A BBC drama about a parish priest in a deprived Liverpool community has won two awards for religious broadcasting. In Broken, written by Jimmy McGovern (above left), Fr Michael Kerrigan, played by Sean Bean (right), struggled to maintain the mental and spiritual balance needed to serve parishioners.
The series won two Sandford St Martin Awards at a ceremony at Lambeth Palace on 7 June. “Our winner is a great example of how religion on the box can reach you in places you may never have expected it to come from,” said the chair of the TV judging panel Aaqil Ahmed, former head of religion at the BBC and Channel 4. A three-hour live broadcast from Stanbrook Abbey, home to 21 Benedictine nuns, by Emma Barnett won the radio category.
Baroness Williams, the Minister for Countering Extremism, is encouraging faith leaders and institutions across England and Wales to apply for a share of a £1 million grant set aside by the Home Office from the Places of Worship Protective Security Funding Scheme.
In an open letter to the faith leaders, she said: “I will not stand by and see those who seek to sow hatred and division in our society divide us. It is sickening when mosques, churches, gurdwaras, temples and synagogues are defaced with graffiti, religious symbols are trashed and worshippers suffer verbal and even physical abuse and I expect the police to treat such incidents with the utmost seriousness.”
Successful applicants in England and Wales will receive up to £56,000 towards improved security to counter the threat from hate crimes at their premises.
Goldman Sachs to Stonyhurst
A Goldman Sachs managing director is taking the unusual step of combining his role at the top investment bank with a new position at his old school – Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. Stephen Withnell, more used to advising on multimillion-pound transactions in the metals and mining sector at Goldman Sachs, is moving his young family to the Ribble Valley to take up the post in fundraising, endowment activity and external affairs at the school, where he is already a governor. Mr Withnell told The Times: “Kudos to Goldman ... They were very supportive and agreed to customise my job so I could do both.”
Cardross blow
The arts group trying to revive the site of St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross in Argyll and Bute has announced that it will cease work in September.
NVA, a specialist in arts events in unusual settings, had been attempting to refurbish elements of the former seminary, a brutalist masterpiece by architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, which was built for the training of priests and opened in 1966.
The building had design and maintenance problems and with the fall in the number of vocations never reached its projected 100 seminarians.
St Peter’s was closed in 1980, and lay derelict until developers Urban Splash and NVA began to explore its potential. A final exhibition of work by Rachel Maclean will take place this summer. The decision to withdraw was hastened by NVA’s failure to attract core funding from Creative Scotland, which in 2015-16 gave the arts group nearly £250,000, about one fifth of its operating budget.
The Church has warned the Scottish government not to “create a hierarchy of rights” after a report on hate crime in the country skirted the question of religious sectarianism. The Church had earlier submitted to Lord Bracadale, author of the report, that hate crime against Catholics was “qualitatively and quantitatively different from other types of religious hate crime in Scotland”.
In recent statistics, religious hate crime is ranked third behind racial prejudice and homophobia, but attacks on Catholics make up nearly 60 per cent of all such reported attacks in Scotland, despite Catholics representing just 15 per cent of the population. Lord Bracadale said: “I do not consider it necessary to create any new offence or statutory aggravation to tackle hostility towards a sectarian identity at this stage.” Under Scottish law, protected characteristics include race, religion, physical and mental disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.
Loading ...
