Britain and Ireland Briefing: Amoris Laetitia a fillip for divorced and remarrieds

Amoris Laetitia welcomed
Catholics who are divorced and remarried should treat the Year of Mercy as an opportunity to begin a process of discernment, Cardinal Vincent Nichols said in a pastoral letter this week. In the message, written to welcome the Pope’s apostolic exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia, Cardinal Nichols said that it was wrong to reduce the document to an argument over whether divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Communion.

But he encouraged them – and everyone in difficult circumstances – to seek guidance from a priest about “the next step in their journey”. Elsewhere in the letter, Cardinal Nichols praised the document for its sensitivity, saying that it upheld the Christian ideal of marriage while promising mercy to those who fall short.

Radical evangelisation of saint
The Master of the Dominicans, Fr Bruno Cadoré, spoke of the radical evangelisation of St Dominic at Solemn Vespers held in Westminster Cathedral last Friday, 29 April, to mark the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the Order of Preachers.

Dominican friars and nuns from across Britain as well as representatives of the order’s institutions and former institutions, including schools, were among the hundreds who attended. The Archbishop of Liverpool, Malcolm McMahon,  a Dominican, gave the homily on St Catherine of Siena, whose feast was celebrated that day. “She would not make a good Dominican today; she wasn’t obedient and she was a mystic,” he said, “but nothing is more true than her words: ‘be who Gods want you to be and set the world on fire’.”

An antiphon of the Magnificat was specially composed for the occasion by Sir James MacMillan.

Prayers for Europe
The Church of England has produced a prayer for voters ahead of the June referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Like the reflection and prayer circulated by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales last month, it is politically neutral and asks only that issues are debated with honesty and openness. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said in the past that there is no single Christian view on Europe. But Cardinal Nichols has indicated that he hopes Britain will stay in the EU, as Christian tradition believes in holding things together.

The director of the Council of Christians and Jews said last week that racism towards Jewish people is prevalent in politics, as former London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party for comments he made about Zionism in an interview.

Dr Jane Clements said that racism and anti-Semitism could be thwarted if people took to heart papal documents like Nostra Aetate. This week the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism reported an increase in violent anti-Semitic crime of 50.8 per cent in 2015, making it the worst year on record for racially motivated crimes against Jewish people.

Cafod against tax havens
The chief executives of Cafod and Christian Aid are among signatories to a letter calling on the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to clamp down on UK tax havens that they say enable corruption and secrecy. The letter, written ahead of an international anti-corruption summit in London on 12 May, warned that Britain’s reputation as a leader in the fight against corruption was on the line.

Urging greater transparency, the charity leaders called on Mr Cameron to introduce public registers of the real owners of all companies in UK tax havens like the British Virgin Islands.

They highlighted public outrage around the networks revealed in the cache of leaked documents known as the Panama Papers and said: “With such overwhelming public demand, now is the moment for you to take decisive action and secure the credibility of the UK in hosting this potentially groundbreaking summit. There can be no excuse. We offer you our full support if you choose to do so.”

An inquest jury in Preston, Lancashire, returned a verdict of accidental death on a parish priest whose body was found inside his church by parishioners arriving for morning Mass. Fr John Cribben, 76, died of serious head injuries at St Patrick’s in Walton-le-Dale in February 2015. The jury was told that Fr Cribben was most likely cleaning a high arch with a vacuum cleaner when he fell from a mezzanine roof.

Bishops back refugee call
There’s to be a fresh attempt to oblige the Government to take in unaccompanied refugee children fleeing persecution from regions including the Middle East. Last week, MPs narrowly voted down an amendment to the Immigration Bill that would have forced the Government to take in 3,000 unaccompanied children. Catholic Conservative MPs, including Sir Edward Leigh, Sir David Amess, Julian Brazier, Conor Burns and Iain Duncan Smith (above) were among those who obeyed the party whip and rejected the amendment.

Bishops have called on Parliament to back a second amendment, this time in the House of Lords, that does not put a precise figure on the number of children who would be granted asylum. The Anglican Bishop of Durham, Paul Butler, said the new amendment offered a clear way forward that even trenchant supporters of restrictive immigration rules could support. The Anglican Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines, said there was an urgent humanitarian case for taking in children who had already arrived in Europe.