Sr Geraldine Smyth OP is from Belfast One of a family of six brought up off the Falls Road she went to St Dominic’s High School where Mary McAleese was a few years behind her.
Geraldine spent more than six years with the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts in England but eventually found the draw of the Dominican charism irresistible including ”its liturgy and its rootedness in history and tradition”. She was finally professed in the Dominican Convent Falls Road on the Feast of St Dominic in 1976.
She enrolled for a Masters at the the Irish School of Ecumenics (ISE) which became a TCD doctorate. Dr Smyth became Director of the ISE in 1994 and in the late 1990s, she led the negotiations which resulted in the integration of ISE from Milltown into Trinity College Dublin. The ISE at TCD now offers full time and part time Masters and PhD degrees in peace studies, conflict resolution and reconciliation. It has a second centre in Belfast and students can study in either city. AS a member of the Dominican Order, living in a Dublin community, she was Prioress of her international congregation (1998-2004).
She holds a first in English from University of Ulster; Masters and Ph.D degrees in Theology from Trinity College Dublin; an Honorary Doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast; and a Diploma in Transpersonal Psychotherapy and Psychosynthesis, Dublin. A member of the Board of Directors of Healing Through Remembering, Northern Ireland; formerly Chair of the International Advisory Group of the Institute of Conflict Research (INCORE) University of Ulster, and has acted as theological consultant to the World Council of Churches (projects on Justice, Peace and the integrity of Creation, and Theology of Life) and the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity (Ecumenical Formation).
Martin O’Brien from The Irish Catholic Newspaper January 30, 2014 wrote an article called The Church has to begin to listen to women’interviewed Geraldine Smyth wherein he stated:-
“Geraldine is one of those exceptionally gifted persons who barring accidents would always have risen to the top of any organisation and left a legacy of achievement. Gospel-centred, articulate, eloquent, clear thinking, and highly intelligent both emotionally and intellectually (they don’t always go together) Dr Smyth was once described in my hearing by a senior Protestant Churchman as “one of the cleverest figures in the [Irish] Catholic Church”.
“Were Dr Smyth a man there can be little doubt that all other things being equal she would be widely known as one of the most powerful voices in the Irish hierarchy if not an influential figure in the Roman Curia….. Educationalist, passionate bridge-builder, with an enviable research record in inter-Church relations, ecumenism and peace-building…”
“Dr Smyth says the type of issues that need to be addressed include “the sin of clericalism, the sin of patriarchy”. She added that she did not think the reasons for not ordaining women “stood up theologically though I think they may stand up in terms of Church discipline”. Dr Smyth said the teaching was on “very shaky anthropological and theological foundations” and was “effectively saying there are two different levels of human being”. “You are essentialising women and essentialising men into roles that have been culturally and socially determined and you are saying that God and the Holy Spirit while working through cultural and historical dynamics and patterns and realities has to stay stuck in one particular configuration of those.”
She added: “I think that is heresy.”
“Dr Smyth warned that reformed governance would not work if it meant “taking lectures from organisational theory and slapping it on ecclesial structures”. “It doesn’t work if there isn’t a more profound self-reflection and self-critique in the light of the Gospels and in the light of what we know about the human condition and the mystery of the human person.”
There was also a need to explore “what is missing from the Church, from culture and society if female experience and female approaches to pastoral care to children, to marriage are actually excluded a priori from the theologising. We are still at the level of tokenism.” Dr Smyth said the Church “is still operating out of old biological mind sets and social constructions of the human person that are highly dualistic and deeply excluding of the inherent irreducible dignity of women as created by God.”
She is deeply committed to reconciliation in the North – recognised by Queen’s University with the conferral on her of an honorary doctorate as far back as 2003.
Her own family have known the pain of that division, a cousin was murdered by the UDA in 1972.
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Research Involvements
Member of Research Project, Formative Childhoods for Peace, (School of Medicine, Yale Child Study Centre, Yale, ACEV Initiative, Turkey; Ernst Struengmann Forum, Fetzer Institute).
Founding Member (2009-) Ara Pacis Foundation: Council of Dignity, Forgiveness and Reconciliation; International Charter of Forgiveness and Reconciliation (in partnership with the Fetzer Institute and Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace, and the Nishkam Centre Birmingham; and University of Birmingham, 2014).
Select Publications:
A Way of Transformation: A Theological Evaluation of the Conciliar Process on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation, WCC 1983-1991, (Berne, 1995).
Co-editor (with Andrew Pierce, The Critical Spirit: Theology at the Crossroads of Faith and Culture, Dublin, 2003.
Glimpses of God, with Lesley Carroll, (Dublin 2010).
‘What Lies Beneath: From Purity and Power to Crisis and Kairos’, in P. Claffey, J. Egan and Marie Keenan (Eds.), Broken Faith: Why Hope Matters, Bern, 2013.
‘Forgiveness between the Theological and the Social’, in T. Eggensperger, U.Engel, A.F. Méndez Montoya (Eds.), Edward Schillebeeckx: Impulse für Theologien – Impetus Towards Theologies, Grünewald, Verlag, 2012.
‘Wisdom to Know the Difference: Reconfiguring a Theological Paradigm in the Transition to Peace in Ireland’ (with Lesley Carroll) in John O’Grady and Peter Scherle (Eds.), Ecumenics from the Rim: Explorations in Honour of John D’Arcy May (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007).
Forthcoming: ‘Body of Christ, Body of Life’ in Andrew Pierce & Oliver Schuegraf (ed.), Den Blick weiten: Wenn Ökumene den Religionen begegnet. Ecumenism Encounters the Religions. Proceedings of the 17th Academic Consultation of the Societas Oecumenica (Beihefte zur Ökumenischen Rundschau 99), Leipzig 2014).
She has contributed papers at Interfaith and Ecumenical Symposia in India, Iran, Israel, USA, Australia, Argentina, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and many European Countries on the renewal of intra- and inter-religious epistemologies and ethical traditions of overcoming violence and building theologies of peace in a plural world. Currently she is on the Editorial board of the journal, One in Christ.
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