Catholic churches across Northern Ireland reopened for public worship on Friday.
The Church of Ireland, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches in Northern Ireland will resume in-person services this coming Good Friday, 2 April.
The four Churches voluntarily suspended in-person gatherings in January of this year due to the latest Covid-19 lockdown and a surge in cases. In the South, the ban is imposed and public worship is illegal.
The Bishop of Derry Donal McKeown commented that the “Churches in the North have been trusted by government to make decisions about closing and opening, which I think is a mature way of running a society, and I think we have to be very sensible and sensitive to ensure that we do not contribute to any possible super-spreader events.”
Derry priest Rev Michael Canny told BBC NI’s Good Morning Ulster that he was “delighted” to be reopening in time for Holy Week and Easter, but stressed that a lot of care was needed.
“When people come at 9:15 and again at 10:00, there will still be social distancing, they will still have to sanitise hands, we will encourage them to go home afterwards, rather than to be standing outside chatting.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has imposed sanctions on a leading British Catholic human rights campaigner who highlighted widespread abuses of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province.
The Chinese authorities announced the measures against Lord David Alton and eight other U.K. citizens, as well as four institutions critical of the country’s human rights record.
Alton, an independent member of the House of Lords, noted that the step followed the U.K. government’s introduction of sanctions against four senior Chinese officials last week over China’s treatment of its Uighur minority, and similar sanctions by the EU.
Writing on his website, Alton said: “The imposition of tit-for-tat sanctions is a crude attempt to silence criticism. But the CCP needs to learn that you can’t silence the whole world and that the first duty of a parliamentarian is to use their voice on behalf of those whose voices have been silenced.”
Two women from Bishopstown in Cork have become the first same-sex couple in the country to be legally identified as the parents of babies from birth.
Geraldine Rea and Niamh O’Sullivan were both registered as the parents of twin girls Réidín and Aoibhín O’Sullivan Rea on the babies’ birth certs, without having to go through a court process. Geraldine had given birth to the twins at Cork University Maternity Hospital on February 4th following donor sperm treatment at the Waterstone Clinic.
The new process of direct registration follows the enactment last May of the final sections of the 2015 Child and Family Relationships Act.
Prior to the signing of the legislation into law, female same-sex couples had to go through a court process to re-register the birth of their children, in order for both of them to be legally recognised as the children’s parents.
However, since last May, the birth mother and the intending co-parent, be they spouse, civil partner or cohabitant, can now register directly with the registrar for the births, deaths and marriages as the parents of a child born as a result of a donor-assisted human reproduction procedure.
Four Independent TDs have called for places of worship to be reopened for limited numbers of people for Easter.
Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath claimed “this Cabinet will go down in history as the most anti-Christian Government of all time since we got our freedom back . . . to think that people will be persecuted for going to Mass or having public worship”.
Mr McGrath pointed to a Scottish supreme court ruling on Wednesday that it was in breach to the European Convention on Human Rights to completely stop public worship. He said: “if it’s against Scotland’s European rights it’s against ours. I’m appealing especially for Holy Week” for religious services to be allowed.
He said a parish priest had contacted him about a note he saw on a window “where nine people can go into a chipper or takeaway and nobody allowed inside a church”.
Regarding to 10 person limit on funerals, Limerick TD Richard O’Donoghue said “140 people or more were in this room (Convention Centre) today voting on legislation. There’s churches in this country bigger than this and yet you only allow 10 people in.”
Minister of State for Health Anne Rabbitte was unable to point to any direct evidence justifying the ban on public worship.
Northern Ireland’s First Minister Arlene Foster has told Northern Secretary Brandon Lewis to “back off” in a row over the introduction of permissive abortion legislation. The law decriminalises abortion completely,
The DUP leader was reacting to Mr Lewis’s intervention in the House of Commons on Tuesday, where he said he was taking on the power to compel health minister Robin Swann to commission an extensive abortion regime in the North despite the Executive not agreeing on the issue.
At a press conference in Dungannon, Co Tyrone with Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, Ms Foster said the DUP’s position was “that both lives matter, and whilst we’ve spent this past year trying to save lives through Covid-19, we should also try and save lives in the womb”.
“This is a hugely complex, controversial, legally challenging issue for the Executive but let us be very clear, it is for the Executive, it is not for Brandon Lewis,” added Ms Foster.
She said the new abortion law came in at Westminster in 2019 because devolution was suspended. “There is devolution now and he should back off,” she said of Mr Lewis.
Worshippers have returned to churches in Scotland after a judge ruled coronavirus regulations that forced their closure were unlawful.
Instead of a blanket ban, a limit of 50 people has been employed where churches are large enough to offer 2m social distancing.
St Mary’s Catholic Church in Calton in east Glasgow was among the churches to reopen yesterday, welcoming believers for midday Mass.
Canon Tom White was involved in the legal action and he said that he was “delighted” at the outcome.
