Considerable savings could be made if assisted suicide were to be introduced on the island of Guernsey, according to a local politician

Lester Queripel told the local parliament’s Health & Social Care Committee that the Island’s financial problems provide an ideal opportunity to revisit the controversial issue.

The Deputy said that ‘no stone should be left unturned’ as committees battle to save millions of pounds a year in spending. And he urged HSC to accept that significant savings could be realised through the use of assisted suicide.

In written questions to HSC, Deputy Queripel asked how many people had been kept alive, against their wishes, in the past five years, how much their medication and treatment had cost taxpayers, and how many staff hours had been taken up keeping them alive.

HSC president Al Brouard said such figures were unavailable and rebuked Deputy Queripel for his choice of language.

Britain can no longer be described as a Christian country, three quarters of Church of England clergy believe, according to a landmark survey conducted by The Times of London.

The wide-ranging poll of frontline Anglican clergy also found a strong desire among rank-and-file priests for significant changes in Church doctrine on issues such as sex, sexuality, marriage and the role of women to bring it into greater line with public opinion.

The survey analysed responses from 1,200 serving priests and ministers.

Asked whether they think “Britain can or cannot be described as a Christian country”, only a quarter (24.2 per cent) answered: “Yes, Britain can be described as a Christian country today”. Almost two thirds (64.2 per cent) said Britain can be called Christian “but only historically, not currently” while 9.2 per cent answered “no”.

Figures from the 2021 census showed that the proportion of people who identified as Christian in England and Wales had fallen below half for the first time — to 46.2 per cent — with the strongest growth among those who say they have “no religion”. The figure has trebled since 2001 to 37.5 per cent.

The survey also uncovered high levels of stress among clerics, many of whom feel over-stretched. They fear that the Church’s efforts to arrest the decline in attendance will fail and this may ultimately lead to its “extinction”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/church-of-england-christianity-survey-gay-marriage-sex-female-archbishop-70ck07sj6

Priests in Berlin may confer a blessing on same-sex couples in a ruling of the local Catholic Archbishop.

This comes despite a 2021 Vatican declaration, approved by Pope Francis, that “the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex.”

In a recent letter, Archbishop Heiner Koch assures the Berlin archdiocese’s priests, deacons, and lay pastoral workers that he will not take disciplinary action against them if they bless couples “who cannot or do not want to marry sacramentally.”

Citing Pope Francis’ 2016 post-synodal apostolic exhortation, ‘Amoris Laetitia’, he notes that it says that same-sex unions “may not simply be equated with marriage,” and he suggests that Amoris also gives local churches “a great deal of latitude in dealing with people in so-called ‘irregular’ situations.”

Koch argues that Francis’ oft-cited statement about the Eucharist in his 2013 apostolic exhortation ‘Evangelii gaudium’ — that it is “not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak” — also applies to other sacraments, including marriage, “and yet even more so to a sacramental such as blessing.”

“Every blessing promises God’s grace and help to us people who are and remain weak. Blessing therefore does not have the meaning of ‘legitimizing, endorsing, approving,’” he writes.

The father of a man with Down Syndrome has said society needs to decide whether it wants to have children with Down Syndrome in it.

Michael O’Dowd was speaking after it was revealed that 95% of parents diagnosed with a Down Syndrome baby at Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital choose an abortion. He was reacting to a column by David Quinn in The Sunday Independent.

Mr O’Dowd, a former Mayor of Drogheda and Aontú representative, told The Hard Shoulder people need to have a balanced and rounded view.

“As a society we need to decide whether we want to have children with Down Syndrome, and the richness and the beauty that they bring to all our lives, or whether we want to have a society without them,” he said.

“The question is there, the gene that causes the chromosome disorder will continue to happen, so this is a discussion that will continue to happen.

“There will never be a situation where we have no Down Syndrome people in the world, but certainly in some societies they’re moving that way unfortunately.”

Teacher Enoch Burke has returned to the school that sacked him to protest his suspension and dismissal after refusing to facilitate a pupil’s ‘gender transition’.

As the new term began Monday, Mr Burke arrived and took up position in a corridor in the school.

A statement from a family spokesperson said Mr Burke “will not endorse an ideology which he as a Christian disagrees with and which will have serious repercussions for young people”.

“He has a right to his religious beliefs and believes it is wrong that he is being denied access to his place of work.”

