A Catholic priest in the Indian state of Goa has been granted “anticipatory bail” after police registered a criminal case against him for allegedly “hurting Hindu sentiments” in remarks he made about a Hindu king during a Sunday Mass in July.
Hindu groups had staged demonstrations in front of the police station calling for criminal charges to be brought against Father Bolmax Pereira, parish priest of St. Francis Xavier Church in Chicalim in the Archdiocese of Goa.
Pereira was quoted in the Mass posted on YouTube saying that 17th-century Hindu king Chatrapati Shivaji “was a national hero but not a god.”
Hindu nationalist groups demanded his arrest for offending their “religious sentiments.”
Anti-Christian hatred and attacks are becoming more and more common in Israel, as some are calling the levels of violence a “crisis” for the conservative government led by Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop and soon-to-be Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, has spoken out regarding the growing anti-Christian attacks in Israel in a recent interview with Vatican News.
“Let us say that these clashes, these spats, these accusations, these insults, are not new. But the exponential increase in these phenomena, especially in the Jerusalem area, in the Old City, has become a matter of concern and an issue on the agenda that worries both the Christian community and the Israeli authorities,” Archbishop Pizzaballa said.
He noted that while authorities in Israel have publicly condemned the rise in anti-Christian attacks, their promises to act have yet to yield much in the way of real results.
A pastor and his family have been jailed for allegedly luring people to Christianity in violation of an anti-conversion law in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state where Christians only make up less than 1% of the 200 million population.
The pastor, Harendra Singh, and his wife, Priya, were arrested by the police and jailed along with their 3-year-old son on July 31 after they were accused of hosting a prayer meeting in their home.
Even though India’s Constitution “guarantees religious freedom to all persons,” Uttar Pradesh’s state legislators explained in a copy of the law that their anti-conversion statute was necessary to protect “gullible persons.”
Despite violating international human rights law, 12 of India’s 28 states, including Uttar Pradesh, have anti-conversion laws as of February, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Catholic Archbishop of Armagh asked the Government to push for the release of a bishop falsely imprisoned in Nicaragua.
Monsignor Rolando Álvarez, the Bishop of Matagalpa, has been a prominent voice of protest against the suppression of human rights that has occurred in Nicaragua as the regime of president Daniel Ortega has become increasingly authoritarian in recent years.
The bishop was sentenced to 26 years in prison in February after being convicted of a series of trumped up charges including treason.
Archbishop Eamon Martin wrote to the Tánaiste to express his “grave concern at the situation in Nicaragua, and the persecution of members of the clergy as well as others who express criticism of the regime”.
The archbishop said 222 political prisoners were deported to the US and stripped of their citizenship shortly after their departure.
“However, Monsignor Rolando Álvarez… who had been under house arrest since August 2022, refused to board the plane,” he said. “He was subsequently detained, tried and given a 26-year sentence for offences of conspiracy, spreading false news, obstruction of justice and contempt of court.”
Parents who never married were significantly more likely to have split up compared to those who married at some stage, whether before or after their child was born, an analysis by the Marriage Foundation has found.
Data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study showed 46% of first-born children aged 14-years-old were not living with both natural parents.
Divorce accounts for less than a third of all family breakdown, rising from 10% of breakdown involving first-born children aged 3 to 31% of breakdown involving children aged 14.
Among natural parents of 14-year-olds still living together, 84% were married.
This means while marriage is responsible for the majority of family stability (84%), marriage is only responsible for the minority of family breakdown (31%).
In terms of raw data, 60% of parents who never married split up compared to 21% of those who married before their child was born and 32% who married afterwards. But even when considering a wide range of socio-demographic controls the probability of splitting up was still 46% for never married parents, significantly higher than the 26% for those marrying before and 27% for those marrying after their child was born.
Local authorities in the UK have filed criminal charges against an army veteran for praying silently within an abortion exclusion zone.
