MEPs are urging Ireland’s Mairead McGuinness, the European Unionʼs special envoy for Freedom of Religion, to engage with Pakistan over forced religious conversions as the countryʼs Constitutional Court is due to hear an appeal on behalf of 13-year-old, Christian Maria Shahbaz.
Maria was abducted in July 2025 at the age of 12 and was allegedly forced to convert to Islam before being married off to a man two decades her senior.
A review seeks to overturn an earlier judgment that left Maria with the man accused of abducting, converting, and marrying her.
There were 210 such cases involving Christian girls documented between 2019 and 2025 with many victims’ ages falsified in official records while police, local officials, and religious figures facilitated fraudulent marriage and conversion documents.
Speaking at a conference last week, Slovak MEP, Miriam Lexmann, said she had recently met with McGuinness and urged her to “make this a key priority for the coming months and coming years.”
Carmen Correas López of human rights law firm, ADF International, said they are working to arrange a September meeting with the special envoy to discuss the case and broader concerns about the persecution of Christians.
The Madrid regional parliament has approved a law so that preborn children become eligible for family benefits.
Under the measure, families may include a child in utero in their eligibility for certain benefits once the pregnancy has been medically verified. These benefits include transportation discounts and tax relief.
Special benefits for large families (with three children) will kick in earlier. Families with two children will become eligible once a third pregnancy is verified after the 14th week. If miscarriage or stillbirth occurs, they will not be required to reimburse any benefits received.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the conservative president of the Madrid region, explained that the pro-family measure is an effort to counter the country’s sharply declining birth rate. Spain’s fertility rate stood at 1.1 in 2024, which is among the lowest in the world, and well below the 2.1 needed for population replacement.
Opposition parties have slammed the legislation as a “culture war” tactic and as threatening abortion rights through the recognition of the value of unborn life.
Amnesty International UK has expressed regret for calling the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales an “anti-rights” organization in a report on women and trans rights.
The report, titled A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, was published last week and immediately caused a furor as it also targeted a sexual violence support center set up by Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, because Rowling does not believe men who self-identify as women should be allowed to use women-only spaces.
The report listed 117 organizations it said were working to ‘undermine’ the rights of women and LGBT+ people.
This included the bishops’ conference, Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), the Evangelical Alliance UK, the Christian Institute, Christian Concern, and the Catholic Herald newspaper. The report called for the charity status of many of the organizations to be reviewed.
Amnesty International UK has now said the report was uploaded without the usual checks and that it had been temporarily withdrawn. However, it issued a very similar report last year, albeit with a smaller number of organizations on its hit-list.
More than 1,600 people from across Ireland, the vast majority of them youth, gathered at Dublin’s National Stadium on Tuesday to hear well known American evangelist, Fr Mike Schmitz, speak. His ‘Bible In A Year’ podcast has over one billion downloads.
Ahead of the event, St Kevin’s Church on Harrington Street was packed for Mass, concelebrated by Fr Schmitz and dozens of priests including Cork’s Bishop Fintan Gavin, that saw people queueing well before Mass began, while large crowds unable to enter gathered around the church doors.
Those attending came from every corner of Ireland, with young adults making up the overwhelming majority of both the congregation and the audience. Many travelled as part of parish groups, university chaplaincies, ecclesial movements and youth ministries.
Welcoming the capacity audience to the National Stadium, Bishop Gavin called the gathering “remarkable”.
“All of this points to something deeper than the popularity of any one speaker. It speaks of a real hunger for faith, for meaning, for belonging and, above all, for an encounter with Jesus Christ.”
A Labour MP in the UK is trying to legislate for assisted suicide again by reviving a bill that expired in the last session of Parliament.
The effort, however, has been described as “divisive and flawed” by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.
In a statement, Liverpool Archbishop John Sherrington said that the bill was “wrong in principle” and “likely to lead to pressure on the most vulnerable to end their lives”.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, introduced by Lauren Edwards, MP, would legalise assisted suicide for people over the age of 18 who are expected to die within six months.
Archbishop Sherrington said the “safeguards against coercion, pressure and abuse are wholly inadequate.”
