Christian Europe is in decline and lapsed Catholics are partly to blame for the situation by abandoning their faith, a senior cardinal has said. He said they “should return to the Church” if the historical identity of Europe was to survive. Practising Christians are more likely to marry and have children than their secular counter-parts, research has shown.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria, told a French Catholic magazine that the rejection of Christianity combined with a below-replacement birth rate and mass immigration from Muslim countries was changing the continent beyond recognition.

“If Catholics have left the Church, we should not be surprised that they are in the minority,” the cardinal said in an interview with Famille Chrétienne.

“We must accept the decline of Europe,” he said. “We tend to gaze at our ecclesiastical navel, but it is an undeniable continental movement.”

He said: “In 20 years, the European population will not be the same as it is today, and it is already not the same as it was 50 years ago.

“This is inevitable, above all due to the decline in the birth rate in Europe but also due to immigration and the increasing presence of Islam”.

A campaigner for secularism has failed in a discrimination claim after a series of religious services were hosted on the grounds of the Mansion House during the Covid pandemic.

John Hamill alleged his organisation, the ‘Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’ in Ireland, and other “non-faith” groups, were denied access to public resources when they were not granted similar permission to hold services of their own on the same property.

Mr Hamill’s case was that non-religious groups represented by an organisation styling itself the Dublin City Inter-Non-Faith Forum should have had a slot.

The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) rejected Mr Hamill’s complaint under the Equal Status Act 2000 in a decision published yesterday.

In his decision, WRC adjudicator Jim Dolan wrote that the Dublin City Inter-Non-Faith Forum “is not directly comparable” to the Dublin City Interfaith Forum.

He wrote that the latter had “existed for over a decade and has been active in organising and promoting events… throughout that period”, had a regularly updated website and social media presence, had a full-time employee, and was registered as a charity with 21 constituent members.

A UK Court has ruled against a male couple’s request that the mother of their child be barred from seeing him.

The unusual case arose after the woman agreed to be a surrogate for the couple. But in the absence of a donated egg, the woman herself provided the egg, meaning she carried her own biological child which she handed over to the couple upon birth.

Soon afterwards she signed a parental order granting responsibility for the child to the men along with a second order ensuring that she could have regular contact with the child, now aged 4, who lived permanently with his dads.

But the same-sex couple reneged on that agreement – leading to a doorstep argument described as ‘horrendous’ by the judge when she turned up at their house to see her son for a pre-arranged visit but the men threatened to call the police.

The men then pursued a series of legal cases against her that would cut her out of the boy’s life.

But the British courts have ruled in the mother’s favour and she retains legal parentage and a share of parental responsibility for the child.

Parents will shortly be invited to complete a national survey organised by the Department of Education on their preferred ethos of school as part of Government efforts to transition Catholic schools to other forms of management.

The online poll is expected to be open to parents of preschool and primary school-aged children, as well as younger children who have yet to enter the education system.

The poll will also ask parents about their school preferences in terms of gender mix and language of instruction: Irish or English.

The Irish Times is reporting that parents will be asked to provide details of their Eircode and, potentially, PPS numbers to help identify the location of their local school and to validate votes.

Minister for Education Norma Foley has previously said the poll will differ from previous efforts, which took place locally, by generating a “national conversation” on the issue.

His remarks come as the House of Commons is set to debate a proposal to legalise the practice.

Speaking at the Financial Times Weekend Festival in London on Saturday, Mr Streeting spoke about the importance of making sure “people aren’t coerced into exercising their right to die” because of a lack of support in end-of-life care.

He said having the “right protections and safeguards” in place was needed to make sure people don’t “take their own life thinking they were a burden on others”.

He added: “That is one of the reasons why I can buy into the principle and think about people in my own life who have really suffered at the end of life and not want to impose my views on assisted dying as to whether they should have a choice.

“But I am not sure as a country we have the right end-of-life care available to enable a real choice on assisted dying.”

A Catholic bishop in England is warning that the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia “undermines the sanctity and dignity of human life.”

Britain’s Parliament will this week consider a Private Member’s Bill called the “Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults Bill” – which seeks to legalise assisted suicide for those terminally ill with six months to live.

