A bench and sculpture celebrating the lives of two of Ireland’s leading humanitarians, brothers Fr Aengus and Fr Jack Finucane, were unveiled in Limerick city on Thursday.

The brothers Finucane, both Spiritan priests, first came to worldwide attention in the late 1960s when they shipped thousands of tons of food to starving Biafrans in west Africa during a war with Nigerian authorities.

Fr Aengus and Fr Jack organised mercy-flights aid effort in Biafra.

The airstrip they used was under constant attack from Nigerian bombers, especially when the aid aircraft were taking off and landing.

The Biafran war was the first involving mass starvation to be reported on television and the Nigerian blockade provoked worldwide outrage. In 1970 Fr Jack was briefly imprisoned by the Nigerian authorities before being expelled.

Their Biafra aid campaign led to the founding of Concern Worldwide in 1968. Subsequently, both men were involved with relief efforts in Bangladesh in the 1970s, Ethiopia in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Sudan and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

Members of the Church of Ireland have been asked “to give urgent consideration” as to how they can provide accommodation for people fleeing Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Its Church and Society Commission has appealed to “anyone who owns or knows of buildings in good or habitable repair for immediate use which could accommodate groups of Ukrainian refugees” to contact the relevant Government agency.

This follows consultation by the commission with the Department which manages short–term accommodation needs, in light of the current shortage of accommodation for refugees, and the need to “sustain the momentum for the long run on behalf of people who have lost everything at home,” as the Church’s commission has put it.

Leading advocates of religious freedom today marked the International Day to Commemorate the Victims of Acts of Violence based on Religion or Beliefs.

The international foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), a Catholic organisation that supports persecuted and suffering Christians in over 140 countries, highlighted a number of important issues.

Among them are the lack of international response to the myriad Islamic terrorist cells in Africa.

In particular, the threat to religious freedom in the Sahel region has severe consequences, not just for the members of the threatened religious groups, but for the growth and development of whole nations.

Worryingly there is a spiral of violence in Nigeria. The country with the largest population in Africa is experiencing an unprecedented scale of religious-based violence which ACN warns could get even worse unless the international community unites to address and seek solutions to the issues.

Likewise, there are millions of displaced people and refugees. Many of the victims of violence provoked by religious extremists have had to flee their ancestral homes.

There is also a disturbing rise in the use of sexual violence against minority religious groups, including kidnapping and forced marriages and conversions in countries such as Pakistan and Egypt.

Elsewhere, there is an alarming rise of religious attacks in Latin America, headed by Nicaragua, where in less than four years the Catholic Church has suffered over 190 attacks and desecrations.

At the same time, there is also an imposition of new aggressive secular ideologies.

Couples should be offered cash incentives to encourage them to tie the knot, campaigners in the UK have urged.

Government Ministers have been warned that the number of Britons committing to each other is at a record low and must be brought back up.

The Marriage Foundation says offering financial perks has worked in Hungary and should be explored in the UK.

It hailed the dramatic uptick – 92 per cent between 2010 and 2020 – in the European nation as “nothing short of a miracle”.

And that it showed the power of the “right policies and financial incentives” .

Surveys found far fewer people on lower incomes get married than higher incomes, with the organisation citing financial disincentives.

Report author Harry Benson said: “Low income families stand to lose as much as £10,000 every year of tax credit or Universal Credit entitlement if they live together or marry.

The Sisters of Jesus the Saviour announced that four of their Sisters were kidnapped in Nigeria’s Imo state on Sunday.

“It is with great pain that we bring to your notice the kidnaping of our Sisters: Johannes Nwodo, Christabel Echemazu, Liberata Mbamalu and Benita Agu,” said in an announcement from the community’s secretary general, Sister Zita Ihedoro.

The abduction took place near the Okigwe-Umulolo axis of the Okigwe-Enugu Expressway while the religious were on their way to a Mass.

“We implore for an intense prayer for their quick and safe release. May Jesus the Saviour listen to our prayers and may Our Mother Mary intercede for the unconditional release of our dear Sisters,” Sister Zita wrote.

