It was confirmed yesterday that the new Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor diocese is to be Mgr Noel Treanor (57), currently secretary general of the Commission of the Bishops' Conference of the European Community, a post he has held since 1993.
Mgr Treanor is a priest of Clogher diocese and from Silverstream, Co Monaghan. After attending St Mary's CBS in Monaghan and St Patrick's seminary in Maynooth he was ordained on June 13th, 1976, in St Macartan's Cathedral, Monaghan.
Since then he has spent all but five years abroad, with most of his period in Rome involving study, and his time since 1989 in Brussels spent working with the bishops' conference.
His appointment to Down and Connor, the second largest Catholic diocese in Ireland after Dublin, with a population of 317,622 Catholics, has been warmly welcomed by the Catholic primate Cardinal Seán Brady and the Bishop of Clogher, Most Rev Joseph Duffy. On his ordination as bishop Mgr Treanor will succeed Bishop Patrick Walsh who had reached retirement age.
It was also announced yesterday that the new papal nuncio to Ireland is to be Archbishop Giuseppe Leanza (65), currently papal nuncio to Bulgaria. He will succeed Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto, who is the new papal nuncio to Australia.
Archbishop Leanza was ordained in 1966 and has been in the Vatican diplomatic corps since 1972. He served in Paraguay, Uganda, and the US before taking up his first post as papal nuncio in 1990, to Haiti. Since then he has served in Zambia and Malawi, Bosnia Herzegovina, Slovenia and the Republic of Macedonia. He has been papal nuncio to Bulgaria for the past five years.