Cardinal Vincent Nichols and other faith leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, have written to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, calling on him to establish a cross-party commission to tackle child poverty in England. The faith leaders call for temporary measures to ensure that children in low-income families do not go hungry during the pandemic, “especially over school holidays”. They also call for the temporary increase in Universal Credit to be made permanent.
Campaigners have demanded the government provide safe and legal routes into the UK for asylum seekers after an Iranian Kurdish family drowned while attempting the dangerous Channel crossing. Sarah Teather, director of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK, said the young family’s death should “make us weep ... we should cry out at the injustice that led to a family drowning on the doorstep of Britain”. The Bishop for Migrants, Paul McAleenan, said this was a humanitarian tragedy: “All who value human life, whatever their position on migrants and refugees, will be united in sorrow.”
The chair of the Irish Bishops’ Council for Healthcare has said that religious faith can increase people’s personal resilience. Writing in the Sunday Independent, Bishop Michael Router noted how people have been consumed by the battle against Covid-19 over the past eight months. Referring to the recent deaths by suicide of two young men in the same small parish in Co Cavan, Bishop Router highlighted how a local suicide prevention charity had seen a 40 per cent rise in calls, mainly from young people, in one week alone. “It is incumbent on all of us to reverse this trend,” he said. Last Sunday 26 cathedrals across Ireland held liturgies for all those who have died from Covid-19 and other causes, especially suicide.
The Church in Ireland too often failed those entrusted to its care, allowing “harshness” to become an over-dominant thread, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin has said. His comments were made as the 4,000-page report into Mother and Baby Homes was delivered to the government. The findings are not expected to be made public for some weeks. In his homily in Dublin’s Pro Cathedral on All Saints’ Day, Archbishop Martin warned that where such harshness is not exposed, “generations of victims will bear the results and the genuine witness of others in the Church will be compromised”.
Professor Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, warned of the threat to peace in Northern Ireland posed by Brexit, in a podcast interview with Senior Times magazine. “The Good Friday Agreement never foresaw Brexit and did not have built into it a mechanism for dealing with such a phenomenon. So it hasn’t been road-tested against Brexit. Nor has it been road-tested against a referendum on partition,” she said in a reference to the question of a possible future poll on uniting both parts of Ireland.
Lancaster Diocese and Churches Together in Cumbria, where modern slavery is a growing issue, are due to run training on human trafficking during November. The online training is free and will be provided by the Clewer Initiative, in liaison with Cumbria Police.
Bishop Declan Lang, chair of the bishops’ conference department for international affairs, has supported the Cameroonian Diocese of Kumba in praying for the children who were killed when a Christian school in the region was attacked last week. He was joined by Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, whose diocese is twinned with the neighbouring Diocese of Bamenda in Cameroon. The bishops said: “We echo Pope Francis’ call for all those involved in Cameroon’s conflict to silence their weapons and urge the international community to redouble its efforts towards justice and peace in the country.”
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) is due to publish its final report into abuse in the Catholic Church on 10 November.
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