In announcing the awards last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sr Orla Treacy's work "has become a beacon of hope for girls who might otherwise be denied education and forced to enter early marriages".

Treacy received the award at the State Department in Washington, along with nine others from Bangladesh, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Montenegro, Myanmar, Peru, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.

At the awards, Treacy was commended for working to empower young women and girls in South Sudan "at great personal risk and sacrifice".

She joined other Loreto Sisters in 2006 when they were starting a new mission in Sudan.

The country was besieged by civil war, inter-clan conflict, insecurity and starvation.

They found women and girls were particularly vulnerable.

Treacy and the other Loreto Sisters started a girls' boarding school with 35 students. Within the past 10 years over 1,200 students from across the country, representing more than 64 ethnic groups, have attended the school.

Today, as the head administrator of the Loreto Rumbek Mission in Maker Kuei, Treacy oversees the girls' boarding secondary school, plus a co-educational primary school and a primary health care facility for women and children.

Treacy and her sisters have also saved many young women from forced or early marriages. They are part of a diverse multinational team of religious sisters, educators, nurses and others who share a vision for improving the lives of women and girls in the community.

Another of Treacy's achievements was to help establish a medical clinic at the boarding school to feed the students, employees and their families.

She found providing food directly affected the school's attendance rates, which improved by 95 percent.

In addition, Treacy works hard to ensure the provision of 12,000 meals per week (over 700,000 per year). This involves her and other Loreto sisters working with community members willing to risk their lives to source and transport food provisions through South Sudan's conflict areas.

These efforts, coupled with a nutrition programme for malnourished infants, have dramatically improved children's health in the region.

Source

• Herald.ie
• National Catholic Reporter
• Global Sisters Report
• Image: National Catholic Reporter

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the United States is calling on Pope Francis to clarify and repudiate any remaining legal status of what is known as the "Doctrine of Discovery".

The LCWR also wants the Pope to issue a pastoral statement to courts of settler nations, urging them to change laws derived from the doctrine.

The Doctrine of Discovery is a series of papal bulls, or decrees, which gave Christian explorers the right to lay claim to any land that was not inhabited by Christians and was available to be "discovered".

If its inhabitants could be converted, they might be spared. If not, they could be enslaved or killed.

The Doctrine of Discovery remains influential in legal circles and, since 1823, has been enshrined in US law.

It is often cited as a way of arguing that nomadic Native American Indians occupied the land, but did not own it.

In 2005, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine in a land-claim ruling against the Oneidas nation.

Late last year, 13 Catholic groups, including the Loreto sisters, officially asked the Pope to rescind the decrees.

"When I learned about it, I was horrified," said Loreto Sister Maureen Fiedler, who has sent a letter to the Pope on the subject.

Her order marked its 200th anniversary by challenging "the papal sanctioning of Christian enslavement and power over non-Christians".

US indigenous groups have sought to overturn the doctrine since at least 1984.

In its 2007 Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the United Nations condemned policies like the Doctrine of Discovery.

If the Church was to disavow the doctrine, it would remove a legal argument against tribal land claims, said Oren Lyons, a faith keeper of the Turtle clan in the Onondaga nation.

The Vatican has said that later bulls and papal apologies show the Church no longer supports the doctrine.

"The wrongs done to the indigenous people need to be honestly acknowledged," Saint John Paul II said in 1998.

He also delivered a sweeping apology in 2000 for the Church's mistreatment of groups, including indigenous peoples.

Sources

• Huffington Post
• New York Daily News
• Image: Legends of America