Faith-based education in North needed to promote forgiveness – Belfast nun

Faith-based education is needed in the North to promote forgiveness, justice and compassion, a Belfast-born nun and principal has said.

Her comments come as politicians and activists push for integrated – secular, State run – education in the North, calling faith-based schools “segregated” and accusing them of fostering division between Protestants and Catholics.

However, Sr Liz Smyth OP, who lived on the Falls Road in Belfast at the height of the Troubles and now teaches in a Dominican secondary school, said Catholic schools in the North are fully inclusive.

“I’ve no doubt in my mind that if anybody went to one of our [Dominican] schools in Belfast or Portstewart or any of our schools, nobody would exclude them because they are Protestant or because they’re of any other faith,” Sr Smyth told The Irish Catholic.

The Catholic school she attended, St Rose’s Dominican College in Beechmount, “wasn’t sectarian and didn’t bring me up sectarian”, she said, adding that it was a “safe place and an oasis” in the midst of the Troubles’ violence.

“I was never, ever, ever in school told to treat anybody of any other faith differently or badly,” she said.

“At a fairly young age, I realised this was not a Catholic-Protestant war, that it’s wrong to say Catholics or Protestants are Loyalist because it’s nothing to do with our religion, it’s to do with a whole lot of other issues.”

Sr Smyth, now a principal in Dominican College Ballyfermot in Dublin, said the “Christian calling of forgiveness and understanding and acceptance” have a “huge, important role to play today”.

“It’s a Catholic Faith of openness, being inclusive, and being able to stand on your own.

“If you’re strong in your own faith, then really others can’t shake it. You can be strong and still accept other people,” she continued.

“I do think the Catholic Faith does have a role to play in today’s society,” Sr Smyth said.