He told the PA news agency: “I think it’s an important victory not so much dependent on your disposition towards how we keep each other safe in this time of pandemic, but it’s how we make sure that how we act as a liberal democracy is proportionate and that we don’t at all costs trample on the rights of others.
“Authentic worship is about gathering together as a community, authentic worship for us in the Catholic tradition is about coming together in a building which is sacred and participating in a sacred space at a sacred time and the sacraments necessarily are tangible, they’re not virtual. Faith is real, it’s tangible and people in this time of pandemic need to embrace the sacred.”
He said that his parishioners were “delighted” and “over the moon” at being able to take part in communal worship again.
Scotland’s churches can reopen immediately after Covid regulations that forced their closure and criminalised public worship were deemed a breach of human rights.
Lord Braid said the regulations disproportionately interfered with the freedom of religion secured in the European Convention on Human Rights. In striking down the blanket ban, the judge allowed the previous regulation to return, namely, a limit of up to 50 people if the place of worship is large enough to facilitate 2m social distancing.
In the ruling, the Judge said it was difficult to see why the Scottish courts services could use cinemas to conduct jury trials, but yet parishioners were prevented from going to church.
Measures such as social distancing and limiting numbers did not appear to have been considered and an instruction to conduct religious services online was not for the State to dictate:
“That might be an alternative to worship but it is not worship. At very best for the respondents, in modern parlance, it is worship-lite”.
Sacramental issues such as Catholics receiving the Eucharist and attending confession had not factored into government thinking, he added.
“For all these reasons, I am clear that the effect of the closure of places of worship is that the petitioners, and the additional party are effectively prevented from practising or manifesting their religion, however many broadcasts or internet platforms may exist.”
Rev Dr William Philip, senior minister at the Tron Church in Glasgow, welcomed the ruling, saying “the approach to banning and criminalising gathered church worship was clearly an over-reach and disproportionate and if this had gone unchallenged it would have set a very dangerous precedent”.
The Taoiseach and the Government were compared to Oliver Cromwell in a Dáil row over Covid-19 restrictions, closure of churches and claims that Ireland is the only EU country “effectively locking people into their homes”.
Independent TD Michael McNamara made the comparison with the English soldier who suppressed rebellion in Ireland in the 17th century and crushed the Catholic church and clergy.
The Clare TD said rights could be restricted on the basis of public health “but those restrictions have to be proportionate and necessary. In Ireland, churches and all religious denominations (places of worship) are closed”.
Mr McNamara said the Scottish supreme court had on Wednesday ruled that it was contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and disproportionate to close the churches.
“If it is disproportionate in Scotland, it is disproportionate in Ireland because we are bound by the same convention.”
He assailed Taoiseach Micheál Martin for saying on radio that we live in a liberal democracy: “Either he does not know what a liberal democracy is or the man is deluded.”
He said Mr Martin promised to govern as a republican when he was elected. “There are many republican traditions, one of which is the tradition of Oliver Cromwell. It is in that republican tradition he and the Government are currently governing.”
A constitutional challenge to the ban on public worship took a bizarre twist yesterday when counsel for the State could not confirm if the ban actually exists in law.
Businessman Declan Ganley first took the case four months ago, but it has been repeatedly postponed in the High Court.
Yesterday, he raised a recent opinion from a leading legal experts that the restrictions on public worship are merely advice, and have no force in law.
This is despite the gardai fining a priest in Cavan €500 last week for saying mass while a gathering of people were present.
Judge Charles Meenan gave the State two weeks to clarify.
Professor in law at Trinity College Dublin, Oran Doyle, said it was bizarre that, four months after the start of the legal case, lawyers representing the State need to take instructions on whether those restrictions actually exist.
New powers to force through a very permissive abortion law on Northern Ireland involves an expansion of direct rule that rides roughshod over local decision making, according to the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
The Church had previously expressed its total opposition to the imposition of abortion laws from Westminster, and expressed grave concern that the Secretary of State might compel the North’s Health department to implement them.
However, the Right Reverend Dr David Bruce described the new regulations as “radical, and unreasonably sweeping powers”, and said they go much further than had been expected.
“[T]he regulations laid before Parliament today drive a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s hard won and finely balanced devolved constitutional settlement. These powers not only devalue Northern Ireland’s purposely unique system of negotiated government, they also give the Secretary of State the freedom to interfere directly, and at will, with every single department of devolved government”.
“For instance, the Secretary of State is seeking to be able to unilaterally direct what should happen in Northern Ireland’s schools, taking local power and decision making away from governors, teachers and parents on sensitive issues, therefore undermining the right of schools to embrace a particular ethos,” Dr Bruce said, in a statement.
The Moderator called the intervention ill-considered and irresponsible and said it undermines Northern Ireland’s fragile devolved settlement. He called for the powers to be withdrawn.
