The coronavirus pandemic had struck at the very heart of the ministry of priests, curtailing their normal outreach to the sick, the elderly and the dying, the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin, has said.

The Archbishop was speaking on Thursday morning at Holy Thursday Chrism Mass, commemorating the founding of the priesthood at the last supper, in the Cathedral of St Patrick and St Colman in Newry, Co Down.

“Perhaps saddest of all, it has cruelly restricted our capacity to draw close to families who are bereaved,” he said.

He also said it had “driven our congregations indoors, forced us to stay apart, prevented us from having the public celebration of Mass and hindered us from offering the healing sacraments of reconciliation and anointing in the normal manner.

Nonetheless, he said “Our calling as priests remains strong in this crisis: to be with our people, to encourage them, to bring them the hope and consolation”.

But he added that “there will be more sacrifices for our people and ourselves to make before this Covid-19 crisis is all over”.

Meanwhile, Easter liturgies will take place behind closed doors across Ireland due to the coronavirus restrictions.

In addition, many clergy are cocooning. The Dublin Catholic archdiocese has almost 200 priests unavailable as they are over 70 and cocooning. In Kildare and Leighlin, 58 priests are cocooning, with 47 in active ministry. In Killaloe diocese 44 of its 93 priests are in active ministry with 49 cocooned.

Women seeking an abortion during the coronavirus outbreak will not need to visit a GP in most cases, under guidelines issued by the Department of Health on Tuesday evening. The easing of restrictions are meant to apply only for the duration of the Covid-19 emergency.

Instead of face to face meetings with their GP, women seeking abortions will instead consult with their GPs on the phone or via video chat.

Responding to the new Department of Health guidelines, Pro Life Campaign spokesperson Eilís Mulroy said it is “utterly reckless” that Minister Simon Harris has approved these new guidelines. “When ushering in his new abortion law in 2018, he repeatedly gave assurances about how safe his new abortion law would be for women, citing the two visits that the pregnant woman would have to make to her GP before any abortion took place. But in the blink of an eye, the Minister has done a complete about turn in order to facilitate abortions taking place during the Covid-19 lockdown. Abortion is never safe for the baby as it directly ends his or her life, but now we have a situation where women’s lives are also being put at risk”.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, turned 75 on Wednesday and was expected to mark the day by offering his formal resignation to Pope Francis. According to the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law, diocesan bishops are required to offer their resignations to the pope when they turn 75.

However, it does not signal an automatic or immediate retirement.

In a message of hope marking the beginning of Holy Week last weekend, Archbishop Martin said it is the first year in his 50 years of ministry, that he will be unable to participate in or lead Easter services due to restrictions around the coronavirus.

Born in Dublin in 1945, Archbishop Martin was ordained a priest on 25 May 1969. He succeeded Cardinal Desmond Connell as Archbishop of Dublin in April 2004.

The oldest Catholic diocesan school on the island is being repurposed to temporarily provide parking, changing and showering facilities for staff at a Belfast hospital during the covid19 emergency.

St Malachy’s College, which was opened in 1833, stands next to the Mater Hospital which is the main hub for coronavirus patients in Belfast.

Two holes are being cut in a wall that separates the buildings so that medical staff may freely move between the two without encountering members of the public.

One of the doorways will be used for staff to enter the hospital after putting on Personal Protective Equipment.

The other will be used at the end of their shifts to enter the school to shower and change before going home.

The College principal Paul McBride said the move will enable staff to get suited and booted before going into work and then get cleaned up and changed so they are infection-free before getting into their cars and going home.

A parish priest and spokesman for the Association of Catholic Priests, has called on the Government to be more flexible in its application of the Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment.

Priests are eligible for the payment if they are under 66 and lost their employment due to the pandemic.

However, Fr Collins said this would mean dioceses would have to make priests redundant, which will not happen as they are carrying out funerals and tending to the sick, as well as conducting Masses online.

Fr John Collins told the Irish Independent that he is self-employed and pays his taxes.

“If I get into difficulties, I should be entitled to whatever supports are there for the self-employed,” he said.

A curate in the Archdiocese of Dublin earns around €23,000 per year, while parish priests earn up to €27,000.

Priests often supplement their incomes with stipends from weddings and other occasions which have been cancelled in recent weeks because of the Covid-19 crisis.

Fr Collins warned the drop in church basket collections will begin to be felt from May and June onwards. The collections go to the diocesan common fund that pays for priests’ salaries among other things.

In Italy, dozens of priests have succumbed to the coronavirus as they tend to the dying, trying to offer comfort in the absence of loved ones, who are not allowed to say a final farewell for fear of being infected.

