A Catholic care home in Belgium is being sued by relatives of a patient for not offering euthanasia to her. The Catholic Herald reports that, when the St Augustinus home in Diest declined a request for a doctor to administer a lethal injection to Mariette Buntjens in 2011, the woman’s family transferred her to a...
State and other schools in England will not be required to teach non-religious views on an equal footing with religion, following the issuing of revised Department of Education guidelines. According to the Christian Institute, the review, which was prompted by a High Court ruling last November that the new Religious Education curriculum had wrongfully excluded...
An Evangelical pastor in Northern Ireland has been found not guilty of issuing grossly offensive remarks during a sermon in which he described Islam as “a doctrine spawned in hell”. Brought before Belfast Magistrates’ Court, Pastor James McConnell had denied two charges levelled against him for the sermon, delivered at Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast in 2014....
The number of children living in ‘traditional family’ settings in the United States has plummeted, new research has found. Defining the traditional family as one where “the children are under 18 years old, the mother stays at home while the father works and both parents are in their first marriage”, the Pew Research Centre studied...
Pro-life voters must be aware of the position of political parties and individual politicians on abortion as Ireland’s abortion laws may well rest on the outcome of the coming election, Bishop Kevin Doran has said. In the course of an interview on Newstalk Radio’s Pat Kenny Show, the Bishop of Elphin pointed out that “many of...
A support group for parents who receive poor pre-natal prognoses for their babies (so-called ‘fatal foetal abnormalities’) has criticised a call made by a leading physician at a maternity hospital for abortion to be made available in such circumstances. In a statement responding to comments on abortion made by Professor Fergal Malone, the new Master of...
Archbishop Eamon Martin has said that claims of many parents feeling under pressure to baptise their children to gain school places when a school is oversubscribed is “overstated”. Speaking during an interview on RTÉ Radio’s Countrywide programme at the weekend, the Primate of All Ireland said that, while there may be examples of parents baptising their...
British Parliamentarians have called for the slaughter of religious minorities in the Middle East to be recognised by the UN as genocide. In a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron signed by 60 Members of Parliament, Mr Cameron is urged to use his influence to begin a process that would result in the UN declaring...
The Iona Institute has criticised proposals by the Minister for Justice to reduce the waiting time for divorce. Reacting to comments made by Minister Frances Fitzgerald that “it is time to review” the minimum four-year waiting period for couples seeking a divorce, Iona director David Quinn said the “announcement is simply one more indication that...
The Bishop of Waterford and Lismore has taken issue with plans to end the rule for national schools that gives protection of the status of religion in primary schools. In a letter sent to local newspapers in his diocese, Bishop Phonsie Cullinan questions the apparent drive by Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan to create a “one-size-fits-all”...
