Jonathan Aitken (pictured with his wife), the former Conservative cabinet minister who served a prison sentence for perjury, is to be ordained and plans to work as an unpaid prison chaplain. Mr Aitken became a Christian while serving a prison sentence for perjury in 1999 after lying on oath in a libel case. “Although I have had several years of experience as a lay prison volunteer, working as an ordained prison chaplain will allow me to offer a deeper level of spiritual and practical service to the prison community,” said Mr Aitken. Speaking to The Tablet, he continued: “I have the experience of being a prisoner. I can say: ‘I have been where you are now’. Those words do allow for a special level of communication.” Mr Aitken is to be ordained as a deacon on 30 June at St Paul’s Cathedral by the new Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally. The Bishop of Kensington, Dr Graham Tomlin, said: “I have known Jonathan Aitken for several years and this is a calling that has grown within him and been tried and tested.”
A new course, commissioned by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales and due for launch in the autumn, aims to help individuals and communities engage creatively with the spirituality of the “ecological conversion” highlighted in the Pope’s environmental encyclical Laudato si’. Global Healing, produced by Catholic Faith Exploration (CaFE), has been filmed on location at the Eden Project, at a Franciscan friary in Dorset and at a Cambridgeshire wind farm. “Its descriptions and visual presentations help in understanding the reality of the damage being done and the various opportunities and possibilities that are within reach to reverse the process of pollution,” said Bishop John Arnold, spokesman on the environment for the bishops, in a 1 June statement. The course, to be launched on 4 October, Feast of St Francis of Assisi, will be available to download for free.
Religious to learn from abroad
The major religious superiors of England and Wales have vowed to learn from the work of their international counterparts, particularly in addressing the plight of asylum seekers and refugees, at an annual general meeting that marked a shift towards a more pro-active approach to public affairs. At the three-day gathering in Derbyshire, they made a commitment to learn from what Religious Orders in other parts of the world are doing already in such areas as human trafficking. The President of the Conference of Religious, Fr Paul Smyth, said: “It’s about how we can jointly help to give a voice to the voiceless. This could be by expressing points of view within the Church where views may differ from [those of] bishops.”
Faith groups called
The director of the Catholic Parliamentary Office at Holyrood has told the Scottish Government that faith groups and parishes should be consulted in an initiative to solve the problem of loneliness and social isolation. Anthony Horan said that “the knowledge and experience of Christian Churches is a key component of the solution to tackling this issue”. Mr Horan was responding to a Scottish Government consultation titled “A Connected Scotland: Tackling social isolation and loneliness and building stronger social connections”, which aims to address problems associated with a steadily ageing Scottish population. The study has been conducted by Tyler Vander Weele of Harvard University School of Public Health. Among its findings, based on nearly 90,000 individuals monitored over 14 years, was that people who regularly attended a religious service were far less likely to commit suicide or self-harm.
The popular British comedy series about an Irish parish priest, Father Ted, is to become a musical, its co-writer has confirmed. Titled “Pope Ted: The Father Ted Musical”, Graham Linehan, co-writer of the Channel 4 show, announced on Twitter that the project was almost completed. The musical will see Father Ted move from the fictional location of Craggy Island to the Vatican to take on his new duties as leader of the Catholic Church. “I didn’t want to do anything like this until the right idea came along, and when Trump won [the US presidency] and Corbyn won [the Labour leadership] I kind of thought: ‘Maybe Ted has a chance,’” Mr Linehan told the BBC.
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