Even after decades of Ireland’s rapid societal secularization, clergy and laypeople have cause for optimism about the renewal of the Catholic faith first brought to the Emerald Isle by St. Patrick in 432.

Dolores R. Leckey, who was founding director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for the Laity in 1977 and at the time one of the highest ranking women in the U.S. Catholic Church, died peacefully of natural causes Jan. 17 in her home in Arlington.