Disgraced former bishop dies
Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Lewes who was jailed in 2015 for sexual offences against teenagers and young men, has died age 87.
Peter Hancock, the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the Church of England’s lead safeguarding bishop, said in a statement: “Our prayers and thoughts are with everyone affected by this news.”
Ball (pictured above) was found guilty of offences against 18 young men. A report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse last month accused George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, of a serious failure of leadership in dealing with allegations against Bishop Ball, and said the Church had prioritised its own reputation over the safety of children.
The leader of the Irish Catholic Church, Archbishop Eamon Martin, will be a keynote speaker at the Kennedy Summer School in County Wexford. The prestigious summer school has invited the Primate of All Ireland to deliver the Edward M. Kennedy lecture on the role of faith in politics.
Other speakers include New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, former United States Congressman Bruce Morrison, and Seamus Mallon of the SDLP, who served as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 1998 to 2001. Talks will consider the impact Brexit on the island of Ireland, the UK and beyond. It will also discuss the Trump presidency.
Bishop Paul McAleenan has called on the Government to compensate people from the Windrush generation who were detained and deported “as a result of its hostile environment policies”. The bishop cited reports that more than 164 people from the Caribbean community were deported or detained who might have had the right to live in the UK.
Marking the first Windrush Day on 22 June, which commemorates the 1948 arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush, with one of the first large groups of migrants to Britain from the West Indies aboard, Bishop McAleenan said: “The Government must now restore the human dignity of those whose rights were violated. They must ensure that necessary emergency support is provided and compensation made. Most of all they must take steps to ensure that such mistakes which undermine one’s God-given value are never repeated.”
The Orange Order has agreed to reroute an annual march through Glasgow that was due to pass by a church where a priest was assaulted during last year’s event. The Orange Lodge said the decision to move the 6 July Boyne parade followed comments from the Catholic Church in Scotland about protecting the legal right to protest, and was made in that same spirit of “positive cooperation”.
Faith groups on climate demo
Cafod backed a mass demonstration outside Parliament this week that called on politicians to act faster on climate change. Faith leaders including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams were due to lead a walk of witness down Whitehall on Wednesday to begin the demonstration. A Mass for Cafod supporters was to be celebrated afterwards at Church House.
Members of Justice and Peace, the Catholic Worker and Anglicans from the Diocese of Canterbury gathered in Dover last week to mark World Refugee Day and the launch of a new cross-Channel advocacy network, “People Not Walls”. Campaigners met at the seafront for a memorial service for people who had died trying to cross the Channel. The day closed with a service at the church of St Margaret-at-Cliffe, the English village closest to the French coast, where French Catholics and migrants were celebrating a similar vigil on the Plage Bleriot.
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