Three named to University of St. Thomas Board of Trustees

Three named to University of St. Thomas Board of Trustees

The University of St. Thomas has named George Buckley, Cardinal Pio Laghi and Father John Malone to its board of trustees.

  • Buckley is chairman, president and chief executive officer of 3M. Buckley, a native of Sheffield, England, previously held executive positions at Brunswick Corp., Emerson Electric Co., and the British Railways Board. He has served on the boards of a variety of organizations, including Black and Decker, Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Minnesota Public Radio. Last year he was named by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez to the Measuring Innovation in the 21 st Century Economy Advisory Committee. He received an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas at commencement exercises last spring.
  • Laghi is prefect emeritus of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the Vatican office that oversees Catholic education at all levels around the world. He has had a long and distinguished career in the Vatican’s diplomatic service beginning with his 1952 appointment by Pope Pius XII to the Secretariat of State. He was the first papal nuncio to the United States from 1980 to 1990.  Ordained a priest in Faenza, Italy, in 1946, he was named a cardinal in 1991. He received an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas in 1982, presided over dedication ceremonies for its Bernardi campus in Rome in 2000 and chaired the university’s School of Law board from 2001 to 2004.
  • Malone is the affable retired pastor of the Church of the Assumption in downtown St. Paul and a retired member of the faculty of St. Thomas, where he taught business law for more than 25 years. Ordained a priest in 1967, he earned his juris doctorate from William Mitchell College of Law in 1974. A longtime provider of pro bono legal assistance for needy clients, he later became chaplain of the St. Thomas School of Law. He has served many organizations, including Clare House, the Marian Center, the Jeremiah Program, the Dorothy Day Center and the Little Sisters of the Poor. He received the Ramsey County Bar Association’s Humanitarian Award in 1999 and the St. Thomas More Award in 2004.

St. Thomas is a Catholic, coeducational university with campuses in St. Paul, Minneapolis and Owatonna, Minn., and Rome, Italy.