Maureen H. O'Connell

Program Director, CENTERS Catholic Education Network to Enact and Resource Synodality

Maureen H. O'Connell is an educator, writer, and community organizer who holds a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College and a BA in History from Saint Joseph's University. She has more than 20 years of teaching and leadership experience, at Fordham University and La Salle University. She is the author of Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009), If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (Liturgical Press, 2012), Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness (Beacon Press, 2021), most recently Empowering People Through Encounter: Catholic Social Teaching and Community Organizing with Dr. Erin Brigham (Liturgical Press, 2024).

From 2022 to 2025, O’Connell served as Director of Synod and Higher Education Engagement with Discerning Deacons, a movement to discern the ministry of the deacon and possibly restore women to it through the ongoing Synod on Communion, Participation, and Mission. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Collaborative for Catholic Organizing and the Mission Committee of Cranaleith Spiritual Center, a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy. Currently she directs the CENTERS initiative at Loyola University Chicago's Institute of Pastoral Studies, a $10 million Lilly Endowment project to seed synodality in the US Church by fostering collaboration, formation and bridge building among 16 Catholic higher education institutions.