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Baroness Nuala O’Loan pictured with the
Students’ Union Vice-President, Eamonn Walls and College
Principal, Professor Peter Finn, at the Le Chéile Annual
Lecture
The Annual Le Chéile lecture was held in the College Hall
recently. St Mary’s were honoured to have Baroness Nuala
O’Loan deliver a lecture entitled ‘Governance: The
Challenge for Church and State’.
Nuala O’Loan’s speech began by outlining the meaning
of good governance and discussing its importance to securing confidence
and trust in society. She pointed in particular to governance
problems in Northern Ireland in relation to transfer tests between
primary and second level education. Her main comments concerned
the need to secure better levels of governance within the Catholic
Church in Ireland, especially in the wake of the on-going clergy
child abuse crisis and its mismanagement by bishops and others
in authority. She argued that a cornerstone of governance is good
communication and that the Church urgently needs to strengthen
its mechanisms for discussion and consultation between bishop
and priests, between parish clergy and parishioners and between
the bishop and the people of his diocese. She ended by noting
that the laity must play a full and proper role in the life of
the Church and that this would allow us to develop that ‘spirituality
of communion’ which Pope John Paul II had called the whole
Church at the end of the Jubilee Year 2000. |
