The Muslim man who had kidnapped a 14-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan threatened to kill her and her family unless she gave court statements falsely affirming that she had married him and converted to Islam of her own free will, the girl told Morning Star News.

Maira Shahbaz of Medina Town, Faisalabad, was abducted on April 28 by Nakash Tariq, according to family members.

“Nakash and two other men took me to an unknown place at gunpoint, where Nakash repeatedly raped me.”

She said she had been forced to sign blank papers and denied consenting to becoming a Muslim.

“I was coerced into making those statements in the courtrooms,” she said. “They threatened to kill us all.”

Prior to the court case, Maira had been placed in a women’s refuge, but The High Court in Lahore accepted her coerced statements and ordered she be returned to her kidnapper.

Five days ago, Maira escaped from her captor and is now in hiding.

The Workplace Relations Commission has ruled that it has no legal authority to adjudicate claims of discrimination in attending Mass or the dispensing of Catholic sacraments.

The WRC agreed with a preliminary legal argument raised by representatives for Bishop Drennan that the Holy Communion Mass provided by the Catholic Church as a religious service did not constitute a service within the meaning of the legislation.

The WRC said if religious services or sacraments had come within the ambit of the legislation, it would be unlawful for churches to refuse the sacrament of matrimony to persons who were divorced or of the same sex, or similarly to only ordain men as priests.

“There seems to be no reason in law or logic to differentiate between these types of religious services and a Holy Communion Mass,” said Ms Boyle.

She added: “If the Oireachtas had intended to apply the principle of equal status, enshrined in the Act, to all of these situations, it would have said so in express terms.”

Former minister John Halligan has said he helped people travel to Switzerland to access assisted suicide and would do so again.

The former Independent Alliance TD also called on politicians to finish the work he started on a bill that would legalise assisted suicide.

In 2015 Mr Halligan introduced the “Dying with Dignity” bill but it stalled after the government collapsed the following year.

Gino Kenny, the People Before Profit TD, has now introduced the same bill.

If passed, it would give people with incurable and progressive illnesses the right to a legal assisted suicide if they are likely to die within six months. At the moment, assisted suicide is a crime in Ireland which is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Mr Halligan said he believed “conservative elements” in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would try to block assisted suicide.

He added that the Irish Catholic Church would also staunchly oppose such a change, and that “religious” arguments would be involved.

“Would a God want to inflict unnecessary suffering on someone? I don’t believe in God, but I think that if there was a God, he or she would not want that,” he said.

The birth rate dropped by almost 10pc during the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, new figures reveal.

Data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) showed that births decreased by 1,522 in the first three months of 2020.

In the first quarter of 2019, there were 15,893 babies born in Ireland while in the same period this year there were only 14,371 births.

The birth rate stood at 11.7 per thousand in the population, the lowest ever on record.

This corresponds to a fertility rate of 1.77, where 2.1 is needed to achieve population replacement.

Senior lecturer at the UCD Smurfit School of Business, Jim Power, said the decline in births is “one of the biggest challenges facing the country” as there won’t be enough income to pay for pensions. However, he told the Irish Daily Mail that having more children was “not going to happen”.

He said the pension age will have to be raised, or there will have to be a lot of inward migration to make up the difference.

“Unfortunately, many of our political leaders just don’t have the political strength to state the bleeding obvious—it’s a time bomb ticking away.”

More than 600 incidents of criminal damage have been recorded at places of worship in the North in the past five years, according to a Christian charity.

Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) figures obtained following a Freedom of Information request by Christian Action Research and Education (Care) NI showed there have been 601 such attacks between 2014/15 and 2018/19.

The figures include all crimes recorded as criminal damage to religious buildings, churchyards or cemeteries.

Recent incidents, the charity said, include an arson attack on St Saviour’s church in Craigavon, Co Armagh in July, and damage to the interior and a smashed window at Brantry parish church in Co Tyrone in April.

However, the figures also showed that the number of incidents has fallen each year, from 136 in 2014/15 to 104 in 2018/19.

In the first 7 months of 2020, Hungary’s birth rate increased by 4.9%, according to the latest figures from the country’s Central Statistics Office.

The corresponding fertility rate increased from 1.44 to 1.53 compared to the same period last year.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, the number of births in the first quarter of 2020 decreased by 1,522 (9.6%) while deaths increased by 56 (0.6%) compared to the same period in 2019.

In Hungary, the figures show that there were 52,825 births in January-July, up 2,488. The number of marriages also increased, rising to 34,337, up 2,158 from last year.

Moreover, despite the covid pandemic, the number of deaths at 74,093, was down 3,992, or 5.1%, from last year.

The rise in births and a drop in deaths means that the rate of population decline slowed by 23 percent compared with the same period last year.

Evidence suggests that church services following public health guidelines do not present a greater risk of spreading the novel coronavirus than other similar activities, doctors said last week.

Washing hands, social distancing, and mask requirements have helped prevent the spread of COVID-19, even in cases when contagious, pre-symptomatic parishioners took part in church events, three members of the Thomistic Institute Working Group on Infectious Disease Protocols for Sacraments & Pastoral Care concluded.

Doctors Thomas McGovern, Deacon Timothy Flanigan, and Paul Cieslak authored an article for Real Clear Science on Mass attendance and COVID-19 Aug. 19.

“For Catholic churches following [the] guidelines, no outbreaks of COVID-19 have been linked to church attendance, even though we have examples … of asymptomatic, unknowingly infected individuals attending mass and other parish functions,” they wrote. “Their attendance could have led to an outbreak if appropriate precautions were not followed, yet in each case, we found no evidence of viral transmission.”

Members of the public will be able to attend Pope Francis’ general audiences again from Sept. 2 after an almost six-month absence due to the coronavirus crisis.

The Prefecture of the Papal Household announced yesterday that the next audience, this coming Wednesday, would take place “with the presence of the faithful.”

The gatherings will be held in the San Damaso Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace throughout September, following advice from authorities.

The venue differs from the usual location of St. Peter’s Square or the Paul VI Audience Hall.

The Prefecture noted that general audiences in September would start at 9.30 a.m. local time and would be “open to all those who wish, without the need for tickets.”

Retired Philipino Archbishop Oscar Cruz died early Wednesday from coronavirus complications. He is believed to be the 10th Catholic bishop to die of COVID-19 since the outbreak of the global pandemic.

The current archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan in the Philippines said that Cruz died after “multiple organ failure caused by critical COVID-19 infection”.

Cruz died at Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan City at the age of 85. He had been hospitalised since Aug. 10.

“He was a faithful shepherd. He was a courageous prophet. He was a brilliant canon lawyer … My heart is grateful that in this lifetime I met a great churchman like Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz,” Archbishop Socrates Villegas wrote on Facebook Aug. 26.

Cruz led the Archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan for nearly two decades from 1991 until his retirement in 2009. He was also president of the Philippines bishops’ conference from 1994 to 1999.

The Department of Education raised no objection to a secondary school holding a prayer assembly for 152 pupils on their first day back after the Covid shutdown of schools in March.

The assembly, at St Leo’s College, Co Carlow, has come in for criticism, with Association of Secondary Teachers’ Ireland president Ann Piggott describing it as “unwise and ill advised” in light of the continuing pandemic.

As students started to return to school for the first time in almost six months, incoming first-years at St Leo’s College were welcomed with a prayer service, with pupils seated a metre apart in the hall.

Principal Niamh Broderick, whose daughter Laura (13) was among the group, said they had followed department guidelines and everything was done properly and safely.