News Briefing: from Britain and Ireland

A Catholic delegation including Bishop Paul Hendricks, an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Southwark, and Canon John O’Toole visited Finsbury Park Mosque last week to help with its weekly ecumenical “Meal for All” project, which feeds homeless people. The project is run with faith organisations including The Passage and Westminster Caritas.

Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of Finsbury Park Mosque, said: “Such a visit between faith leaders will strengthen the relation between the two largest religions in the world and will promote community cohesion and peace, and it will also send a strong but positive message to the public that we can and should work together for the sake of humanity.”

Caritas Westminster is to partner with the Jewish Volunteering Network (JVN) to launch a new, interfaith volunteering portal this week. The new portal will match volunteers with volunteering opportunities in parishes, including Caritas projects and with other Catholic charities.

Caritas and JVN will also offer shared opportunities and joint activities. “As Catholics, we are called upon to reach out in love to those who are most in need in our society,” said John Coleby, director of Caritas Westminster.

“There are many Catholics looking, either individually or as parish groups, for opportunities to share their time and skills for the benefit of the wider community. We’re fortunate to be working with JVN and to learn from their experience,” he added.

Clergy crisis
The number of Church of England vicars retiring outstrips the number of new clergy being ordained, statistics released last week have revealed. A quarter of all Church of England priests are over 60 and only 13 per cent are under 40. Women joining the ranks of the Church have slowed but not reversed the decline in numbers of full-time stipendiary (paid) clergy. The data also shows a failure to recruit ethnic minority clergy: 93 per cent are white British.

The Church of England’s £72 million “renewal and reform” programme aims to increase the number of ordinands by 50 per cent by 2020, with a specific aim of recruiting more vicars from ethnic minorities.
“The statistics on the age and ethnicity of clergy show that we still have some way to go to ensure that the whole cohort fully reflects the demographics of the wider community,” said the Ven. Julian Hubbard, director of Ministry for the Archbishops’ Council.

The Diocese of East Anglia celebrated its 40th anniversary on 3 June last week. Speaking at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Norwich, Cardinal Vincent Nichols said that faith in East Anglia was as old as the hills. The anniversary offered “a challenge to be diligent in our mission to live out the faith, playing our part in the continuing story of Christianity in East Anglia now and into the future”, he said.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has called for better palliative care and more ongoing training and support for doctors in end-of-life care. In the final part of its three-volume report on end-of-life care, the BMA said palliative care should be prioritised by all UK governments, both in terms of funding and planning. It warned that there were discrepancies in quality of care in different parts of the country.

Bishop backs Europe
The Bishops’ Conference’s lead bishop on European affairs, William Kenney, has warned that Brexit would deprive aid agencies like Cafod of funding. Kenney, an auxiliary bishop in Birmingham, explained that Caritas Europa received funding from the EU, and would not be able to pass that on to UK agencies like Cafod in the event of a vote to leave on 23 June. “The EU is very much in need of reform, but we have to reform every organisation from the inside; you will never reform it from outside,” the bishop told the Catholic News Service. “Yes, we need reform, and secondly we need to stay there to be part of that reform.”

The Bishop of Leeds, Marcus Stock, has designated a church in Bradford for the celebration of Mass in the Extraordinary Form on Sundays. Bishop Stock said the designation of St Joseph’s church was in response to requests for Mass in the Extraordinary Form to be available in a central, accessible church. The church will be in use for the celebration of the Traditional Mass from September and brings the number of parishes in England and Wales where the Extraordinary Form is offered on a Sunday to 50.

The survivor of a failed abortion, who was the keynote speaker at a rally in defence of the Irish Constitution’s pro-life Eighth Amendment in Dublin last weekend, has challenged Amnesty Ireland to say whether she is a “human rights violation” in its view.

Melissa Ohden, who was born alive in 1977 in the US after a failed abortion procedure, congratulated Ireland for its legal protection for a mother and the unborn child. Addressing thousands of people at the “Celebrate the 8th” rally, the 39-year-old wife and mother said it was “an awful tragedy” that groups like Amnesty Ireland now describe abortion as a human right. “All human beings have human rights.”

In Knock, the Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, criticised those seeking to overturn the “constitutional commitment to the equal life and dignity of a mother and the unborn child”.

Mary’s Meals rewarded
Mary’s Meals, a volunteer-led charity founded by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow (above) to provide meals for impoverished schoolchildren, has won the highest award given for voluntary work, the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. The charity’s school-feeding programmes are run by local volunteers – often parents of the pupils – who are trained by Mary’s Meals to cook and serve meals to hungry schoolchildren. Alan Brown, executive director of Mary’s Meals, said: “From our 65,000 volunteers in Malawi who get up at the break of dawn to prepare, cook and serve vital meals to hungry children, to the thousands of generous people across the UK who give their time to support our work, volunteers are at the heart of everything we do.”

Progressio has called on its supporters to lobby their MPs to defend UK aid ahead of a debate in Parliament on 13 June. The aid organisation joins Cafod and Christian Aid in urging politicians to support the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of gross national income on overseas development assistance.