Sister Cyril Mooney, an Irish sister who changed education for impoverished children throughout India has died at age 86. / Photo credit: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Denver, Colo., Jun 28, 2023 / 11:55 am (CNA).
An Irish nun who received India’s highest civil award, the Padma Shri, for her work in education, has passed away at the age of 86.
Sister Cyril Mooney, IBVM, died Saturday, June 24, in Kolkata, India, after a long illness. She was born on July 21, 1936, in Bray, Ireland. She was a student at Loreto Convent and it was there, at the age of 13, that she felt called to become a religious sister.
In 1956, she left Ireland and started her journey by ship to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). In 1979, she finished her doctoral degree in zoology and became the principal of Loreto Day School at Sealdah, Kolkata.
Inspired to use education as a means of creating change and empowering India’s poorest population, Mooney founded the Rainbow School Program. Previously, the convent’s school only allowed the well-off to attend, but thanks to this program, their doors were opened to the poor and have helped nearly 450,000 individuals improve their circumstances.
Under the program, 700 children who attend the school pay fees, and those fees provide free schooling for 700 other children who cannot afford to pay.
“We mandated ourselves that we would take 25% of poor children every time we did admissions, and over time this moved up to 50%,” Mooney said in an interview with The Irish Times in 2015. “To help street children keep up their attendance, accommodation was provided on site in a model that has been copied by the West Bengal government.”
The nun also created a home at the school for roughly 200 street children who had no family.
Her school model inspired the entire country of India to follow suit. Since 2010, it has become mandatory for private schools to follow the 25% quota for disadvantaged students under the Right to Education Act.
Mooney recalled how “the [Indian] government said if the Loretos can do it, we can do it.”
Another initiative Mooney began was the Barefoot Teachers Training Program, which provided teacher training to young people from the slums near Kolkata who lacked the basic requirements for admission to teachers’ colleges.
Mooney and her team trained more than 7,000 teachers who were able to bring primary education to over 350,000 children with no access to education.
In 2007 she was awarded the Padma Shri Award by the Indian government. The award is one of the country’s highest civilian honors. In 2013 she received a distinguished service award, one of Ireland’s highest awards.
Mooney’s funeral took place at St. Thomas Church in Kolkata on June 27. This is the same church Mother Teresa laid in state for a week before her funeral in September 1997.
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Detroit, Mich., Jun 25, 2018 / 02:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Amid recent ecclesial efforts to combat the problem of racism, Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit released a pastoral note last week confronting the “sin of racism,” saying a mission-centric attitude is the best remedy for the harms caused by discrimination.
“Our nation’s history has many tremendous accomplishments of which we should be proud. But it also bears the stain of many years of institutional racism whereby Blacks – even after emancipation – were treated as second-class citizens or worse,” said Archbishop Vigneron in his June 18 pastoral note “Agents for the New Creation”.
“Acts of racism are sins,” he continued, noting the Archdiocese of Detroit would be confronting racism by “recommitting ourselves to becoming a community of believers – a band of joyful missionary disciples – who affirm each person’s human dignity.”
According to Vigneron, acts of racism produce three evil fruits. First, he said, racial prejudices cause tremendous harm to whom they are directed, causing a deprivation “of his inherent human dignity” which questions their “God-given value.”
Secondly, Vigneron said racism can poison other minds through its reach, causing societal damage as it is transmitted to others.
Finally, it also causes “self-inflicted harm,” since the attitude of racism disfigures an individual’s “understanding of right and wrong and obscures his ability to see truth through the light of the Gospel.”
Vigneron said the Detroit archdiocese would focus on its commitment to “being radically mission-oriented” in an effort to fight the sin of racism.
“This means that our primary purpose for existing is to preach the Gospel,” Vigneron said, adding, “our mission is to proclaim the life-changing power of Jesus Christ.”
“The Gospel illuminates not just our relationship with God but also our relationship with others. All have been created in the image and likeness of God. Each person bears within himself the very image of God,” he continued.
This misson-centric attitude, Vigneron said, means that Christ is the center of every action and that every life is entrusted to the providence of the Holy Spirit. Being transformed by the Holy Spirit, he continued, begins with each individual’s journey of repentance.
