German lawmakers on Tuesday called for stronger protection of Christian minorities worldwide after coordinated attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday killed more than 300 people.
Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens all expressed their concern about what they saw as growing violence against Christians.
Germany’s commissioner for religious freedom, Markus Grübel (CDU), told Die Welt newspaper that the Sri Lankan attacks were part of what appeared to be a global trend. “Christians are the target of radical Muslims worldwide,” Grübel said, a phenomenon that he found to be “incomprehensible,” given “Christianity’s close relation to Islam.”
Former CDU parliamentary leader Volker Kauder echoed his colleague’s sentiment, denouncing “growing persecution of Christians in the entire Asian region” in an interview with Bild newspaper. For Kauder, the attacks in Sri Lanka did not represent an isolated case: “nationalist movements of Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims are becoming more and more militant here.”
The FDP’s deputy leader in the German parliament, Michael Theurer, told Die Welt that more than 100 million Christians lived in countries “where the basic human right of religious freedom is currently not respected.” In many places such as “China, North Korea, Pakistan or parts of Nigeria,” Christians comprise the largest persecuted minority, Theurer said.
Sven Giegold, a member for the Greens in the European Parliament, shared the view that Christians’ religious freedom is threatened worldwide. “Europe must emphatically stand up in the world for the right to freedom of religion,” Gievold said.
The Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka are only the latest and deadliest in an uptick of violence against the Christian minorities in the country, who make up 7 percent of the populace. In 2018, Buddhist extremists burned down both Muslim-owned shops and Christian churches across the country, while the state police and civil authorities were criticised for not adopting stronger measures to protect the religious minorities targeted.
Pew Research lists Christians as the most attacked faith in the world, with significant levels of persecution in 144 countries, according to 2016 data.
The persecution varies widely. In countries like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq it is due to the effects of Islamic fundamentalism and sectarian violence in the region.
In China, the authoritarian atheist government is tightening its restrictions on the country’s Christians.
Indian Christians face an “extreme” level of persecution, up from “high” just five years ago, due to spikes in Hindu extremism targeting churches, as well as halfhearted government responses failing to protect these minorities
Even in the West, hostility to religion is on the rise. Journalists have reported a record 47 documented desecrations of church property in France for February 2019. In Germany, three-quarters of resettled Christian refugees claim to experience persecution, mostly from the Muslim refugees which surround them. The number of attacks on Catholic churches in the whole of Europe is already up 25 percent compared to the number of attacks during a similar period last year.
Older women are being exploited by IVF clinics “trading on hope”, the UK fertility watchdog has warned.
Sally Cheshire, chairwoman of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), told the Daily Telegraph that some private clinics were using “selective success rates” to target older women. IVF is less likely to be successful as a woman gets older.
Since 2004 the number of women in their 40s undergoing fertility treatment has doubled to over ten thousand. The latest HFEA figures show that, among those using their own eggs, out of 2,265 embryo transfers in 2017, just 75 women aged 43 to 44 ended up with a baby.
For those over 44, the success rate was even lower – amounting to 1% between 2004 and 2017.
Mrs Cheshire told the BBC that some women were not being told their “realistic chance of success” when sold the treatment. She said all UK clinics needed to be “transparent” about the costs involved, as well as the likely outcome.
Social Protection Minister Regina Doherty has vowed to “break down” stereotypical roles and remove a “taboo” that she says prevents men from using paternal leave.
The minister published legislation yesterday to give parents the opportunity to take two weeks parental leave from November. However, figures already show around 60pc of men do not avail of existing paternity benefits.
Despite this, Ms Doherty is insisting the additional leave will be a non-transferable benefit, meaning each parent will need to ‘use it or lose it’. Ms Doherty says the decision to make the payments non-transferable is crucial to stimulating a debate around the roles of fathers. She said “traditionally caring in the home has been viewed as a female responsibility”, but that should not be the case.
“There’s a construct here about a narrative that the value of money associated with the scheme isn’t enough for men to take off work. It doesn’t seem to have stopped women from taking maternity leave for time immemorial, because it’s exactly the same amount of money,” Ms Doherty said.
The minister said some people have argued the low uptake is because women earn less than men, but “lots of women who earn a hell of a lot more do”.
Last year, Fianna Fáil put forward legislation to allow new parents to share leave in a way that suits the family situation. However, Ms Doherty said the ‘use it or lose it’ basis of parental leave “will help incentivise fathers to take more time off work to care for their children than has been the case up to now”.
“I think we need to break down those stereotypical roles, and if more fellas do it, whether it is parental leave or paternity leave, I think that will start to remove the taboo of the traditional role of caring for babies,” the minister said.
Civic engagement which takes account of religious and non-religious stakeholders is essential to the public interest and to building a trusted democracy, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Jackson, said in his Easter sermon.
The Archbishop said an impression is given that “religious belonging should have taken itself off long ago in order to leave the adults to get on with the real work”. He suggested a Citizens’ Assembly for people of faith and politics to discuss the future of the public interest. “It would be an engagement quite different from the other matters discussed by the Citizens’ Assembly. But it could lead us right into two things that currently are at loggerheads in Ireland and neither of them is going away anywhere soon: secular policy and religious belonging,” he stated.