“Moreover, the bill fails to provide sufficient protection for freedom of conscience for doctors. In addition, health and social care staff could find themselves under pressure to participate in assisted suicide.”
https://thecatholicherald.com/article/bishops-call-new-assisted-suicide-bill-divisive-and-flawed
Divorces are taking a major financial toll on people’s plans for their retirement, new research has shown.
Divorce rates have risen sharply since 2019 when the mandatory separation period before filing was reduced from four years to two.
4,550 divorces were granted in 2025 – 28% more than in 2019.
The survey of 215 financial advisers nationwide, undertaken by the Independent Trustee Company (ITC), found that more than four in ten (42%) reported that people often lose out on pension benefits due to divorce or separation, while a further 51% said this happens sometimes.
An additional 6% said that in their experience, this always happened, while just 1% said it never did.
Glenn Gaughran, head of business development with the ITC, said there is “a huge financial toll on divorced couples” because of the costs of the divorce and the major changes in living and family arrangements that often follow the split.
‘The impact on a pension – and in turn, an individual’s retirement – can be significant.’
A massive new UN survey reveals a large gap between the number of children people want and what they end up having. The survey was conducted against a background of plunging birth rates in nearly every part of the world.
108,000 adults aged 18-39 in 73 countries responded to the online Demographic Futures Survey making it among the largest and most geographically broad surveys of its kind.
Regarding “Lifetime fertility ideals”, males report on average an ideal number of children of 2.62, compared with 2.43 among females.
However, across all regions and income groups, the number of children reported by respondents aged 35–39 is lower than the number desired by respondents aged 18–39.
Moreover, the proportion of adult respondents aged 35–39 who took part in the survey and who report having no children is 41 per cent for males and 30 per cent for females.
Among those, 79 per cent of males and 72 per cent of females would ideally like to have children.
However, separate studies suggest that at 35, just 25% of childless women will ever have children. At 40 it is just 7%.
The Pope has encouraged more than 700 young people who lived through Iraq’s jihadist occupation to be a light to the world.
In a video shown at the Ankawa Youth Meeting (AYM), Pope Leo XIV urged young believers to persevere in faith and become peacemakers despite the region experiencing conflict and instability.
The majority of the attendees, aged 18-35, fled their homes when militants from the Islamic State seized northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plains in 2014.
Ankawa was one of the main destinations for Christians who escaped the jihadists, and the Church there cared for more than 10,000 displaced families.
With practically no international aid provided for the families, they were supported by Christian organizations – including Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) which provided more than €20 million in aid.
“You must be Christ’s light in the midst of a darkness that can, at times, seem overwhelming,” the Pope said.
“You may not be able to control your situation or the challenges you will be asked to face, but you can always choose to allow the peace of Christ to rule in your hearts.”
The French Parliament gave final approval yesterday to a bill legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide, making France one of the few European countries to have done so.
The 291-241 vote ended an unusual parliamentary stalemate between the National Assembly which passed the bill three times and the Senate which rejected it each time.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu invoked his constitutional power to give the lower house the final say on the matter while disregarding the consent of the Senate.
He also referred part of the bill to a court to review how its conscience clause would bear upon hospices opposed to ‘assisted dying’.
The end-of-life law covers both euthanasia, administered by a doctor or nurse, and assisted suicide, in which the patient self-administers a lethal substance.
Five conditions are required: A person must be an adult, a stable resident of France, diagnosed with a serious and incurable condition, in an advanced or terminal phase of that condition, and suffering in a way current treatment cannot relieve, while remaining able to express a free and informed decision. Self-administration is the default rule, with intervention by a nurse or doctor only when a patient is physically unable to act.
Falling birth rates lead to higher wages and GDP productivity per worker according to an optimistic but radical theory espoused by a group of Anglo-American economists.
According to their just published paper, a slump in birth rates makes us all richer because it forces companies to develop new technology to fill the gap left by fewer workers.
Then, as companies struggle to hire from a smaller pool of talent, they are forced to increase wages.
The paper shows that countries with the lowest birth rates have experienced the biggest rise in the use of new technology and automation.
“Robot deployment in Japan, South Korea and China exceeds 40 robots per 1,000 workers, which is nearly four times the global average,” says Maria Vassalou, the head of Pictet Research Institute in Switzerland.
David Miles, of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, says people who write about low fertility rates as posing some sort of “economic and fiscal disaster,” are, “almost completely wrong-headed”.