Unity in Christ “does not dissolve our differences,” he said. “Rather, it is the variety of gifts which Christ gives to the faithful through his Holy Spirit which makes his Bride, the Church, more able to reflect God’s goodness.”
The archbishop noted that as the Church has spread, “different customs and traditions consonant with the revealed faith and appropriate to local communities were developed. We see this richness expressed in the various liturgical rites which are present in our Eastern Churches.”
“The gifts of the African American faithful are a tremendous blessing to the Archdiocese of Detroit. We would be a much poorer Church without the expressions of faith through prayer, music, and personal testimony proper to the Black communities,” Vigneron said.
“And these expressions are a leaven to the Catholic Church. They are charisms which God has given to the whole Church through our African American brothers and sisters,” he continued.
The Detroit archbishop also said the only antidote to the evils of racism is Christ, and asked for the particular intercession of Blessed Solanus Casey, who was a “shining example” of how to treat others with dignity and love.
“As we seek to build a more just society – one in which we can truly say that racism has been defeated – we must begin, as Christians, with our personal commitment to Jesus Christ,” Vigneron said.
“To conclude, I particularly commend to you the memory of Blessed Solanus Casey,” Vigneron continued, encouraging his archdiocese to let Fr. Solanus “be for us still a powerful intercessor to obtain the grace from on high that we need to be agents for healing wounds of racism in our community, and to be agents of the new creation in Christ.”
Vigneron’s comments come amid recent efforts within the Church in the US to oppose racism.
The archbishop is a member of the USCCB’s ad hoc committee against racism, which was announced in August 2017 in the wake of rising racial tensions, for the purpose of promoting education, resources, communications strategies and care for victims of racism.
The committee’s chair, Bishop Shelton Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, said earlier this month at the US bishops’ spring general assembly that their work is on schedule, and a draft of a pastoral letter should be presented at the autumn general assembly held in November.
The US bishops also listened to a presentation about racism by Bryan Stevenson at their spring general assembly. Stevenson is a lawyer and the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization which advocates for equal treatment in the criminal justice system.
A fellow US archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, has also written a pastoral letter on racism recently.
“The Challenge of Racism Today” was published by Cardinal Wuerl in 2017. In the pastoral letter, he wrote that “Intolerance and racism will not go away without a concerted awareness and effort on everyone’s part. Regularly we must renew the commitment to drive it out of our hearts, our lives and our community.”
Both Cardinal Wuerl’s pastoral letter and Archbishop Vigneron’s pastoral note were fruits of diocesan synods.
Vatican City flag waiving over St. Peter’s dome – Bohumil Petrik / CNA
Rome Newsroom, May 20, 2021 / 05:30 am (CNA).
The Vatican’s Council for the Economy faces a “huge task” in its efforts to quickly bring up the Holy See’s accounting and financial transparency to international standards, according to one of its lay members.
“We are very much focused on getting those basic standards in place and making sure the information that is in front of the pope when he makes decisions is thorough, complete, and fair. And we’re not in that situation yet,” Council for the Economy member Ruth Kelly told EWTN News.
Kelly, who was Education Secretary under British Prime Minister Tony Blair and later worked for HSBC Global Asset Management, is one of seven lay people on the Vatican council overseeing the administrative and financial structures and activities of the Roman Curia, institutions of the Holy See, and Vatican City State.
The lay members work together with eight cardinals to set the budget for the Holy See’s entities and raise the level of financial transparency — something which Kelly said can pose unique challenges.
“For example, the historic legacy is very, very difficult to tackle if you take the example of, say … a place of residence through tradition in a particular part of the Vatican, or Rome, or somewhere in the world. It may be the case that no one has ever had it valued, or really thought about who legally owned it, because through customs and tradition it was obvious to what use it should be put,” she said.
“The Holy See cannot yet account for all of the investment properties that it owns specifically around Rome and in Italy. And there’s a huge task to go through to make sure it identifies properly the ownership of each — whether it’s owned by a diocese, whether it’s owned by the Vatican, whether it’s owned by a parish, or somebody else — and then to valuate it to make sure that it’s properly accounted for in the balance sheets.”
“So that’s one real area where the Holy See needs to be moved quickly up to date.”
