A Catholic priest was prevented from giving Conservative MP Sir David Amess the last rites as he lay dying in his Essex constituency because police refused him entry to the crime scene.

Father Jeffrey Woolnough arrived at the police cordon stretching across tree-lined Eastwood Road North in Leigh-on-Sea, offering to administer the Last Rites to the devout Catholic, 69, on Friday afternoon after he was stabbed multiple times by a suspected terrorist.

But police officers said “that because it was a crime scene, and also the nature of the scene, it just wasn’t possible.”

He later clarified on social media that he respected the Police’s decision and he instead prayed a rosary for the dying man from outside the police cordon.

A law that would make assisted suicide legal for terminally-ill people in Scotland is a “danger” to the disabled, according to the first Member of the Scottish Parliament to use a wheelchair full-time.

Pam Duncan-Glancy, who represents Glasgow for Labour, raised concerns over the definition of “terminally ill” in new proposals.

She told the BBC’s Debate Night programme: “You start to question what’s terminally ill. How long do you need to be terminally ill? How terminal does it need to be to be ill? You’re looking at a backdrop of a situation in society where disabled people are so far from any kind of equality whatsoever, that there is no safeguard I believe that can be put in any bill.” She added: “I have said this [bill] is a danger.”

A nationwide pro-life billboard campaign has been launched to ask people to rethink our abortion law as the legislation is subjected to the first review since its introduction in January 2019.

“We’re bringing public attention to the disturbing rise in the number of abortions – 13,243 in just two years, despite assurances from Leo Varadkar that it would be ‘rare'”, the Life Institute said. The billboards from the Iona Institute say: “The 8th amendment saved lives”.

The Life Institute billboards are central to a campaign urging both TDs and the public to examine the surge in abortion and the other negative outcomes that have accompanied the new regime.

Pro-life groups say the review of the 2018 legislation is in danger of being a “whitewash designed to ignore the reality of abortion which would be disturbing to many – including many Yes voters.”

The billboards are running in Dublin, Cork, Galway and elsewhere in the country through the middle of October, and others are being planned by the Life Institute over the coming months.

People are mistaken who “think that most parents are less interested in a school with a Catholic ethos than previous generations,” Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin has said.

“We should not shy away from our ethos. We must put ourselves in the public square. If the Catholic school is to fulfil its mission properly, it cannot retreat into what it considers a safe space. A Catholic school that isolates itself becomes self-centred and self-referential,” he said.

Those with responsibility for such schools “now need to consider seriously what it is we do, how we do it, and how we prepare these schools to continue to reflect the Catholic ethos for the families who wish to enrol their children in them,” he said.

Archbishop Farrell was speaking yesterday at a Mass for the Association of Patrons and Trustees of Catholic Schools (APTCS) in the Dominican retreat centre, in Tallaght.

An SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament has attended an anti-abortion gathering by the 40 Days for Life group outside Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow.

In an email, Mason said the gathering, “could not really be described as a protest. It was more like a vigil.”

“They stood across a wide road from the hospital entrance and certainly did not approach anyone, harass anyone or cause alarm or distress.”

He added that he considered abortion to be “seldom essential or vital”, before claiming the vigils might help women realise “they have a choice”.

Mason, the MSP for Glasgow Shettleston, added: “Sadly some women are being coerced by a partner or family to have an abortion when they may not realise they have a choice, eg by having the baby and giving him/ her up for adoption.”

He also said he was “unconvinced” of the need for a new exclusion zone law. Mason later told The Times that “the key dividing line in all this is when life begins” and argued that if life was deemed to begin at conception then society had a “responsibility to support the health of both mother and baby”. He added: “But I respect the view of others that life does not begin until birth so only the woman’s health is a consideration.”

Terminally ill people could soon arrange their own deaths over Zoom under assisted suicide proposals going through the Scottish parliament.

Liam McArthur, the Orkney MSP who has resurrected assisted suicide proposals in Holyrood after two previous parliamentary defeats, said remote consultations could be provided for those who could not travel.

Care Not Killing, a coalition of healthcare workers and religious groups who oppose assisted suicide, said that the prospect of booking your suicide on social media further exposes the “utterly sinister” motivation behind the bill.

Northern Ireland Secretary of State Brandon Lewis failed to comply with his duties by not expeditiously making abortion widely available to women in the North, a High Court judge has ruled.

However, Mr Justice Colton declined to make any order compelling Mr Lewis to set out a timetable for the provision of the procedure.

He was delivering a ruling after the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission took a judicial review against the Secretary of State, as well as the Northern Ireland Executive and the Department of Health over their failure to commission and fund an extensive abortion regime.

The claims against the Department of Health and Executive were dismissed.

But relating to Mr Lewis, the judge said: “The court declares that between April 2020 and March 2021 the Secretary of State failed to comply with his duties under Section 9 of the Northern Ireland Executive Formation Act 2019 in that he failed to ensure expeditiously that the State provide women with access to high-quality abortion and post-abortion care in all public facilities in Northern Ireland.

“The court declines to make any order of mandamus [a judicial writ issued as a command] against the Secretary of State.”

The Assembly voted yesterday, by 58 votes to 29, to allow the bill to complete its first key legislative hurdle.

If the legislation becomes law it would be the first of its kind anywhere in Europe. Similar proposals exist in the Republic.

Green Party Northern Ireland leader Clare Bailey is behind the move and claims it will protect staff and women accessing services.

Laws allowing for the provision of abortion services in Northern Ireland took effect last March, after they were drawn up by Westminster.

Following a public consultation, the government decided not to include powers to establish exclusion zones but said it would keep the matter “under review”.

DUP MLA Jonathan Buckley described the bill as “regressive”.

“Neither I nor my party support abuse or harassment,” he said, adding that he was concerned that “anything from a conversation to a leaflet” would be deemed criminal under the legislation.

The U.S. Catholic bishops’ pro-life chairman is expressing disappointment with President Biden as his Administration reverses a Trump-era rule that restricted funding over abortion.

“It’s really sad,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, who heads the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities, told EWTN News Nightly. The Biden administration, he added, is “in the control of abortion extremists.”

The archbishop reacted to the administration’s reversal of the “Protect Life Rule,” which barred tax dollars from Title X recipients that provide or promote abortion and required Title X clinics to be physically separate from abortion clinics. A federal program, Title X subsidizes family planning services, including contraceptives, for low-income communities.

The archbishop challenged President Biden – the second Catholic president in U.S. history – to defend and cherish human life.

“He likes to call himself a devout Catholic. I would urge him to begin to act like one, especially on the life issues,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann said. “And to let his faith really inform his conscience and the decisions that he’s making, not the platform of his party.”

Christian human rights campaigners are calling on the Pakistani government to do more to protect girls at risk of coerced conversion and forced marriage.

ADF International says around a thousand girls from religious minorities are converted to Islam against their will every year. It also believes the practice is growing in Afghanistan and across South Asia.

The organisation is urging people to sign an open letter to the Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan  calling for better protection from the authorities and an increase in the legal age of marriage from 16 to 18.

Director of ADF India, Tehmina Arora says an estimated 1,000 girls every year are abducted, kidnapped, and forced into marriage and then forcibly converted. “These are reports that have come out repeatedly from various human rights groups in Pakistan and that’s a really frightening statistic. The number of minor girls who are married off in Pakistan is among the highest in the world, according to the United Nations data. But the number of minor girls who belong to religious minorities are particularly vulnerable, because along with the kidnapping comes this forced conversion.

“Some of the girls that we’ve met because of the long process of working with our allies on the ground are as young as 12 , 14 and 15 years old, really young girls.”