eamonn insists. Not just Catholics. Not just regular churchgoers.

“You do not need to be a Passionist — perish the thought,” he laughs. “You don’t need to be a Catholic. You don’t even need to be a Christian. Anyone searching. Anyone who wants a quiet space to face the big questions. That’s who this is for.”

The only prerequisite, as he puts it, is good faith.

“But I should warn you,” he adds, a glint of mischief in his voice. “This is not going to be a quiet walk in the park. Jesus was fire to the earth. And that’s exactly what I intend to bring.”

Fire to the Earth!
Led by Fr Eamonn Mulcahy CSSp
Friday 1st May (from 6.30pm) to Sunday 3rd May 2026 (2pm)
Minsteracres Retreat Centre, Nr Consett, County Durham, DH8 9RT
Suggested Donation: £220 (includes accommodation and meals)
Book online at minsteracres.org or call 01434 673 248