News Briefing: Britain and Ireland

The sculptor of the Angel of the North, Sir Antony Gormley, was made a Companion of Honour in the King’s birthday honours list for services to art. Another Ampleforth-educated recipient of an honour was Joseph Bamford of the HydraB Power Group, who was appointed CBE for services to “innovating and developing the clean hydrogen economy”.

Bishop Kenneth Nowakowski, Apostolic Eparch of the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of the Holy Family of London, was appointed OBE for services to Ukrainians.

The actress, Samantha Jane Morton received an OBE for services to drama and charity. The soprano, Gabriella di Laccio, founder of the Donne Foundation who teaches singing at St Benedict’s School, Ealing, also received an MBE for services to Music and to Gender Equality. Roisin Currie, the chief executive of Greggs, a former pupil at Our Lady and St Francis Secondary School, Glasgow, received a CBE for services to hospitality. 

The first international conference for grandparents was organised in Rome before the Jubilee for Families, Grandparents and the Elderly (30 May to 1 June) by an association for Catholic grandparents founded by an Englishwoman.

Catherine Wiley, one of the 15 delegates from England or Ireland attending the meeting said: “The conference was a huge success, a time of grace and purpose.” The mission of the Catholic Grandparents’ Association is to encourage and support grandparents in the passing on of their faith and to keep prayer at the heart of family life.

Speakers included the Emeritus Cardinal of South Africa, Wilfred Napier. Other speakers included Professor Gabriella Gambino, undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life, Vittorio Scelzo, director of the Vatican Office for the Elderly and Children and Archbishop Gilbert Garcera from Lipa, in the Philippines and Professor Keith Chappell, qualitative sociologist of religion and biologist at the University of Birmingham. 

The Catholics in Fundraising Jubilee Year Conference will take place next Wednesday, 25 June at St George’s Cathedral, Southwark.

Keynote speakers include Inno Van Den Berg of Evelyn Partners who will give an address on Fundraising for Endowments in Partnership with Religious Orders and Tom Hall, Global Head of Social Impact and Philanthropy at UBS Optimus Foundation Network who will speak on the topic of Amplifying Impact through Collective Resources, Social Action and Evangelisation.

Liam Allmark of the Jesuit Refugee Service UK will give a talk on Finding Tomorrow’s Community of Support, while George Reynolds of the Diocese of Westminster will address the topic of Contactless and Digital Giving. The conference will include a chance to hear choral Vespers. For tickets for the day-long event which begins at 8.30 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m., please click here.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, were among the speakers at the Latin Mass Society faith and culture conference at the London Oratory last weekend. Other speakers included Professor Thomas Pink, the philosopher and Dr Joseph Shaw, chairman of the society.

The social policy expert and author Lord Lemos will deliver the Catholic Union’s 2025 Craigmyle Lecture on 16 September, at Notre Dame University, London.

“The world is becoming ever more complicated. Navigating a path is not easy, but encounters with the Catholic faith, albeit via education or parish life, can enhance the life experience of children in today’s world,” said Lemos, whose talk is titled “Catholicism for the Next Generation”.

The event will be chaired by the president of the Union, Baroness Sheila Hollins, who said: “As we look ahead to the next generation, we must do all we can to ensure that children, as well as adults  in vulnerable situations, are given the very best chances in life. With his huge experience in social policy, I’m sure Lord Lemos will both challenge us and share some fascinating calls to action”.

Lord Lemos is chair of English Heritage  and National Savings and Investments and the author of Childhood and Contemporary Catholicism.

The present “must be English Catholicism’s moment,” a leading Shakespearean scholar said as she delivered the annual Allen Hall Lecture in London. Clare Asquith, Countess of Oxford, gave a lecture titled “The Enterprise of England,” which highlighted the rise of iconoclastic views in the English Church that began in the 1530s and the fight for the resurgence of beauty that followed.

Under Pope Leo, “it looks as if the Church will be now able to draw confidently both on the clarity and accessibility of reform…and the treasury of mystical and liturgical beauty dating back to the earliest times,” she said. A greater emphasis on liturgical truth in the sixteenth century demonstrated England’s wavering acceptance of Catholic ideals. The Church’s attempt to combine the doctrines of beauty and truth forced the population to split into two opposing viewpoints: those who believed in Real Presence and those who believed in sacred beauty.

Asquith noted that Cardinal William Allen, poet Robert Southwell and playwright William Shakespeare were key players in the fight for the resurgence of beauty following the Reformation. Allen fought for the revival of ancient beauty from within the Church, while Southwell published a number of manuscripts that detailed doctrinal beauty and challenged religious censorship. Shakespeare’s plays displayed his belief that truth and beauty were parallel entities that must work in tandem. 

Our Lady of Victories Church in Kensington hosted a fundraising dinner for a new eye hospital in the West Bank last Saturday. The funds raised at the dinner will go towards the new Nablus optometry hospital that opened earlier this year. The fundraiser featured a raffle, Palestinian dishes and performances from traditional Palestinian Dabke dancers.

The new hospital was opened by the Guild of St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital which works to aid the eye-care needs of patients regardless of their socioeconomic status, race or religion. More than 135,000 people have been helped by the institution, which has been treating patients in the Middle East for the past 137 years. 

