News Briefing: from Britain and Ireland

A former British soldier turned priest, who risked his life to rebuild the Church’s presence in Algeria, was ordained the new Bishop of Laghouat in a ceremony at Worth Abbey, East Sussex, last Saturday.

“We’re a Christian presence. It’s our presence among Muslim people that is important. If we weren’t there, they wouldn’t know what Christians are like,” said Bishop John MacWilliam (above), 68, who volunteered to join the “White Father” missionaries in Algeria at the height of a campaign of violence against Christians by Islamist militants in the mid 1990s.

Bishop MacWilliam’s new diocese, in the south of the country, is 10 times the size of Britain, covering an area of around 800,000 square miles. There are only a small number of Christians left in Algeria, with about 3,000 Catholics, and the Church there focuses on service and dialogue.

“This diocese that is being entrusted to you is indeed vast … the desert is your cathedral,” said Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, who was chief consecrator at the ordination. Archbishop Fitzgerald, formerly in charge of Interreligious Dialogue at the Vatican, added that the new bishop’s pastoral care is “not to be confined to the few thousand or so Catholics in the diocese, but … to the population of over four and a half million”.

Ethics show wins prize
BBC Radio 4’s long-running discussion programme on ethics, The Moral Maze, will receive the coveted Trustees’ Award at the 2017 Sandford St Martin Awards for religious broadcasting in June. “We live in a complex world, and this programme takes these complexities seriously,” said the Church of England’s Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines, the trust’s chairman, who added that it is “Sometimes annoying, usually riveting, always worth the listen.” Presenter Michael Buerk said the series is “a highest common factor programme in an increasingly lowest common denominator world”.

“I firmly believe that if we are to welcome migrants, to be open to others, to welcome ideas, it is a matter of education – education can overcome many things,” the Bishop of Brentwood, Alan Williams, said at the annual Migrants’ Mass last weekend. At the service, the Westminster, Southwark and Brentwood dioceses came together to celebrate the international nature of the Churches, the migrants’ contribution to society and to express concern for their welfare and human dignity.

Bishop Williams added that while helping refugees can be “a very unpopular option”, he was encouraged by the development of the Community Sponsorship Scheme, which enables community groups including charities, faith groups and businesses to support resettled refugees in the UK.

Final deportation appeal
A gay Ugandan asylum seeker and LGBT campaigner, Godfrey Kawalya (above), has made his final appeal to the Home Office against his deportation, with the decision expected next month. On 17 May Mr Kawalya travelled to the Home Office in Liverpool to make the application in person and to present a petition with over 1,300 signatures in support of his case. He arrived in Britain in 2002 and claimed asylum on political rather than sexual identity grounds, as he feared further discrimination. In August 2015, the Home Office refused his claim on the grounds that they did not believe he was gay and because he didn’t disclose his sexuality when he first arrived.

Mr Kawalya, who is a member of LGBT Catholics Westminster, risks a long prison sentence if he is sent back to Uganda where same-sex relationships are illegal.

Trafficking warning
Irish missionary Fr Shay Cullen has warned that human trafficking is a “billion-dollar business” and that legalising prostitution is not the answer as it “opens the door” for traffickers. Addressing politicians in Dublin last week, the Philippines-based priest said trafficking was happening in Ireland, the UK and across Europe.

“We are advocating legislation along the Swedish model, where the man who solicits sex from a woman is prosecuted. There has been a 50 per cent reduction in prostitution in Sweden in the last six years,” Fr Cullen said.
In the Philippines, where he set up the Preda Foundation to provide shelter to street children and sanctuary and therapy for victims of sexual abuse, most trafficking victims are children and women.