Adam Smith-Connor was issued a fixed penalty notice last December for “praying for his deceased son” a month earlier near an abortion facility in Bournemouth where an exclusion or “buffer zone” is in place.
His first hearing will take place on 9th August and he is expected to enter a “not guilty” plea.
“Nobody should be prosecuted for silent prayer,” said Adam Smith-Connor, upon hearing the news of his prosecution.
“It is unfathomable that in an apparently free society, I am being criminally charged on the basis of what I expressed silently, in the privacy of my own mind. I served for 20 years in the army reserves, including a tour in Afghanistan, to protect the fundamental freedoms that this country is built upon. I continue that spirit of service as a health care professional and church volunteer. It troubles me greatly to see our freedoms eroded to the extent that thoughtcrimes are now being prosecuted in the UK”.
26% of mothers and 7% of fathers in the US are stay-at-home parents, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
Over the past 30 years, the share of stay-at-home parents has fluctuated, rising during periods of higher unemployment.
Between 1989 and 2021, the share of mothers who were not employed for pay decreased slightly, from 28% to 26%. Over the same span, the share of fathers who were not working increased from 4% to 7%.
Due to these diverging trends, dads now represent 18% of stay-at-home parents, up from 11% in 1989.
The reasons mothers and fathers give for not working for pay differ significantly. In 2021, the vast majority of stay-at-home moms (79%) said they took care of the home or family. About one-in-ten (9%) said they were at home because they were ill or disabled, and smaller shares said they didn’t work because they were students, unable to find work or retired.
Stay-at-home dads cite more varied reasons for not working for pay. In 2021, 23% stayed home to care for the home or family.
About one-third of stay-at-home dads (34%) were not working due to illness or disability. Some 13% were retired, 13% said they could not find work and 8% were going to school.
Marriage is the “the most important differentiator” of who is happy in America, and that falling marriage rates are a chief reason for why happiness has declined nationally, according to new research from the University of Chicago.
Surveying thousands of respondents, it revealed a startling 30-percentage-point happiness divide between married and unmarried Americans.
This happiness boost held true for both men and women.
“Marital status is and has been a very important marker for happiness,” researcher Sam Peltzman concludes. “The happiness landslide comes entirely from the married. Low happiness characterizes all types of non-married. No subsequent population categorization will yield so large a difference in happiness across so many people.”
Commenting on the news, sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and David Bass said it further confirms that Americans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless.
About 1,000 people gathered in Dublin last week to hear concerns about the Government’s proposed new Social Personal and Health Education course for secondary school students.
One of the speakers at the National Stadium, Aontú’s Peadar Tóibín TD, said there was a broad mix of different faiths, communities and groups who attended. “There is significant concern over the extreme nature of the Government’s new curriculum,” he told The Irish Catholic.
The draft senior cycle SPHE programme aims to teach about gender ideology, gender identity, abortion, ‘white, male or Irish privilege’, among other topics.
Pastor John Ahern of All Nations Church, Dublin told the Irish Catholic: “People are concerned about their children, irrespective whether it’s Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Muslims or Jews, nobody wants their children indoctrinated, particularly regarding the teaching of beliefs that are completely contrary to their faith.
“This is the bottom line. It doesn’t matter how the Government dresses this up, it is indoctrination and it is a violation of many of our deepest convictions regarding marriage, sexuality, gender etc. This is the problem many of them live in this progressive bubble where they feel that everybody has bought into this but that is far from the case,” he added.
In the past six months, Finland witnessed the lowest number of births in its entire recorded history since 1900, with 21,180 live births, a decrease of 1,082 compared to the same period last year.
Over the past 12 months, the total fertility rate dropped to 1.28, down from 1.87 in 2010 and 1.35 in 2019, the number-crunching agency said in a press release on Thursday. Replacement level is 2.1.
The total fertility rate indicates the average number of children a person would give birth to in their lifetime if the birth rate remained at the same level as during the calculation period.
Finland’s fertility rate was on a long, steady decline until the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when there was a slight increase in births, but then the decline resumed last year.