He added that a totally secular state – as reflected in policy and politics – does not seem to accord with the active spiritual and religious sense in the majority of Irish people. Neither would it reflect the many people who have come from outside Ireland have brought a culture and faith that is their identity. “It would be a consummate irony were an Ireland that pushes relentlessly a secular agenda in a post–secular world wilfully to shut its ears to the very diversity that is staring it in the face through its own residents and citizens simply and precisely because such diversity wears a religious smile,” he said.
For the second year in a row since the lifting of the ban on the sale of alcohol, all three pubs in the village of Drumconrath, Co Meath, remained closed on Good Friday.
“Publicans get two days off in the whole year – just two – so we decided to keep that holiday as well as keeping up the tradition and having a bit of respect for our religion,” said one publican Dermot Muldoon.
“Last year we got a lot of support from our customers – the majority of whom would observe fasting on the day and stay off the drink anyway.”
Pauline Fay, of Fay’s Bar, added the day enables publicans to completely switch off and spend time with family. Ms Fay intends to spend the day with her daughter, Claire, and go for a drive, do some shopping and then go to the Good Friday services.
She said there is a lot of respect from customers for her position, and that nobody passed any remark on the bar staying closed this year.
“The way Ireland is going, a lot of wrong decisions have been made in the last number of years – serious bad decisions. We are not going to go with this one,” she said. “It was a very disappointing decision when there are so many other important things. If the Government ran the country like we run our pubs, this would be a brilliant country to live in.”
It is predicted that there will be 10,000 terminations in Ireland this year, according to a Rotunda Hospital board meeting document.
If it comes to pass it would more than double the previous estimated Irish abortion rate. The document states that the National Women and Infants Health Programme has estimated that 80% of terminations will be under 9 weeks and undertaken by GPs. Around 20% would be in the 9-12 week bracket and would require hospital services. It has not been reported how many abortions it predicts would take place after 12 weeks.
During the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, pro-life spokespersons consistently maintained that introducing abortion in Ireland would result in a big increase in the number of Irish women getting abortions, a claim that was steadfastly denied by repeal campaigners.
Sri Lanka was hit by a wave of deadly bombings on Easter Sunday that targeted Christian churches and high-end hotels.
Officials say 290 people were killed and another 500 people were injured in the suicide attacks.
Most of the dead are Sri Lankan nationals, but about 35 people from other countries are believed to have been killed.
The first reports of explosions came at about 08:45 local time with six blasts reported within a small space of time. Three churches in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo’s Kochchikade district were targeted during Easter services. Blasts also rocked the Shangri-La, Kingsbury and Cinnamon Grand hotels in the country’s capital.
Police did not release a breakdown of how many people were killed and wounded at each location.
All the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers, officials said.
Police then carried out raids on two addresses and there were explosions at both. One was in Dehiwala, southern Colombo, and the other was near the Colombo district of Dematagoda in which three officers were killed.
An improvised explosive device – a 6ft-long [1.8m] plastic pipe packed with explosives – was also found and defused near the airport in Colombo.
Police also recovered 87 low-explosive detonators from the Bastian Mawatha private bus station in Pettah.
No-one has admitted carrying out the attacks, but the government has blamed a local jihadist group known as the National Thowheed Jamath who they think had help from an international network of Islamic militants.
There was another blast on Monday near a church in the capital, Colombo, as security forces tried to defuse explosives inside a vehicle that was used by the attackers.
The Taoiseach confirmed that the proposed new law on the issue of exclusion zones outside abortion facilities was running into legal difficulties regarding constitutional rights to ‘free speech’ and ‘peaceful protest.’
Responding to Sinn Féin TD Louise O’Reilly in the Dáil on Tuesday, Leo Varadkar said: “We are running into real difficulties around restricting peaceful protest and restricting free speech.”
The Taoiseach also conceded that in placing a ban on peaceful protest “we do enter a difficult space in a democracy when you decide that certain opinions can’t be held, certain types of protests can’t happen.”
The Taoiseach continued: “In a democracy, if you’re going to restrict free speech and if you’re going to restrict the right to protest, you need to be on very solid ground.”
Commenting on the Taoiseach’s remarks, Pro Life Campaign spokesperson, Maeve O’Hanlon said: “It is time for the Minister for Health and others to stop demonising the pro-life movement by misrepresenting the kind of protests that are taking place against abortion and instead face up to the reality that the right to peaceful and reasonable protest against the new law should not be criminalised.”
A group of over 50 family doctors have rejected as “very misleading” claims by the Irish College of General Practitioners that their opposition to a GP-led abortion service was an attempt to thwart the will of the people.
Writing in Tuesday’s Irish Times, the doctors who comprise those who voted for and against repeal of the Eighth amendment, said General Practice is not an appropriate setting in which to provide abortions. They cited a poll where 75 per cent of almost one thousand GP respondents said they were opposed to a GP-led abortion regime. The doctors added that almost every European country that provides abortion does so outside of General Practice.
