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“Society has forced us in the Irish Church to look into the mirror and what we saw were weakness and failure, victims and abuse,”
(Bishop Liam MacDaid of Clogher, Catholic Culture)
"The Vatican has been wilfully deceitful in things it has said.”
(Colm O’Gorman, abuse survivor, Guardian)
“Increasingly, on these issues of modernity, the Vatican of the new millennium seems like the Soviet Politburo of the 1980s. They pretend to believe what they preach while we pretend to obey them. One day, this surreality will pop like a bubble. One day.”
(Gay Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan, Atlantic magazine)
“It makes me sad to see the three-year-olds in hijab, who want, of course, to look like Mummy (all three-year-olds want to look like Mummy) but who, in any case, soon won't have much choice, and who are being taught that their tiny bodies, and their lovely hair, are things to be protected from the male gaze.”
(Cristina Patterson, Independent)
Not the church, not the state – gender equality in the crossfire
(Deniz Kandiyoti, Open Democracy)
NSS member Alan Rogers, who has been urging the setting up of charitable trusts to pay for hospital chaplains in Wales, has written to Assembly members urging them to support his campaign.
The Education Secretary, Michael Gove, faced a House of Commons Education select committee this week to answer questions about the Academies Act. It became law yesterday after having been rushed through Parliament with scandalously inadequate scrutiny, given the scale of the changes and the complexity of our education system.
As part of the Labour leadership hustings, the five prospective candidates (Diane Abbott, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham) have all faced a series of questions over their party’s unpopular policies surrounding faith schools.
When the Treaty of Lisbon was signed, it brought into effect a clause that gives special consultation rights to religious organisations. It is something the Vatican has been trying to achieve for decades.
We knew it was going to be popular, but demand for our Protest the Pope t-shirt, with its simple but striking message “Pope – Nope”, has gone through the roof.
The National Secular Society is staging a film season in the days before the Pope arrives in Britain. The films will look at aspects of the Catholic Church which both the Government and the Church itself would prefer were not mentioned during the visit of the “Holy Father”.
A public meeting has been organised in Richmond to propose a protest against the Pope’s visit to St Mary’s University College in Twickenham, where the pontiff is slated to talk about his views on education.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, a long time Vatican watcher, said papal visits to the developed world are immensely expensive for the local church, especially when the host country’s government doesn’t pick up the full tab.
In the House of Lords last week, Lord Kilclooney asked the Government: “What is the estimated cost to the Exchequer of the planned state visit to the United Kingdom this year by Pope Benedict XVI.”
The left in this country has had the reputation of championing the cause of anti-racism, gay rights and civil liberties, but now it is seen to be blind to the obvious problems with the doctrine of multiculturalism, and even paralysed by the hypnotic term “Islamophobia”, which it has been persuaded equates with “racism”.
Wrexham Council in Denbighshire is to recognise the demand for non-religious funerals and will provide the “services” at the local crematorium — or anywhere else that isn’t a religious building — for £110.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is sometimes referred to as female circumcision although it is far more severe than the male version and should always be referred to as what it is – mutilation.
Spanish politicians rejected a proposal in Parliament on Tuesday to ban women from wearing face covering veils in public places.
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