Ruth Kelly, pictured in 2006. / skuds via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The Council for the Economy is also currently implementing an investment policy for the Vatican and “a huge training program” in financial standards for those who work in its departments and dicasteries, according to Kelly.
“I’m actually very encouraged by the steps that I’ve seen, even though there’s so much to do and so far to go,” she said.
Pope Francis established the Council for the Economy in 2014 as part of his program of financial reform. Kelly was appointed to the council for a six-year term last August along with five other women with backgrounds in banking, finance, asset management, and international law.
“There’s a real recognition that it’s now very important at the heart of the Church to have lay experts involved in overseeing the Vatican accounts and policies and so forth. And that is important, not just in its own sake, but also for the credibility of the process,” Kelly said.
“The ambition is to have international accounting standards applied in full across the Holy See,” she said. “That’s not a position which we have arrived at yet, but it is one to which we aspire.”
Kelly spoke at the webinar series, “Inspiring Trust: Church Communications and Organizational Vulnerability,” offered by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. The university is entrusted to Opus Dei, with which Kelly is associated.
“To be brutally honest about it, from my perspective of the council’s perspectives … it’s not clear how funds have been flowing and how they’ve been managed because the transparency hasn’t been there,” she said.
Kelly is adamant that “once that transparency is there, and international standards are applied, then you can start talking altogether differently about the Vatican’s role and its responsibility and how it manages money, and so forth.”
“If someone’s going to put money into the Peter’s Pence account, they need to know that that money is being well spent. And at the moment, you can’t say definitely that we can show that, but we’re well on the way I think to be able to do that before too long,” she said.
The Council of the Economy was very focused on cost restraint in setting this year’s budget, asking Vatican departments to come up with reductions in their spending, Kelly explained.
The Vatican’s budget, which already operated on a deficit, took another hit in 2020 and the beginning of 2021, when the Vatican Museums, a major source of income, was forced to close for months.
For the Holy See, the coronavirus crisis also meant collapsing market investments, uncertain income from real estate investments, and diminished contributions from the Church around the world.
“The Holy See suffered, along with every other organization, or many other organizations, in the pandemic, and that’s not surprising. And the question really for the council is how much of that is temporary and how much of that will bounce back,” she said.
“And it is the case that fundraising has been severely dented through the COVID crisis, not surprisingly, as it has been felt right throughout the Church,” she said.
“So, you know, it is one of the areas in our minds, as we think about how to restore the reputation and how to create a strong reputation for how the Holy See manages finances.”
Kelly is confident that there is a strong willingness among both the lay members and the cardinals on the council to “make an impact quickly.”
“We do expect results, very significant results, before the six years run out at the end of the council’s current term,” she said.
German Cardinal Reinhard Marx has overseen the council since its creation in 2014. Other cardinals currently on the council include Joseph Tobin of Newark; Anders Arborelius of Stockholm; Péter Erdő of Esztergom-Budapest; Odilo Scherer of São Paulo; Gérald Lacroix of Quebec; Giuseppe Petrocchi of L’Aquila; and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.
Among the lay members are German law professor Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof; Maria Kolak, president of the National Association of German Cooperative Banks; Alberto Minali, the former chief investment officer of the asset management group Eurizon; Leslie Ferrar, who was treasurer to Britain’s Prince Charles; elevator manufacturer Zardoya Otis; and Eva Castillo Sanz, who sits on the board of directors of the Spanish bank Bankia.
Kelly said: “One of the things that’s on my mind to really explore as we go forward is how the whole whistleblowing setup works in the Vatican. Because I think part of an open culture is not only financial transparency but the ability of people to raise issues in private, perhaps without being identified or only identified if they so wish.”
“Now I do know that whistleblowing happens, but I’m not yet sure that that works well enough within the Holy See, and the Vatican.”
“There is a huge way to go, but I do think the will is there at the very top to see change happen,” she said.
Respectful farewell. For people of goodwill in India’s City of Joy and beyond, the late Sister Cyril Mooney was an exemplary nun tirelessly contributing all her energies to nation-building. In Paradisum Deducant te Angeli.
Respectful farewell. For people of goodwill in India’s City of Joy and beyond, the late Sister Cyril Mooney was an exemplary nun tirelessly contributing all her energies to nation-building. In Paradisum Deducant te Angeli.