The ACP was critical of those arguing for an earlier return to public Masses than the original Government plan of July 20. In the end, they returned on June 29, but with strict limits on numbers.

Killala priest Fr Brendan Hoban said Church income was “in free-fall, and will be (it appears) for some time”.

Church collections were “the main-stay of parish life” and restrictions imposed due to the pandemic were having a drastic effect on these, he said.

Fr Hoban said there was “ a strange belief hanging around for years that the Catholic Church has plenty of money”.

“This is a persistent fallacy, beloved of critics of the Church, even though it’s glaringly obvious that without church collections there’s no other form of income available. The Catholic Church is as rich as its adherents are generous – no more and no less,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese a voluntary redundancy scheme was introduced for all 82 staff members in the diocesan support services and parish pastoral workers during the summer with hopes that a third of staff might partake. It was oversubscribed.

The Australian state of Victoria reported more than ten times the anticipated number of deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia in its first legal year.

Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board reported 124 deaths since June 19, 2019, when the legalization of the procedure took effect. There were a total of 231 permits issued for that year.

According to the review board’s report, 104 of those who died under the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 committed assisted suicide, while 20 people were euthanized by a medical practitioner.

“That number blows apart Victorian Premier Daniel Andrew’s much-publicised prediction of ‘a dozen’ deaths in the first 12 months,” Marilyn Rodrigues wrote in The Catholic Weekly, an Australian publication.

Victoria Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, of the Australian Labor Party, expected the number of persons seeking assisted suicide or euthanasia to be low initially, and increase in later years.

“We anticipate that once the scheme has been in place for some time, we’ll see between 100 and 150 patients access this scheme every year,” Mikakos told the ABC shortly before the law took effect.

“In the first year, we do expect the number to be quite modest — maybe only as low as a dozen people,” she added.

The number of men seeking vasectomies has increased by 20pc in a year at a busy Dublin clinic.

“We are flat out with all the patients who were cancelled in March, April and May and new applications are up 20pc,” said Dr John O’Keeffe of Morehampton Clinic in Donnybrook.

While most men undergoing the procedure have two or three children, Dr O’Keeffe conducts vasectomies on about a dozen men each year who have no children.

These men are typically well-educated and in their mid-30s, often professionals, academics, or working in the tech sector, who are either not in a relationship or who have decided with their partner that they do not wish to have children, he said.

Dr O’Keeffe said the average age of his patients rose from 34 in 1988 to 38 and six months in 2018. His oldest vasectomy patient was 72.

A Mexican pro-life group dedicated a shrine in Guadalajara last month in memory of aborted children. Called Rachel’s Grotto, it also serves as a place for reconciliation between parents and their deceased babies.

In an August 15 dedication ceremony, the archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara, Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, blessed the shrine and emphasized the importance of promoting “awareness that abortion is a terrible crime that frustrates the destiny of many human beings.”

Brenda del Río, the founder and director of Los Inocentes de María (Mary’s Innocent Ones), said the main goal, “is to combat violence against children, both in the womb and in early childhood, newborns and up to two, five, six years old, when lamentably many are murdered,” some are even “thrown into sewers, onto vacant lots.”

So far the association has buried 267 preborn children, newborns and infants.

Del Rio said that the parents of aborted babies can give their child a name, handwriting it on a small piece of paper to be transcribed on a clear plastic tile placed on the walls next to the shrine.

This is intended to help grieving parents “to reconcile with their child, [and] to reconcile with God.”

Government spending on services and tax breaks for families in Ireland is below the OECD average, according to new research from Unicef, the UN body set up to promote the welfare of children worldwide.

The findings are contained in UNICEF’s latest report card research, which has been running for two decades. It uses national pre-Covid data from EU and OECD countries to compare them across several measures of childhood wellbeing and development .

Teenagers in the Netherlands were the most satisfied with life, while those in Turkey had the lowest levels of satisfaction at 53 per cent, according to the research.

A doctor of Uigher origin who fled China has given a harrowing testimony of her own participation in the communist state’s brutal repression of ethnic minorities, in particular its Uighur Muslims.

Speaking to ITV News, she says that for much of her career she worked for the Chinese government as part of what she describes as its population control plan to curtail the growth of the Uighur population.

She speaks of participating in at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women including forced contraception, forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs.

Speaking on camera to ITV News Correspondent, Emma Murphy, she said that on at least one occasion a baby was still moving when it was discarded into the rubbish.

It follows an appeal from the Frontline Emergency Security Services Éire Forum (FESSEF), which organises the annual National Services Day, to show solidarity with people in the frontline services.

FESSEF has asked that church bells around Ireland ring out to mark the day show appreciation for frontline emergency and security services.

The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Remembering with Dignity’ and will commemorate all who have died from Covid-19 and their grieving families, as well as all who became ill with the virus and those frontline workers who have fought it.

Christians in India are facing horrific levels of violence from Hindu radical extremists as the government advances an agenda to turn the country into a Hindu nation.

A new report by a human rights group claims that despite a four-month coronavirus lockdown, Christians in India are facing an uptick in religiously-motivated persecution.

According to Persecution Relief, the four states of Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Chhatisgarh are now the most dangerous places for Christians, where beatings, arrests, church destruction, and at times death, are regular occurrences.

“The police will be called and at times the Christian will be arrested and accused of creating communal disharmony, accused of causing problems by being a Christian,” Todd Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs told CBN News.

“Prime Minister Modi was elected last year and he promised to make India more Hindu,” Nettleton said. “They believe that India is a Hindu nation, literally the soil is Hindu soil, and if you want to live there you should be a Hindu.”

For more than seven decades, India has been held together by its secular constitution, rich culture, and pluralistic values.

Now, human rights groups say all that is under threat as Modi and his political party pursue an aggressive and deadly agenda of trying to turn India into a Hindu nation.

A naturalized American citizen and pastor’s son has been charged with “inciting secession” and “colluding with foreign powers” under Hong Kong’s new national security law.

Samuel Chu is a pro-democracy activist and managing director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, based in Washington DC.

A warrant for the arrest of the activist, who is now in Los Angeles, has been issued by Hong Kong police, NBC News reports.

Writing in the New York Times, Chu warned that no one was beyond the law’s reach.

“It doesn’t matter that I’ve been an American citizen for 25 years — having left Hong Kong in 1990 to live in the United States,” he said.

“Nobody is beyond the law’s reach, not me in the United States, and certainly not the estimated 85,000 Americans living and working in Hong Kong itself,” he warned.

A leading Catholic voice has called on Pope Francis to speak out against China’s brutal suppression of its Uigher Muslim minority, and its authoritarian crackdown on Hong Kong.

Writing in the Washington Post, George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that in the past, under Pope John Paul II, the Holy See was uncompromising in defense of fundamental human rights.

Two years ago, the Holy See signed an accord with China, but the situation of believers seems to have deteriorated rather than improved. State efforts to ‘Sinicize’ religious communities have intensified, with Catholic and other churches now compelled to teach the thought of Xi Jinping. Church buildings continue to be stripped of external religious symbols. Catholic schools in Hong Kong have been ‘advised’ to extol the virtues of the new national security law Beijing recently imposed on the city. “Even more gravely, a horrific persecution of more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs is being conducted in Xinjiang, using concentration camps, forced sterilizations and other terrors that reek of Nazi practice.”

As the Chinese-Vatican accord is up for renewal, Weigel says the Holy See negotiators should press their Chinese interlocutors on Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs, the persecution of Protestant house-church Christians and Falun Gong devotees, and the continuing assault on Tibetan Buddhists.