A leading Catholic bishop has spoken of the “coarsening” of life and womanhood by secularist ideologies in the West. Bishop of Shrewsbury Mark Davies, at a Mass celebrated for Ven Elizabeth Prout at St Anne and Blessed Dominic in Sutton, St Helens, said that at the bicentenary of her birth, he had reflected on her witness to human dignity and the value of every human life. “Mother Mary Joseph saw her mission in education as more than imparting information and human skills, rather a vital opportunity in times of social upheaval to pass on faith and the precious inheritance of Christian values.” He spoke of parallels in western societies marked of that time and of today, with “a not dissimilar coarsening of life, of womanhood and a dislocation in the life of home and family. The bitter inheritance, not of industrial development, but of secularist ideologies.” Society is encountering the same religious illiteracy which Elizabeth Prout found in the slums, he said, “an ignorance which leaves a vacuum and exposes new generations to destructive ideologies of every kind”.
A Catholic bishop has asked forgiveness for the anti-semitic decrees of the Synod of Oxford, at an Anglican service marking 800 years since the controversial council was held. William Kenney, auxiliary bishop emeritus of Birmingham archdiocese, led an act of penitence during the service, held in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. “God of Israel, we acknowledge with shame and penitence the anti-Semitic decrees of the Synod of Oxford,” he said. “For times when we have witnessed the ill-treatment of Jews and people of other faiths and have not gone to their aid, Lord, we ask your forgiveness.” The Synod of Oxford barred social interaction between Jews and Christian, banned the building of synagogues, forced Jewish people to wear identifying badges, imposed church tithes on them and banned them from certain professions.
The Scottish Laity Network online talk last week in its “Towards Pentecost 2022” series highlighted the high levels of poverty and debt in Scotland. Speaker Lawrie Morgan Klein, public affairs officer with Step Change Debt Charity in Scotland, reported that it has helped more than 30,000 Scots in the past year struggling with debt emergencies. “The safety net feels so eroded,” he said, reporting that inflation is outpacing pay, utility and fuel costs are at record levels, and tax rises are on the horizon with a three percent rise to Council Tax across many Scottish local authorities. “While cost of living pressures are nothing new to our debt advice clients, the scale of the coming difficulties is daunting,” he said. Morgan Klein welcomed the recent increase of the Scottish Child Payment to low-income families but reported there are huge concerns about the immediate and long-term impacts on children in families facing poverty and debt. “We see many children hungry and anxious, and we have concern about children’s mental health,” he said.
A team of parishioners was on hand to welcome visitors and offer mini tours round a south London church being used as a polling station during local elections last Thursday. Fr David O’Malley SDB, said voters were arriving at Sacred Heart Church in Battersea, from 7 in the morning until 10 at night. “They were impressed by a church many of them had never visited before and we even welcomed two past pupils from Melbourne,” he said. Fr O’Malley, who is Salesian community vice rector, added: “Battersea was a marginal area for the election so there are plenty of party members on the streets directing people to our parish.” Research by the National Churches Trust before the 2015 elections showed that out of 32,000 polling stations, nearly 6,000 were based in church buildings.
Pax Christi England and Wales is supporting a national protest against US nuclear weapons returning to the UK after 14 years. The event, organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, will be held at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk on Saturday 21 May. The US Department of Defence has added the UK to a list of Nato nuclear weapons storage locations in Europe being upgraded under a multi-million-dollar infastructure programme. Lakenheath campaigners say the bombs must not be allowed back. RAF Lakenheath hosted US nuclear weapons for more than five decades, until they were removed in 2008 following persistent popular protest by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Lakenheath Action Group. Before removal the site had 33 underground storage vaults and stored around 110 B61 gravity bombs that could be dropped from F-15E warplanes based there. Lakenheath received the latest nuclear- capable fighter – the F-35A – in December 2021.
“If Christianity has a future as a living voice regarding what a human society, what a human culture, and what a human life should be, we may be in a critical moment for trying to determine how that voice is heard and what precisely it is saying,” Professor David Bentley Hart has said. one of a host of international scholars who took part in a recent conference on “The Future of Christian Thinking” at St Patrick's Pontifical University, Maynooth, the American writer, philosopher, and religious studies scholar added: “Part of the reason that we are where we are culturally is because of the grave moral, cultural, and spiritual failings of Christendom.” At the conference, experts and thinkers addressed the “unprecedented” challenges faced by Christian thought ranging from a denial of metaphysics, to previously unforeseen ethical and moral questions arising from contemporary science, and ever-advancing technologies. Other speakers included Archbishop Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Cyril O’Regan, William Desmond, Therese-Anne Druart and Gaven Kerr.
Scotland’s leading historian has “warmly welcomed” a joint declaration of friendship between the Catholic Church in Scotland and the Kirk. Professor Sir Tom Devine acknowledged that in recent years ecumenism in this country has made very significant progress. He said: “Relations at all levels between the two major Christian churches in Scotland have never been so cordial. Confronted today by mass secularism, atheism and humanist, it is perhaps hardly surprising they look much more to the beliefs which unite rather than divide them.”
Quakers in Britain have published a new report on schools tackling problems such as mental ill-health and violence. The report calls on the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments to support peace education against a rise in school exclusions and zero tolerance behavioural approaches. It advocates processes such as peer mediation and restorative approaches to citizenship. The report found that increasingly popular zero tolerance approaches “violate children’s rights and cause harm”, the Quakers said. “Research has found that young people who develop their empathic imagination become less likely in adulthood to indulge in bullying, sexism, racism, generalised prejudice against out-groups, social dominance, authoritarianism and homo-phobia,” the report says.
Canon Michael McCoy, 57, a priest at St Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle, took his own life four days after police visited him in April last year and informed him they were investigating an historic allegation of clerical sex abuse, an inquest heard. ChronicleLive reported that police had told told him that a “non-recent allegation” had been made and he would be invited for a voluntary interview. On April 10, he was found hanged.
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