The number of third-level students turning up to weekly Masses on-campus are in single figures in many institutions. Newly released figures show that, for example, at the 12,000-student Cork Institute of Technology, just nine students attend Mass there. Atheist Ireland obtained figures under the Freedom of Information Act towards campaigning for an end to public funding of chaplaincy services at Third Level institutions which runs to about €1.5 million per annum.

A judge in the US state of Michigan has thrown out a legal attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to force Catholic hospitals to performs abortions. The ACLU took action against the Trinity Health Corporation, which runs 86 medical facilities across 21 states, and refuses terminations on the grounds of Church teaching, something the ACLU claimed was causing harm to women. That claim was ruled “dubious” by the presiding judge.

In his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis has said the Church must respond with better pastoral care to divorced-and-remarried Catholics, while defending the sanctity of marriage. “What we need is a more responsible and generous effort to present the reasons and motivations for choosing marriage and the family, and in this way to help men and women better to respond to the grace that God offers them,” he wrote.

The charity group Aid to the Church in Need has urged the Irish Government to formally recognise the actions of Islamic State against Christians and other minorities as genocide. The call was made ahead of a presentation in Dublin on ‘How Christians are being killed and driven out of the Middle East for their faith’.

Northern Ireland’s Precious Life group has written to the region’s Director of Public Prosecutions to request an appeal of the suspended sentence handed down on a woman who admitted procuring her own abortion through pill bought on the internet. “By passing such a lenient sentence we believe the judge undermined the seriousness of the crime of killing an unborn child,” the group said in a statement.

In a blow to people of faith in the workplace in Britain, a National Health Service therapist who was disciplined for giving a Christian text to a Muslim colleague has lost her appeal against the sanction handed down for her action. A judge hearing the appeal brought by practising Christian Victoria Wasteney ruled that the NHS had acted appropriately.

Calls have been made in the Dáil for an end to the traditional prayer which begins every sitting of the chamber.

As work towards Dáil reform and the establishment of a new Government continues, TD Paul Murphy of the Anti-Austerity Alliance and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan led calls for the scrapping of the prayer to be part of that reform process. Deputy Murphy said the prayer demonstrated that “we don’t have a separation of church and state in this country”.