Nearly 30 pilgrims from the Edmundite Mission in Vermont, US, visited St Edmund Hall in Oxford and Our Lady and St Edmund’s Church in Abingdon to celebrate the ninth century Anglo-Saxon king St Edmund the Martyr last weekend. After Mass, the group visited Pontigny, the location of St. Edmund’s final resting place.

The Edmundite Mission aims to “Do the best we can, with what little we have, to serve those most in need.” Since the mission’s founding in 1937, the Edmundites have worked to find solutions for people living in poverty, specifically in the Southern United States.

St Edmund ruled over East Anglia in the ninth century. He was brought up as a Christian, but when the Great Heathen Army captured him he was commanded to convert to paganism. He refused, was tied to a tree and killed.

The challenges of reporting religion in the media were considered at the sixth Religion Media Festival at Methodist Central Hall last week. Among the speakers was Sir Mark Thompson, chief executive of CNN and a Catholic, who said he found all religion “intriguing and fascinating”. Sir Mark said that of all the news organisations he has worked for, CNN was the “most focused on covering religion, with a particular focus on very big events”. 

To mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’, Caritas Nottingham and Green Christian ran an online “festival of economic justice” on the evening of 18 June. The keynote talk was due to be delivered by Professor Luigino Bruni, vice-president of the Economy of Francesco Foundation, with a response by Henrique Sengès of the Foundation.

Group sessions covered subjects such as Green Christian’s sustainable food project, the Santa Marta Group’s work to eradicate human trafficking and modern slavery, Cafod’s call for debt justice in the current Jubilee Year and Journey to 2030, which supports Catholic parishes to be hubs of transformational change.

Cafod and Christian Aid are among organisations planning a mass lobby of parliament on 9 July to call for leadership from the UK government to tackle the climate crisis.

As part of the Climate Coalition, they are encouraging their supporters to tell MPs they care about people, climate and nature, and want them to act. MPs will be meeting constituents at two mass lobby venues in the Westminster area.

They will be asked about delivering vital funding to communities hit hardest by climate change, tackling the global debt crisis, securing a greener and fairer future for UK citizens, and restoring Nature. The family-friendly event includes a prayer vigil outside Parliament.

Last Saturday litter pickers assembled at St Julian’s Church, Tenby Harbour in Pembrokeshire, “to help keep the town looking great” as part of the Great Big Green Week, a focus for community action to help the climate. St Ives Green Week in Cambridgeshire saw a pilgrimage walk last Sunday from St Ives Free Church to Holywell Parish Church, where walkers enjoyed tea and cakes upon arrival.

On 13 June the FCJ Centre for Spirituality and EcoJustice in North London hosted an evening discussing the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, for those who “desire to learn to love the Earth”. The Salvation Army’s latest magazine focused on upcycling to reduce waste. Faith for the Climate, in collaboration with Quakers in Britain, organised a webinar on 11 June looking at solutions to the climate crisis.

Staff members from ethnic minorities make up almost a quarter of Catholic school workforces, more than half again the number that other schools employ, according to a new report. Of the 47,312 of employees in England’s 2,074 Catholic schools 24.6  per cent are from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared to a 16.2 per cent national average. 

The data comes from the latest annual survey of all Catholic schools, colleges and academies, published by the Catholic Education Service. Nearly half of the 817,784 pupils in England’s state-funded Catholic schools are from ethnic minorities, at 47.2 per cent, compared with an England state sector average of 38.7 per cent. 

Paul Barber, director, said: “Catholic schools are clearly popular with pupils, parents and staff from a wide range of backgrounds, and which we believe to be the most ethnically diverse in the country. This is partly due to a respect shown for faith, including for other faiths, which is therefore supportive of community cohesion across the country.”

The Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols will on 30 June celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving at Westminster Cathedral to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Caritas Bakhita House, the safe house for survivors of trafficking and exploitation. 

Fr Gerry McFlynn, vice president of Pax Christi UK appealed for political and church “to rebuff the false claims of those who stir up hatred and violence” after communities in Northern Ireland suffered three days of anti-immigrant riots.

“It has been a very dispiriting experience to be back home this week and to witness the racially inspired violence in Ballymena and other parts of the North. I am seeing scenes I thought had been consigned to the past. This violence now risks undermining the criminal justice process into an allegation of a sex attack on a teenage girl in the town,” he said.

“A united response from representatives of the Stormont Executive along with leaders of all the main churches would have a strong symbolic effect and show, at very least, that those engaged in the violence and those fomenting racial hatred do not represent the majority of people in Northern Ireland.”

The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland received a record 385 allegations in 2024-25, according to its annual report.

New allegations “rose to 385 in 2024/25 from 252 in 2023/24,” said Aidan Gordon, chief executive. “This represents an increase of over 50 per cent in the number of new allegations notified and is the highest number of any reporting period since we began publishing the figures annually in 2009.”

Most of allegations received concerned sexual abuse. There were a further 55 allegations of physical abuse. Of the 334 accused members of religious institutes, 308 are male, 221 are deceased, 31 are in prison, and five are in active ministry. Of the 39 accused diocesan clergy, 20 are deceased and one is in active ministry.

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