Mary McAleese’s case for genuine collegiality in the Church (“The centre cannot hold”, 8 March) is very welcome. But there is one problem with her argument. She rightly recognises that, as currently organised, the Synod of Bishops is “a gathering of bishop delegates from episcopal conferences around the world”. As such, it is tied to the current division of the world population into sovereign nation-states, since bishops’ conferences are based on that structure. But human beings were not always divided up this way, and today the nation-state system is creaking at the seams. Climate change and the internet, among many other factors, are disrupting it. The distribution of nuclear weapons among a few states while excluding others exacerbates the difficulty