A seven-year-old girl suffered life-threatening injuries in a drive-by shooting outside a Catholic church in London on 14 January.
A twelve-year-old girl and four women were also injured in the attack on a crowd leaving a Requiem Mass at St Aloysius’s Church in Euston, when suspects fired a shotgun into the crowd from a moving vehicle. More than 300 mourners had attended the Requiem for Sara Sanchez and her mother, Fresia Calderon, who had died within a month of each other in November.
The parish priest, Fr Jeremy Trood said that the congregation had gone outside to release doves when he heard gunshots. “I remember the screams and shots, and the people who were making their way out of the church all coming back in,” he told the BBC.
Vandals smashed six windows of a Catholic church outside Newry in Northern Ireland in the early hours of 13 January. Fr Richard Naughton, parish priest of Upper Killeavy, said he was “shocked to the core” by the damage done to the “beautiful” Church of the Sacred Heart, Cloghogue.
Opened on Easter Sunday 1916, the church was extensively refurbished for its centenary seven years ago. The six stained-glass windows destroyed by the vandals came from Germany, and will cost thousands of pounds to repair.
Independent councillor Gareth Malone condemned the “mindless, wanton and unwarranted attack” which he compared to the destruction of stained glass in a Presbyterian church in Newry in 2018.
Bishops from 11 countries, including five from the UK and Ireland, gathered in Jordan on 14 January for the annual Holy Land Coordination.
Bishop Nicholas Hudson, an auxiliary in the Archdiocese of Westminster, is chair of the group, after being appointed to the post last summer in place of the Bishop of Clifton, Declan Lang. Bishop Hudson concelebrated the ordination Mass of two priests to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem on 12 January.
The bishops, who include the Archbishop of Glasgow, William Nolan, and the Anglican Bishop of Southwark, Christopher Chessun, visited the Christian community in the country, including refugees from Iraq and Syria.
Indian environmentalist Dr Vandana Shiva told a packed hall and more than 4,000 online viewers that faiths have a big role in promoting a sustainable future.
Speaking at the three-day Oxford Real Farming Conference, she said this means addressing climate change and corporate control of land, food, and seeds. “Every faith says care for your neighbour and feed them,” she said and hoped faith communities would promote food sovereignty, a move towards a food system more orientated towards helping local communities and the environment.
In May last year Dr Vandana Shiva, during an online discussion organised by the Vatican for Laudato Si’ Week, called for people of faith to challenge “the rush to own biodiversity as a financial asset”.
The Bishop of Paisley has joined calls to Amazon to scrap plans to close a warehouse in Gourock on the Firth of Clyde. Bishop John Keenan offered prayers and pledged “practical support” for families who would be affected by the loss of 300 jobs in an area already affected by uncertain employment and the current cost of living crisis.
Bishop Keenan said that the Inverclyde area had “suffered greatly in recent times and this is another severe blow to families and the local economy”. He called on Amazon to reconsider the decision and on the Scottish Government and Inverclyde council to bring new jobs to the area and improve a worsening work situation.
Trade unions and representatives of local business echoed the Bishop’s concerns and his call for urgent action.
Christian Aid has installed a “Beacon of Hope” stained glass exhibition at Southwark Anglican cathedral by London Bridge. From 16-29 January, the exhibition illuminates five messages of hope about hunger, equality, health, climate and injustice and features stories from Christian Aid projects.
The project is a collaboration between Christian Aid and Ugandan artist and writer Matt Kayem. Special candlelit evenings of prayer take place on Wednesday 18 and Wednesday 25 January 2023.
The Charles Plater Trust has launched its 2023 large grants programme last week with plans to offer up to £400,000 in grants for domestic good causes. The trust is calling on all registered charities with annual income below £10 million who share its Catholic Social Teaching values, to apply for a large grant of up to £50,000 for social action, lay leadership or applied research projects.
Bishop Richard Moth, chair of the trust, said: “The cost-of-living crisis has pushed many more into poverty and hardship in the UK. At the Trust, we are eager to partner with charities who want to respond creatively to these hard times to seek justice for people on the sharp end of these challenges.”
Apply online at www.plater.org.uk. The closing date for applications is Friday 17 March 2023, with successful applicants publicly announced at an award ceremony held by The Trust on 21 June 2023.
Scotland’s Catholic bishops have accused the Scottish Government of an “ideological totalitarianism” that will criminalise mainstream religion and parental guidance to children. The unprecedented criticism comes in response to the publication of the Scottish Government’s ‘expert’ advisory group with plans to change the law to ban “conversion therapy” for gay and bisexual people.
In a report released on Monday, the bishops said that, if accepted, legal counsel has warned that the recommended change, “would outlaw pastoral care, prayer, parental guidance and advice relating to sexual orientation, expression of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, other than that which is deemed by the state to constitute “affirmative care”.
It “could criminalise the Church’s teaching about God’s creation of the human person as male and female and the meaning of sex as within marriage, and that anyone who proposes this teaching to someone with same sex attraction or gender identity issues would face sanctions.”
There are fears current proposals will have a devastating impact on free speech, outlawing the work of priests and preachers as well as the ability of parents to give advice.
More than 60 people from the UK, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Zambia and Afghanistan attended the annual Christians Aware conference in Derbyshire last weekend, on the theme of “On Eagle’s Wings: Health and Healing Worldwide”.
They heard Elizabeth Perry of the Anglican Alliance speak about church support for communities during the Covid-19 pandemic and post-Covid work as well as former BBC Africa correspondent Mike Wooldridge and Ruth Wooldridge, a specialist in palliative care in Africa, who both said there was much to be done to address inequality in Africa to improve health care. They highlighted mission hospitals which provide around one-third of the continent’s health care.
For more than three decades the Leicester-based ecumenical educational and religious charity, headed by Barbara Butler, has stimulated work between Christians, other faiths and the secular world specifically promoting justice, peace and ecology. Anglican bishop John Perumbalath, chairman, who has recently been appointed Bishop of Liverpool, said the challenge “is to be aware that all our efforts are part of God's mission”.
Paul Johnson, the journalist and historian, died on 12 January aged 94. Raised in the Potteries around Stoke-on-Trent and educated at Stonyhurst and Oxford, he joined the New Statesman in 1955 and was appointed its editor ten years later, despite the objections of Leonard Woolf, a board member, who did not believe that a Catholic could edit a radical paper.
Under Johnson’s editorship, the paper’s circulation reached 94,000. After leaving the post in 1970 he became a prolific columnist for right-leaning papers, and an author of popular history, including the best-selling A History of Christianity (1976).
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