Large numbers of evangelical churches in Ireland have called for the immediate ending of the blanket ban and criminalisation of public worship.
Christian Voice Ireland, a group of over 80 Christian Churches and ministries, released a statement Tuesday that said, given the essential nature and work of the church, they “cannot in good conscience continue under these restrictions”.
Should they not be lifted, they called on churches, if their circumstances permit, “to gather for the public worship of the Lord Jesus Christ—safely and with all appropriate Covid precautions in place”.
The pastor of one church, John Ahern, told Premier Radio on Monday that he would organise an outdoor worship event at the Phoenix Park this coming Sunday morning, even at the risk of arrest and imprisonment.
Meanwhile, the Church leaders of The Dublin Gospel Partnership released a statement on Tuesday saying the criminalising of gathered church worship is disproportionate and exceeds the limits of government authority.
They added that Christian worship is intrinsically corporate – an act of the gathered Church – and some aspects of it, such as baptism and communion, simply cannot be replicated online.
Therefore, they conclude, “to criminalise gathered worship is effectively to criminalise the practise of the Christian religion”.
The Taoiseach has said that the easing of Covid restrictions in May might include a lifting of the blanket ban on public worship, one of only two in Europe.
This reiterates the Government’s plan announced on March 30th.
The Taoiseach made his remarks to media after a cabinet meeting yesterday, to the Dáil, and in a letter to church leaders. The Government’s decision will however be subject to the advice of NPHET.
While giving no date for the move, Micheal Martin said a more detailed plan would be published next week.
In a statement last Sunday, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin said he considered a recent statutory instrument confirming religious gatherings are a criminal offence to be “formally enacting a potential infringement of religious freedom and of constitutional rights”, and he called for its “suspension”.
In a meeting with the Health Minister Monday, he called for the pastoral work of priests and religious ministers to be deemed essential.
The threat to religious freedom remains strong worldwide, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in its annual report published this week.
The report identifies 14 countries of particular concern for their “systematic, ongoing, and egregious” violations of religious freedom, and recommends another 12 as needing special monitoring for their severe violations.
Many countries used the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic to aggravate religious discrimination. USCIRF noted that China, Nigeria, and India were some of the worst violators of religious freedom.
In recent years, USCIRF has strongly criticized the Chinese government’s atrocities committed against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province. In retaliation, China earlier this year sanctioned Gayle Manchin and Tony Perkins, the current Chair and Vice-Chair of USCIRF.
Kelsey Zorzi, Director of Advocacy for Global Religious Freedom for ADF International said the USCIRF’s Annual Report continues to shed light on “the worst abusers against people of faith and even no faith, and stands as a key resource for advocates and governments”.
“We welcome the new report and hope the United States Government will heed the voices of the persecuted in developing its foreign policy priorities,” she said.
Five priests, two nuns and three laypeople were abducted together last week on their way to a parish near the capital of Port-au-Prince in Haiti.
“This new case is a reflection of the collapse of the security apparatus of the state and the country. No one seems to be safe anymore,” Redemptorist Fr. Renold Antoine told Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
Bishop Pierre-André Dumas of Anse-à-Veau et Miragoâne, vice president of the bishops’ conference, told AFP, “This is too much. The time has come for these inhuman acts to stop.”
“The church prays and stands in solidarity with all the victims of this heinous act,” he said.
The Biden administration is suing to reinstate an Obama-era mandate that doctors and hospitals provide gender-transition surgeries, regardless of their conscientious beliefs.
The mandate has been subject to injunctions since 2016 and remains ‘in limbo’ until the courts make a definitive ruling.
On Tuesday, the legal group Becket – which represents Catholic doctors and hospitals in their case against the “transgender mandate” – reported that the administration had filed an appeal to keep the mandate in place.
“The Biden Admin says it can punish doctors and hospitals for ‘sex discrimination’ unless they perform controversial gender-transition procedures,” Luke Goodrich tweeted on Tuesday.
“This is bad for patients, doctors, and religious liberty,” he added.
