The Catholic Union has warned that freedom of religion is under threat in UK workplaces, after a survey of its members and supporters found that almost a third of its responders felt disadvantaged because of their faith.
The vast majority of these cases (73 per cent) were in the public sector. Almost half said that they did not feel able to speak openly to their colleagues about their faith. The Catholic Union has submitted the results of the survey to the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, which is conducting an inquiry into human rights in the workplace.
Ushaw Historic House, Chapels and Gardens – the former Catholic seminary in Country Durham – is hoping to draw Easter holiday crowds with its newly opened exhibition, “The Power of Image: Versailles and The Sun King”. It explores French King Louis XIV’s relationship with Versailles through a series of printed engravings reproduced and enlarged to reflect the opulence of Versailles Palace.
Permanent exhibitions include “The Pugins at Ushaw: Masters of Gothic Design”. For a century, from the late 1830s, the Pugin family played a key role in Ushaw’s buildings and even vestments and dining plates. Ushaw is unique as showcasing the work of all six members of the Pugin family of architects and designers in a single location.
Another exhibition is “Life at Ushaw” which gives insight into the day-to-day life of people who lived and worked at Ushaw during its time as a seminary and boarding school.
Christ Church, Oxford, has appointed Canon Sarah Foot as its new dean, to replace Dr Martyn Percy who left the post last year after a lengthy and acrimonious dispute with the college authorities.
Prof Foot, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and a residentiary canon of the cathedral attached to the college, is the first woman to hold the post.
She has been deputising as dean since Dr Percy’s departure, in the wake of which Christ Church initiated a governance review, chaired by Dominic Grieve KC. Prof Foot said that she intends to stand down once the review's recommendations have been implemented.
The hunger crisis in East Africa is worsening on a daily basis, warned Cafod after the announcement that the aid budget to East and Central African countries is being cut by £28 million.
Countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are suffering the worst drought for 40 years and millions of people facing life-threatening malnutrition. The situation is expected to get even worse this year, as experts predict the rains in April and May will once again be below normal levels.
Kayode Akintola, head of Africa region for Cafod, said: “The situation in East Africa is as bad as I’ve ever known it, livestock’s dying, crops have been destroyed and people are starving. Our partners on the ground are doing everything they can to respond to the crisis, but the need is growing each day.
“The people tell me they feel abandoned and are losing faith. The decision to take more money away from people who need our help urgently is shameful. We need the UK to reverse this decision and act to provide proper funding to East Africa before it is too late.”
A Catholic priest sacked from his job as an NHS hospital chaplain after he counselled a gay man not to marry his partner of the same sex has received £10,000 in compensation from his former employer.
In August 2019, Fr Patrick Pullicino responded to a request by one patient on a psychiatric ward for a Catholic priest. In the 23-minute conversation that followed, the patient raised his intention to marry his long-term partner and asked Fr Pullicino for his opinion. The two parties dispute what Fr Pullicino said in response, with the chaplain claiming he reiterated the Church’s teaching on marriage and the patient claiming Fr Pullicino warned him he would go to hell.
In correspondence responding to a complaint the patient made, the NHS trust that employed Fr Pullicino asserted that the trust’s policy on equality and diversity “takes precedence over religious belief”.
The priest, a former neurologist, was later dismissed by the trust in a decision he asserts was motivated by the complaint against him. A legal case brought by Fr Pullicino on that basis has been settled for £10,000 paid to Fr Pullicino “for perceived injury to feelings”, with his former employer apologising for the way the trust’s policy had been phrased in his case.
Scotland’s oldest inhabited house – a local hub of Catholicism in an era when the faith was outlawed – has extended its opening hours to seven days a week from 1 April.
Traquair, near Peebles, dates back to 1107 and has hosted 27 monarchs over nine centuries, including figures such as Mary Queen of Scots and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Covering 4,500 acres of land, a huge maze and a secret staircase, Traquair also contains multiple hiding places for Catholic priests, dating from the decades after the Reformation. One of the most important recusant Catholic houses, as strong supporters of the Stuart monarchs the family converted back to the “true faith” in 1665 and has remained Catholic ever since.
