The transfer of control of certain schools from orders to lay trusts does not mean the Church is getting out of education, a leading Bishop has said.
Such trusts, added Bishop Leo O’Reilly, President of the Bishops’ Education Committee, were “Church bodies just as much as religious congregations are”.
The Bishop was speaking at a Mass to launch of the Presentation Brothers Schools’ Trust in Cork at the weekend.
Responding to suggestions that the replacement of religious orders with lay Trusts for some schools meant that the Church was getting out of education, the Bishop said that such ideas were “off the mark”.
He continued: “The assumption was that because these Trusts are now going to be lay they are not part of the Church.
“In the past we had a problem with thinking of lay people as the Church – even though lay people make up 99 per cent of its membership.”
Only now, Bishop O’Reilly said, were we “beginning to see some of the practical fruits of that new understanding of the Church as first and foremost the People of God”
One of these practical fruits were these School Trusts held by lay people, he added.
“These Trusts are Church bodies just as much as Religious Congregations are,” Bishop O’Reilly went on. “The only difference is that their members are lay. So this transition is very similar to the earlier one, where the Christian Brothers schools in Cork diocese became Presentation schools with a separate identity.”
Far from being a sign that the Church is getting out of education, he said, the Trust and others like it were “the first shoots of a new flourishing of Catholic education under the leadership and direction of competent, dedicated and committed lay Catholic people”.