Goodrich said he looks forward to another ruling “that protects patients, aligns with current medical research, and ensures doctors aren’t forced to violate their religious beliefs and professional medical judgment.”
The Catholic Archbishop of Armagh has called for the work of religious ministers to be deemed essential.
Archbishop Eamon Martin made his remarks in a meeting with Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly on Monday where he also expressed concern about the “criminalising” of public worship.
In a statement issued after the meeting on Monday, the Catholic Communications Office said the Archbishop emphasised that “the vital pastoral work of priests and other ministers on the ground should also be respected and deemed essential, rather than subject to penal sanction”.
“Ministers of religion are often on the front line supporting the sick, the bereaved, the isolated and those who are struggling to cope. Pastoral ministry and spiritual support, which are so important for people during the time of pandemic, ought not to be confined to a small number of legally acceptable and ‘regulated activities’”.
The statement added that the Minister said that religious worship and spiritual well-being were taken very seriously by government “and consideration would be given to early re-opening of public worship in accordance with public health advice in the coming weeks”.
More than 1,200 church leaders have urged PM Boris Johnson not to introduce Covid vaccine certificates, saying they are an “unethical form of coercion”.
In an open letter, the leaders – who include Anglican and Catholic ministers – warn passports could create a “surveillance state”.
The government says it is reviewing whether to use vaccine certificates and “no decisions have been taken”.
The UK equality watchdog says passports could create a “two-tier society”.
The church leaders go so far as to say that introducing the passports would create a “medical apartheid”.
“This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives,” the letter said.
“As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.”
The church leaders said that, regardless of the government’s final decision, they would not refuse entry to their churches to anybody without a vaccine passport – or any other certificate which they have labelled “proof of health”.
Monkey-human embryos have been created and kept alive for an extended period for the first time in research that scientists said posed significant ethical questions.
The embryos, some of which continued to develop until 20 days, were made by injecting human stem cells into macaque embryos in a laboratory.
These stem cells continued to proliferate, creating embryos that were neither monkey nor human. All were grown outside the womb, and they averaged about 4 per cent human cells.
The researchers said that their work, which was published in the journal Cell, offered a way of studying early human development.
“As we are unable to conduct certain types of experiments in humans, it is essential that we have better models to more accurately study and understand human biology and disease,” said Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, from the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, California.
Other scientists said that although the work may offer a way around this ethical problem it created another.
Leaders of different faiths and Christian denominations have reacted with anger to a Statutory Instrument that formally institutes penal provisions for most indoor and outdoor gatherings including public worship. According to Professor Oran Doyle of TCD, the provision even makes hearing Confession outdoors an offence.
In response, the four Catholic Archbishops called the move, together with the associated penal provisions, “provocative” and “draconian”. Gardai had already been treating public worship as an offence.
“We will seek an immediate meeting with Minister Donnelly and we request the suspension of this harsh and unclear statutory instrument,” Archbishop Eamon Martin said.
The chair of Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council has said he is disappointed by the measure to outlaw religious services.
Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri said faith communities have suffered enough and this is the second Ramadan that his community has been unable to visit a place of worship.
He said he is in agreement with the Catholic Archbishops and he is also considering taking legal advice.
John Ahern, pastor at All Nations Church, said he was “appalled” at the outlawing of services. “We’re going to issue a letter to the government about it this week,” he said. “They’re going to be reviewing the restrictions on May 4. If they don’t lift the ban, we’ll be calling on churches to open up anyway because we can’t go on like this.
“None of us want to be breaking the law and we know this has been a very difficult time for gardai and the government, but it is wrong to be criminalising worship in what is meant to be a free, democratic country.”
President Michael D Higgins has stated that the teaching of children in Northern Ireland separately can no longer be justified.
Mr Higgins told The Late Late Show that segregating children in the North according to their religious denominations is “abandoning them to parcels of hate and memory that others are manipulating”. He did not provide direct evidence for this.
“Who in 2021 can justify the teaching of children separately on the basis of belief? Is it important if you talk about an ethical present and an ambitious future that you deal with it,” he said.