“They die alone,” said Aquilino Apassiti (84), a priest from Bergamo who spent 25 years as a missionary in the jungles of Brazil and now works in a chapel attached to the city’s hospital. “In the Amazon, I dealt with leprosy and malaria, but I have never seen scenes as shocking as those of recent weeks,” he said.

The pandemic in Italy has taken a terrible toll on medical staff, with more than 10,000 infected, and nearly 70 doctors losing their lives. But what has received less attention is the impact it has had on clergy, killing more than 90 priests, as well as dozens of missionaries, monks and nuns. Many worked in hospitals, prisons and care homes, and were particularly exposed.

“The deaths of doctors get our attention, but there are many priests who have fallen victim while working as well,” said Alessandro Rondoni, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Bologna.

The coronavirus outbreak has led to almost half of Dublin’s Catholic priests being confined to their homes as they are aged over 70, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said.

The most recent figures showed that 413 priests and 22 deacons were serving in Dublin. Dr Martin said about 200 of these were in isolation following the Government’s direction that people aged 70 and over stay indoors to limit their risk of infection – a process called cocooning.

The archbishop said this scenario was “placing a great strain on those who remain active in ministry” and that priests were not immune to “the fears and anxieties” many are feeling at the moment and “deserve our support”.

The 74-year-old said he was among the clerics cocooning as a result of the pandemic.

One of Asia’s top prelates has laid the blame for the coronavirus on the doorstep of China’s communist government, saying it has the “primary responsibility” for the pandemic which has put much of the world under lockdown.

“The Chinese regime led by the all-powerful [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – not its people – owes us all an apology, and compensation for the destruction it has caused,” said Myanmar Cardinal Charles Bo, the president of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences [FABC].

“At a minimum it should write off the debts of other countries, to cover the cost of COVID-19. For the sake of our common humanity, we must not be afraid to hold this regime to account,” the cardinal continued.

“International voices are raising against the negligent attitude showed by China, especially its despotic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by its strong man Xi,” Bo said, citing the March 29 article in The Telegraph accusing China of hiding the true scale of the coronavirus pandemic.

“An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by virus would have been cut by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively. Its failure has unleashed a global contagion killing thousands,” the cardinal claimed.

New York had been one of only four states where commercial surrogacy had been expressly prohibited by law, and contracts for non-commercial surrogacy were legally unenforceable.

The law includes some robust protections for surrogate mothers who carry and gestate babies for nine months on behalf of their intending parent clients, but surrogacy advocates balked at those measures, calling them “complicating factors”. A surrogate must be at least 21 and the intended parents — those who will raise the child — must pay for legal counsel for their surrogate, plus for a surrogate’s health and life insurance during the pregnancy and a year after their surrogate gives birth.

Melissa Brisman, a reproductive lawyer in New Jersey who runs one of the largest gestational surrogacy agencies in the United States said “It’s a great step forward, but there are some complicating factors”. Surrogacy already comes with an eye-popping price tag of $80,000 to $250,000, which includes a minimum compensation of $35,000 for the surrogate, Brisman said. Adding a year’s worth of health and life insurance afterward would raise that price, she said.

New York’s long-held resistance stems from a tumultuous surrogacy battle in neighboring New Jersey, known as the Baby M case. In 1985, a woman who was struggling financially, Mary Beth Whitehead, agreed to be a surrogate and be inseminated with sperm from William Stern, a man whose wife had multiple sclerosis, for $10,000.

When the girl, referred to as Baby M in court papers, was born, Whitehead changed her mind and decided she wanted to give back the money and keep the baby — half of whose DNA was hers. A protracted legal battle followed and the child was eventually given to the Sterns, with the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling in 1988 that paying women to bear children was illegal and “potentially degrading.”

Since then, nearly all surrogacies in America have been gestational, meaning they use a donor egg — either from the woman who will raise the child or from an outside donor — rather than the carrier’s egg (called traditional surrogacy), to avoid a similar legal quagmire.

RTE started broadcasting the daily liturgy after the cancellation of public masses due to the coronavirus.

The mass is followed by a short religious message from representatives of other churches and faith communities.

Roger Childs told Spirit Radio that the figures show the desire among people for faith-based programming at this time.

“Just at a time when many people are feeling most isolated, anxious and in need of some encouragement and community, they are least able to get those things because their own churches, and not just churches, but synagogues, temples, gudwaras, and mosques, are prevented from physical gathering”. He said they started the daily mass and multi-faith reflective slot to meet that need.

“65,000 people is an awful lot of people, so clearly it is fulfilling a need and I am delighted if people are finding something of value and succour and sustenance in that”, he added.