The Irish Government has raised the issue of the detention of an archbishop by Lebanese authorities while he was returning from Israel following a routine visit to his diocese.

Archbishop Moussa El-Hage of Haifa and the Holy Land was detained last month while bringing $460,000 (€451,000) in aid from the Lebanese diaspora in Israel to family members in Lebanon.

He was arrested on the orders of a military court before being interrogated for 12 hours. After being released at midnight, he was stripped of his passport, mobile phone, the money and medicine.

Following a query from Carol Nolan TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney said on the issue: “Religious leaders, such as Archbishop El-Hage, play an important role in Lebanon where the political system relies on tolerance, inclusivity and religious freedom. Officials from my department have raised the issue with the Lebanese authorities.”

Mr Coveney went on to say the general situation is “extremely worrying”.

A five-month pregnant Lebanese woman with full body burns is fighting a ‘bleak’ battle for survival after her husband set fire to her because she refused to have an abortion.

Hana Mohammed Khodor, 21, was rushed to a hospital in Tripoli in critical condition after her husband, identified as ‘AA’, set her ablaze with a gas canister.

A doctor said that they had to operate to remove the unborn baby after it died and the mother’s chances of survival are ‘very bleak.’

The horrific attack is alleged to have started with ‘AA’ viciously beating his young pregnant wife when she told him she wanted to keep their baby, due to be born in December.

The argument stemmed from the financial burden that the child would put on the family, with the couple reportedly coming from poor upbringings in the north of the country.

A new anti-conversion law was passed on Friday in Himachal Pradesh, a state in northern India, to keep Hindus from changing religion.

The change to an earlier law from 2019 forbids a convert to Christianity from benefitting from any privilege attached to his family’s caste – lower caste Hindus benefit from quotas in education and state employment – and increases the maximum punishment for “forced conversion” to ten years imprisonment. The amendment also defines the conversion of more than one person in a single ceremony as a “mass conversion,” despite the fact that Catholics and other liturgical Christians often perform baptisms for all converts at the Easter vigil.

In addition, any “marriage for the sole purpose of conversion is declared null and void” under the legislation. Finally, anyone seeking to convert to another religion as well as those performing the conversion must give a month’s notice to a local government magistrate.

In response, a Catholic bishop, Ignatius Loyola Mascarenhas of Shimla–Chandigarh, says he is “more than disappointed and so are people of other faiths”.

Nicaragua’s crack-down on political, business, and media figures has finally caught up with the only remaining opposition: the Catholic Church.

Bishop Rolando Alvarez of Matagalpa has been under house arrest for the past two weeks; processions have been banned for “internal safety” reasons; priests have been imprisoned, kidnapped or had their documents seized; and Catholic radios and televisions have been forcibly closed by the government.

Though the clergy continue to speak up in favor of democracy and forgiveness, and condemn oppression and the country’s growing poverty, the pace at which the government is threatening and arresting Catholic priests might mean that resistance to the regime will soon fall almost exclusively in the hands of Nicaraguans living abroad.

The founder of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation said she believes Ortega has launched a war against the Catholic Church because today the bishops are the “grassroots leaders” and among the few with “credibility.”

India’s federal government has sought dismissal of a petition that sought to end the persecution of Christians, saying there could be a “hidden oblique agenda” behind it.

The Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Archbishop Peter Machado of Bangalore, the National Solidarity Forum and the Evangelical Fellowship of India, said that an average of 45 to 50 violent attacks against Christian institutions and priests were reported every month.

A record 57 attacks were recorded in May, the petition said and sought urgent intervention from the top court.

However, in its affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, the government said there seemed to be an agenda behind filing “such deceptive petitions.”

The government alleged that such petitions were meant to “create unrest throughout the country and perhaps for getting assistance from outside the country to meddle with internal affairs of our nation.”

Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, who appeared for the federal government, told the court that such “half-baked and self-serving facts and self-serving articles and reports culminating into a petition — based upon mere conjectures — clearly appear to be for an oblique purpose.”

Describing the petition as a “hazardous trend,” the government denied any kind of targeted attacks against Christians.