The estate, which was last redesigned in the seventeenth century, anticipates an estimated 30,000 visitors over the next year. Opening times and other information available on the Traquair House website.
A liturgical chalice from the early seventeenth century is currently on display at Bar Convent in York, the oldest continuously active Catholic convent in the UK.
Bar Convent, founded by sisters of the Congregation of Jesus in 1686 inspired by Mary Ward, is home to Catholic artefacts dating back to the Reformation and before. One of those items, a chalice donated to the community in the late eighteenth century, has recently been dated to the 1630s and will be exhibited to the public this Easter.
The chalice, designed to separate into three pieces, was studied by Dr Claire Marsland of Ushaw College, who established a likely origin sometime in the 1630s. The chalice is to be displayed alongside the convent’s mother of pearl Stations of the Cross and a relic of the True Cross.
Pact has published an illustrated Stations of the Cross booklet featuring the new text released last year and with images from the Benedictine Sisters at Turvey Abbey. Pact is sharing the booklet with prison chaplains, parish reps, supporters and friends and with the women at HMP Send. The aim is to support the 93,000-plus children in England and Wales who have a parent in prison today.
Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin has confirmed his support for the reconfiguration of school patronage in primary schools in his diocese order to reflect the growing diversity of Irish society.
Last week the Minister for Education, Norma Foley, announced a change of patronage for St Enda’s Primary School in Whitefriar Street, Dublin. Responding to the announcement, Archbishop Farrell said the changeover had his full approval and agreement. He said that consensus is vital in a process that can be complex.
“I, along with the other Catholic patrons, will continue to work with the department to identify remaining barriers to the building of that consensus,” he said. “This includes reassuring Catholic parents that their choice of a school with a Catholic patronage and ethos will continue to be secured and facilitated within the education system.”
RTÉ is airing a special service for Easter this week connecting the themes of Holy Thursday with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The radio service includes contributions from former president of Ireland, Professor Mary McAleese, Alan McBride, widower of Sharon McBride who was killed with her father in the IRA’s Shankill fish shop bomb, and Briege Voyle, of Ballymurphy Victims’ Families.
Nichola Corner, sister of journalist Lyra McKee, who was shot dead in Derry four years ago by gunmen, said: “We give thanks for the space created by the agreement that has enabled us to live in relative peace since it was signed.”
A new book by a former adviser to the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales argues that Jesus did not institute the ministerial priesthood at the Last Supper.
Speaking in Dublin following the launch of The Death of Jesus the Jew: Midrash in the Shadow of the Holocaust, Peter Keenan told The Tablet that Redemptorist Fr Tony Flannery was correct in his view of priesthood, for which he censured by the Vatican.
“All he was doing was presenting reputable scholarship, and he was wrongly victimised for that,” the author said. He also paid tribute to former Tablet columnist, the late Rabbi Lionel Blue, who he said had inspired him to delve into the issue of Pius XII’s silence over the Holocaust.
A reception was organised on Friday 24 March by Mayor of Walsall Cllr Rose Martin for Cardinal Michael Fitzgerald M.Afr to thank him for his work for the Church and to acknowledge his connections to Walsall. Religious leaders and civic dignitaries were present including the local MP Eddie Hughes.
Bishop Christopher Budd, the retired bishop for the Diocese of Plymouth, died on 1 April at his home in Lyme Regis, aged 85.
Canon Paul Cummins, diocesan administrator said: “Bishop Christopher was a faithful servant of the Lord and of the Church. He was an inspiration and a friend.
“On his Silver Jubilee as Bishop of Plymouth in 2011, reflecting on his ministry, Bishop Christopher said: ‘The celebration of a bishop’s ministry should not principally focus on the person of the bishop. The proper focus is God’s gift of episcopacy to the diocese; the particular bishop is always secondary to that... The source of our ability to minister is the wisdom of Christ made available in his community’.”
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