Mr Burke’s dispute with Wilson’s Hospital school in Multyfarnham, Co Westmeath, had its roots in an instruction by the former principal, Niamh McShane, in May of last year that teachers call a transgender child by a new name and with new pronouns.

Fourteen states and several pro-life groups in the US have joined a lawsuit urging the nation’s Supreme Court to overrule laws restricting free speech near abortion clinics.

According to the states’ brief, the laws have “dire consequences” by allowing the government to “cut off speech on a hotly contested moral and political issue” outside an abortion clinic “where a pregnant woman makes a life-altering decision for both herself and her child.”

The case revolves around Debra Vitagliano, a Catholic mother of three who is suing a New York county for barring pro-lifers from counselling women and offering them alternatives to abortion within 100 feet of a clinic, including footpaths.

“I want to offer abortion-vulnerable women a message of hope and compassion, letting them know that they are loved and can keep their babies,” Vitagliano said in an Aug. 25 press release.

The Westchester County law, called a “bubble” or “buffer” zone law, imposes misdemeanour penalties of up to $5,000 and a year in jail for pro-lifers attempting to counsel women outside abortion clinics.

The number of registered births decreased by almost 14 per cent in the first quarter of this year when compared to the same period in 2022, according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). This is well below replacement level. Meanwhile, the number of registered deaths rose by 7pc.

The CSO’s latest vital statistics for the first three months of 2023 recorded 13,968 births, down from the 16,131 births in the same period the previous year, a decrease of 13.4 per cent. There were 10,025 deaths, an increase of 7pc, meaning the natural amount of population increase in the quarter was less than 4,000.

In the first quarter of 2013, there were 17,563 births and 8,347 deaths.

The report also shows that 42.6pc of births were outside marriage in the period.

Sadness, fear and defiance animated a crowd of 700 who attended mass outside their burnt-out church in Pakistan last Sunday following one of the country’s worst outbreaks of persecution in a generation.

Amid tight security, Bishop Indrias Rehmat of Faisalabad presided at the Mass held in the streets of Jaranwala where the previous Wednesday a multitude of people narrowly fled a mob of thousands who went on the rampage.

Up to 24 churches, hundreds of Christian homes and a Christian cemetery were targeted in the attack which was sparked by reports of a blasphemy allegation against two Christians accused of desecrating the Qur’an.

After the service outside St. Paul’s Catholic Church, a Christian community leader, who is not being named for security reasons, told ACN: “Most of the people were crying in the Mass. It was a very painful time but a chance to share with one another their sense of loss and sadness.

The Government is unlikely to press ahead with three referendums in November as Ministers are not prepared to answer fundamental questions about what is a family and what is a woman.

Difficulties in agreeing a wording to replace the protection for mothers working in the home and fears a campaign could lead to divisive debates about the definition of family and related gender issues have led to a growing expectation the vote will be postponed.

“We will have to be able to answer the question ‘What is a family?’” one politician said. It was not yet clear, he added, that the Government had an answer.

Senior sources, however, are wary that the referendum campaign could become a debate about gender, prompting questions about transgender issues that have proved highly contentious elsewhere.

“This is one of those things that you wade into at your peril,” one minister said.

An alleged “industrial” level of fraud, human trafficking and sham embryo transfers in a surrogacy clinic in Greece may result in Irish clients being shut out of surrogacy arrangements there and in neighbouring North Cyprus.

The Greek authorities are investigating 400 cases of alleged wrongdoing and they have placed a number of newborns into a protected area of a hospital in Crete while DNA checks are carried out.

The Mediterranean Fertility Institute (MFI) clinic is accused of trafficking vulnerable women from countries such as Georgia and Albania to become surrogates for foreign couples and pocketing half the money that was supposed to be paid to them. Greek police allege that the women had their eggs harvested before becoming surrogates.

MFI is alleged to have falsified birth records and medical documents, prepared fictitious leases and cohabitation agreements and carried out fake embryo transfers. There are also allegations that the clinic arranged sham marriages for gay men to facilitate surrogacies because Greece does not allow surrogacy for homosexual couples.

The Sunday Independent spoke to one couple based in Northern Ireland that was using MFI who said they were very distressed by the revelations.

“We have paid for IVF and IVF with donor eggs there with no success,” said the Belfast-based women. “We have embryos frozen there too. But we have no facts to present as yet.”

Sam Everingham, global director of surrogacy liaison firm Growing Families, said the MFI scandal is likely to lead to a crackdown on unregulated surrogacy in other jurisdictions that Irish couples regularly use, such as North Cyprus.