The Pro Life Campaign (PLC) has called on parties currently negotiating the formation of the next government to set aside the ‘Citizens’ Convention’ on abortion proposed by Fine Gael. “It is high time that the acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny took this idea off the negotiating table so that the question of a referendum is no longer allowed to further delay the vital process of setting up a new Government,” a spokesperson for the PLC said.
A Christian student, Felix Ngole, who was expelled from his University of Sheffield course in Britain after he posted Facebook comments in support of the biblical understanding of marriage as between one man and one woman is to seek legal action after his appeal against that expulsion was rejected.
A same-sex couple on China has lost a legal case which they hoped would let them marry under Chinese law. The case, heard before a court in Changsha City is the first recorded legal action of its kind in Chinese history. The case arose when the couple at the heart of the case were denied a marriage licence in 2015. Homosexuality was decriminalised in China in 1997.
Archbishop Eamon Martin, Primate of All Ireland has reiterated his call for parties in Northern Ireland to commit to the protection of the unborn. The call came as Archbishop Martin led the Northern Ireland Catholic Council on Social Affairs (NICCOSA) to its latest round of meetings with parties, this time with the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein.
Ireland’s former president, Mary McAleese has criticised Pope Francis’ newly released Apostolic Exhortation on the family, Amoris Laetitia as “traditional” and lacking “imagination”. Mrs McAleese said she was personally disappointed with the document’s “overall failure to clearly address many of the challenges facing families within the Church today”.
Parents with two children, and earning the average wage, gain more than they pay in taxes, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has revealed. According to data compiled by the organisation, once child benefit and other tax provisions are factored in, a worker with two children, on the average wage, takes home 100.3pc of his or her gross wage.
Bishops in Spain have described a recently passed law in the province of Madrid allowing transgender school pupils to access bathrooms of their choice as “unjust”. The prelates added that the law reflected a “totalitarian way of thinking: the absolutisation of the will that seeks to be the only creator of the human person”.
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.