Bishop John Sherrington, however, is encouraging Catholics to unite in prayer and compassionate action in opposition to it.

“I wish to reaffirm that the Catholic Church has always been opposed to assisted suicide in every circumstance. The legalization of assisted suicide undermines the sanctity and dignity of human life. There is also now ample evidence across the world that the legalisation of assisted suicide puts the most vulnerable members of society at risk,” he said.

Hundreds of parents and children at schools run by the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship [MET] have protested the government’s decision to withdraw the operating licenses of the church’s last remaining charitable institutions.

Three schools were closed by order of the Government at the end of August while a fourth was relinquished to the State to keep it operational.

Government authorities cite financial instability, but church members have characterised the decision as retribution for the church’s failure to “toe-the-line” politically and is part of a long-running campaign against the small independent-Methodist denomination, which has 19,000 registered members and operates a network of schools, care homes and homeless shelters located in the country’s poorest communities.

Speaking at a press conference in Budapest last week, MET’s president, Pastor Gabor Ivanyi Snr, said: “What is behind this measure does not serve the interests of Hungary, it does not serve the interests of Hungarian education, and it does not serve the interests of the children in the least.”

Recent events, Ivanyi added, reflected “quite disgusting political game-playing and evil politicking.”

Fergus Finlay has called for the religious orders which ran schools in which children were sexually abused to be stripped of all assets to pay compensation to abuse victims and to reduce its members to a state of poverty. He has previously called for the orders to be suppressed.

Speaking on RTE’s Liveline in response to the scoping inquiry report into sexual abuse at schools run by religious orders, the former Labour Party and Government Advisor said: “I want to see orders like this bankrupted. The Holy Ghost fathers own hundreds of millions in assets, they can employ every legal firm in the country to protect themselves. I want to see them lose those assets and go back to the vow of poverty that they’re supposed to all have taken and I want those assets to be distributed among survivors”.

He repeated the claim on Newstalk Breakfast.

Citing, as an example, the financial worth of schools and other assets of the Spiritan (‘Holy Ghost’) congregation, he said:

“I don’t know what an order that lives by a vow of poverty needs with 157 million euro, but whatever they need, they shouldn’t have it. The land, the holdings, the assets, they should be all devoted, every penny of it should be devoted towards making restitution to the people that they tortured and degraded and humiliated and abused over years and years.”

Their assets include schools such as Blackrock College which would need to be sold to meet Fergus Finlay’s demand.

Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik wants to take faith formation out of schools entirely. She did not allude to the wishes of parents in this regard.

Speaking at the party’s political think-in with a general election looming Ms Bacik criticised the religious orders after the latest report sex abuse in Catholic schools and said that the pace of divestment of Catholic schools had been glacial. When a particular schools is put up for divestment, parents normally vote for the status quo.

“We need to ensure there’s divestment, that we see that the process initiated by [former Labour leader and Education Minister] Ruairí Quinn is now speeded up and continued, so that religious orders, complicit in such awful horrors in the past, no longer have authority over our schoolchildren in our education system.”

She was non-committal on legislation to speed up divestment, but said the party’s policy was to strip “faith formation” from the curriculum, while allowing broad consideration of all religion in class.

Regarding financial redress for victims of abuse in religious-run schools, she said she wants the religious orders to be “made to pay their share.”

On a visit to the country, Pope Francis has praised Indonesia’s birth rate, which is just above replacement level, calling public attention to the global demographics crisis.

Addressing Indonesian President Joko Widodo and civil leaders, the 87-year-old pontiff said: “Your nation has a high birth rate and please continue in this; you offer an example of this to other countries,” he said candidly, deviating from his prepared speech.

“This might make one laugh, but there are some families that seem to prefer to have a cat or dog, but this, this doesn’t work,” he added.

In May, Pope Francis repeated his particular concern for the “demographic winter” affecting Europe and other industrialized nations at the General State of the Birth Rate conference in Italy, warning politicians and business leaders that declining fertility rates will have dire consequences for the future.

While World Bank statistics show Indonesia’s birth rates have also steadily declined from 5.5 births per woman in 1960 to 2.2 births in 2022, the Asian nation is still above the 2.1 replacement level rate of fertility required for a country to maintain its population.