News Briefing: from Britain and Ireland

Cardinal Vincent Nichols said the scourge of human slavery is slowly emerging from the shadows as the Home Secretary joined him at a Vatican meeting to announce £14 million to tackle people trafficking.

Amber Rudd (above) announced the funds during her speech at a gathering last week of the Santa Marta Group, an anti-trafficking body of police chiefs and church leaders set up in 2014 at Francis’ residence, the Casa Santa Marta.

The Home Office said that £11 million will be designated to combat slavery in countries where victims are trafficked into the UK while £3 million will be for preventing child trafficking within Britain and overseas.

Police chiefs and church leaders, including Cardinal Nichols, met with Pope Francis during the conference.


Abuse victims sue
Five former pupils of St William’s residential school in Market Weighton have launched a compensation claim at the High Court in Leeds over historic abuse that they claim took place there.
The Yorkshire school, which was run by the De La Salle Brothers, closed in 1992. It provided residential care and education for boys aged 10 to 16 with emotional and behavioural problems. More than 200 men claim they were abused at St William’s over a 21-year period, from 1970-1991.

The former principal, James Carragher, is already in jail for sex offences against children at the home, as is former chaplain Anthony McCallen. If the compensation claim succeeds, the eventual payout could run into millions of pounds.

A spokesman for the De La Salle order said: “We repeat our total condemnation of the serious criminal behaviour of James Carragher, a former member of the De La Salle Brothers, during his time on the staff at St William’s.”

Prison catechesis published
The Church has published its first catechetical resource for Catholic prisoners in response to a need expressed by chaplains and current and former inmates. Written by a serving prison chaplain in Scotland, Fr Eddie McGhee, Faith Inside: a guide for Catholics in Prison (Redemptorist Publications), takes inmates through basic Christian beliefs and has been created specifically with lockdowns (periods when prisoners are confined to their cells) in mind.

Bishop Richard Moth, the Bishop for Prisons, said: “This resource shows the way for anyone who is thinking seriously about the Catholic faith while they are in prison. It will help them to come to a clearer understanding of the treasures of our faith and how they themselves are loved and welcomed by God and by the Catholic community.”

More empty pews
Official statistics released by the Church of England show a 10 per cent drop in attendance at church services. The figures, released last week, show just over 1 per cent of the population of England now attends Church of England services on a typical Sunday. Last year an estimated 810,600 attended a Church of England service on an average Sunday, 2 per cent down on the previous year and a 7 per cent decline over five years.

The total weekly attendance slipped to 961,400 in 2015 from 977,800 the previous year. Attendance over festivals bucks the trend: 2015 Christmas attendance was up 5 per cent.
 
The Catholic Association for Racial Justice has welcomed a report highlighting the vulnerability of the Roma community since the Brexit referendum. The report, “Roma Communities and Brexit”, produced by the Institute for Public Policy Research, traces the migration of Roma from Central and Eastern Europe to the UK and warns that once EU funding for integration of this group is withdrawn following Brexit, the Government may not make up the shortfall.

Catholics gathered to pray for Syria outside the Foreign Office and Russian Embassy in London on 31 October in response to Pope Francis’ call to unite and pray for peace. Vigils in the UK, organised by Cafod, Pax Christi and the Council of Lutheran Churches (pictured), took place as the Pope led a prayer written for the Caritas Internationalis campaign, Syria: Peace is Possible, at a Lutheran-Catholic service in Sweden.

A conference about how to report faith fairly, organised by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), is to be held in Cardiff on 8 November. The event, subsidised by the Welsh Government and sponsored by ITV Cymru Wales, aims to help the media avoid perpetuating myths and misunderstandings about religion such as equating Islam with terrorism.


Faith communities are invited to enter their buildings for the John Betjeman Award 2017 for repair projects to places of worship. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings award recognises the highest standard of craftsmanship used in carrying out these projects. In 2016, the John Betjeman Award went to painstaking repairs undertaken to a fourteenth-century oak staircase at the Church of St Michael and All Angels in Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire, the earliest example of its type in the UK. Conservation of the fifteenth-century Lübeck altar panels (above) at All Saints Church, Wigan, was highly commended

Whistleblower to speak
Fr Klaus Mertes SJ, the German priest and former headmaster of the Jesuit-run Canisius College in Berlin, who became known as a whistle­blower after he revealed that systemic abuse had taken place at the school, was due to speak at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, on Tuesday evening. The lecture, “A Traumatised and Traumatising Institution”, was to be chaired by chancellor of the University of Oxford, Lord (Chris) Patten.

Fr Hugh Allan o.praem, prior of the Norbertine Community of St Philip’s Priory, Chelmsford, has been appointed Apostolic Administrator of the Prefecture of the Falkland Islands and Ecclesiastical Superior of the Missions sui iuris of the islands of Ascension, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha.