Christian Parliamentarians and leaders have re-committed to tackling the “huge” problem of persecution around the world.

Fiona Bruce MP, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), told a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference that an estimated 83% of people around the world are living in countries where there is some kind of restriction on beliefs.

“And the extent of this in the 21st century is not only largely unrecognised but simply staggering,” she said.

The Conservative MP for Congleton said that while it was “wonderful” to see a growing awareness of the problem among Parliamentarians, there was still more to be done.

She spoke of a need to improve religious literacy levels among Foreign Office workers, and for the UK to be “bolder and braver” in both holding governments across the world to account and calling out specific cases of abuse.

“It is insufficient to talk in general terms, to say for example, repetitively, that FoRB is a key human rights priority,” she said.

“It’s insufficient to have perhaps a quiet diplomatic word when there’s an issue, without necessarily highlighting it publicly.”

She gave as an example Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi, who was acquitted of blasphemy and freed from death row in Pakistan after years of advocacy.

“It took campaigning. These campaigns can make a difference; engage with them. But governments need to do more as well – we underestimate the soft power of the UK even today,” she said.

Fiona is involved in preparations for an FoRB ministerial to be hosted by the UK in July 2022 that will focus on best practice and support for victims.

Turning her attention to the role of UK churches, she encouraged them to invite speakers involved in anti-persecution work as a way of helping to raise awareness.

“There is still a limited appreciation amongst churches across this country of how massive this issue is worldwide,” she said.

Christians can also ask their MP to join the APPG FoRB, she suggested: “Encourage your MP and then very courteously hold them to account to actually act.”

Fiona was one of several speakers at the FoRB event organised by the Conservative Christian Fellowship and SAT-7.

The meeting heard about the plight of persecuted Christians like Pakistani teenager Maria Shahbaz, who is in hiding with her family after escaping from a Muslim man who forced her to convert to Islam and marry him; and Leah Sharibu, another Christian teenager who was abducted from her school in Nigeria by Boko Haram and enslaved for refusing to renounce her faith.

Concerns were also raised about the estimated 2,700 Yazidi women kidnapped by ISIS who remain missing, and Uighur Muslims imprisoned in “modern day concentration camps” in China.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide founder Mervyn Thomas said Christians had a duty to speak up for all people suffering for their faith.

“The problem is huge but of course it’s not confined to Christians,” he said.

“It is so important that Christians speak up for all faiths and none around the world.

“Apart from anything else, it is what Jesus would do … and it’s also missional when we do this. We do this because we are Christian. We speak up for other faiths because that’s what Christ told us to do.

“It doesn’t dilute our Christian faith, it doesn’t make us some kind of syncretist. It makes us a true Christian actually because we are all made in the image of God and God gave us the right to choose – God gave us a free will.”

Coptic Archbishop of London, Archbishop Angaelos, said it was important to support the thriving of persecuted communities, not just their survival.

“When we look to the needs of others, our benchmark must be what we expect for ourselves. We cannot expect others to just ‘survive’ with a basic level of existence,” he said.

“This is not about mere provision or charity; it is about prosperity. It is not about protecting those we perceive to be weaker; it is about their safety. It is not just about their survival, as survival is not a privilege; it is a right.

“It is about their human dignity and their God-given image and likeness that they, and we, all share in common, and which we must stand to protect and defend.”

Life peer Lord Farmer expressed his concern about the UK, where he said “Christians can increasingly expect a soft persecution”.

He cited the controversy surrounding Worcester College, part of the University of Oxford, after it apologised for hosting a Christian training event.

“Christians in the UK have been privileged historically to live in a tolerant society where a whole range of views are acceptable but now we are operating in an increasingly illiberal public square,” he said.

“There is a form of secularism just as zealous as the Christian faith which will squash religion whenever it sees it, and wherever it sees it, while masquerading as liberty and neutrality.”

He added, “Christians must fight for the rights of both their own faith and the faith of others, else a far less tolerant society quickly takes its place.”

Source: christiantoday.com

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis decried abortion and euthanasia in a speech Monday in which he said that today’s “throwaway culture” leads to the killing of children and discarding of the elderly.

“There is the discarding of children that we do not want to welcome with the law of abortion that sends them to the dispatcher and kills them directly. And today this has become a ‘normal’ method, a practice that is very ugly. It is really murder,” Pope Francis said Sept. 27.

Vatican Media.

In a live-streamed address to members of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Pope said that to understand what abortion is, it helps to pose two questions.

“Is it right to eliminate, to take a human life to solve a problem? Is it right to hire a hitman to solve a problem? That’s what abortion is,” the Pope commented.

Vatican Media.

Pope Francis said that the elderly today were also viewed as “waste material” and “of no use” in today’s throwaway culture.

“But they are wisdom. They are the roots of wisdom of our civilization, and this civilization discards them,” he said.

Vatican Media.

“Yes, in many parts there is also the law of ‘hidden euthanasia,’ as I call it. It is the one that makes people say: ‘Medications are expensive, only half of them are needed,’ and this means shortening the life of the elderly.”

The Pope added that both abortion and euthanasia “deny hope” by negating “the hope of children who bring us the life that keeps us going and the hope that is in the roots that the elderly give us.”

Vatican Media.

Pope Francis underlined that this was not a path for Catholic universities or hospitals to follow.

“This is a road on which we cannot go: the road of discarding,” he said.

The speech marked the second time this month that Pope Francis has spoken out strongly about abortion.

Vatican Media.

During a press conference on his return flight from Slovakia on Sept. 15, the Pope repeatedly said that “abortion is murder” and compared the acceptance of abortion to “accepting daily murder.”

The Pontifical Academy for Life was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1994. It is dedicated to promoting the Church’s consistent life ethic.

This week, the academy is holding its plenary assembly in Rome, focused on the pandemic, bioethics, and the future of public health.

Vatican Media.

“I entrust to the Virgin Mary the work of this assembly and also the whole of your activity as an Academy for the defense and promotion of life,” Pope Francis said in his speech in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall.

Source: ncregister.com

European Union flags flutter outside the EU headquarters in Brussels July 15, 2021. (Credit: CNS photo/Yves Herman, Reuters.)

Video footage shows a woman attempting to light a Canadian church on fire days before the church burned to the ground.

Surrey Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a press release that St. George Coptic Orthodox Church was destroyed in an early Monday morning fire, the cause of which is still under investigation. The fire is being treated as “suspicious,” particularly in light of video surveillance footage obtained by CTV Vancouvershowing a woman attempting to light the church on fire last Wednesday.

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Authorities have not established that the incidents are connected. Sergeant Elenore Sturko told the Daily Caller News Foundation Tuesday that the suspect in the July 14 video, described as a “Caucasian woman, 5’7 tall, with a heavy-set build, and dark hair,” has not yet been identified.

The church, attended by more than 380 families, also served as a daycare to 65 children, CTV reported.

“We will not be deterred and we will rebuild,” said Bishop Mina of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Mississauga, Vancouver and Western Canada, the Vancouver Sun reported.

“The timing of this fire … raises many questions about what the authorities did to protect our church, especially considering the attempt on the same church this past Wednesday,” he added, according to the Vancouver Sun.

The Royal Mounted Canadian Police told the DCNF Tuesday that though it is investigating the crimes against churches, it does not have statistics on how many churches have been vandalized or burned.

“The RCMP is tracking/investigating these crimes where we are the police of jurisdiction. We don’t have a mandate to collect/track statistics for crimes investigated by other police departments,” RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival told the DCNF.

At least 48 Christian churches in Canada have either been vandalized, desecrated, or burned down since unmarked graves were uncovered near residential schools for indigenous children, according to one estimate by the Canadian publication True North.

The New York Post’s Kelly Jane Torrence criticized media outlets for suggesting Canada had hidden “genocidal death camps.”

Torrence wrote the unmarked graves are “confirmations” of a sad history Canadians have always known, rather than “discoveries.”

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation report, released in 2015, found that thousands of children died from disease in the overcrowded schools and that lack of supervision allowed for abuse and neglect.

“This is not a mass gravesite,” Saskatchewan First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorm said June 24, regarding burials found near a former Indian residential school. “These are unmarked graves.”

“The finds were shocking but not surprising,” wrote Torrence. “As a schoolgirl in Canada, I learned the ugly history of the country’s forced assimilation policy. Over the course of a century, 150,000 native children were torn from their families — by force, if necessary — and sent to get an English- (or French-) language education in government-funded schools run mainly by the Catholic Church.”

Torrence wrote that most of the clergy in charge were “well-meaning,” but that some “took advantage of their positions to inflict abuse.”

“The idea was to turn poverty-stricken children into productive, even prosperous, members of mainstream Canadian society — and, from the church’s perspective, to save their souls,” she added. “Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that at least 3,200 students died, later revising that figure to 4,100. The No. 1 cause of death was tuberculosis; influenza hit hard, too. Far from home, children were often buried on site, their graves marked with wooden crosses, most of which deteriorated and disappeared.”

LifeNews Note: Mary Margaret Olohan writes for Daily Caller. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience.

Source: lifenews.com

In Ireland, you can face six months behind bars for forging a drug prescription. Or for stealing€20,000 from your employer for luxury holidays. Or, until recently, for attending church.

Even in a year that has turned societal norms on its head, it’s surely a surprise that the Emerald Isle, once a home away from Rome for Europe’s Catholics, got into this state. There are few places more steeped in Church tradition.

Ireland, of all places, enforced some of the most draconian restrictions on religious freedom in the world during the pandemic. Authorities didn’t just close places of worship; they criminalized anyone who would attend a service or a Mass, regardless of their willingness to mask and distance. When a rural priest from County Cavan tried to hold a service, police set up checkpoints surrounding the building and fined him for daring to bid parishioners to come to a large, airy church. Meanwhile, dry cleaners, supermarkets, and even liquor stores stayed open for business. It was considered safer to pick up a cheap merlot outside a corner off-license than to take bread and wine in a socially distanced Communion service with holy God.

DUBLIN (7 May 2021) – People of faith are signing an open letter, addressed to the Irish Prime Minister, Micheál Martin TD, demanding a commitment never to ban church worship in Ireland again.

Church doors will open once again on Monday, after public worship was forbidden for almost a full year, with criminal penalties imposed on those who left their homes to attend services and masses. Despite commercial public venues such as dry cleaners and off-licenses being allowed to open with safety measures in place, worship in church was strictly prohibited.

The open letter, backed by human rights group ADF International, is available to read and sign at www.letusworship.global/ireland.

“There is no clear reason as to why the Irish government prevented places of worship from opening for so long. Other European countries allowed religious worship to continue with safety precautions which protect both the public at religious services and the wider community,” said Lorcán Price, Irish barrister and Legal Counsel for ADF International.

The letter, launched this week, makes three concrete asks of the leader of the Irish government.

First, the letter asks that the Taoiseach affirm respect for the fundamental right to freedom of religion, which is enshrined in Article 44 of the Constitution and protected in international human rights law.

Second, it demands that he recognize that churches are an essential part of society, and finally, that he commits that his government will never again impose a blanket ban on public worship.

“In Scotland, we saw the same disproportionate measures struck down by the top civil court as “unlawful”. Religious freedom is a fundamental human right, protected by the Irish Constitution, and it’s vital that the Irish government recognise this. Irish people of faith were deprived of worship, of the sacraments, and of the hope that the church can offer at a time when they were most needed – at a time of crisis. The Irish government must show that it understands that communal worship is essential for many Irish people, and commit to never again imposing such a draconian ban,” continued Price.

Legal challenge to blanket worship ban pending before courts

Declan Ganley, who filed a legal challenge after seeing the impact on all faith communities, is redoubling his efforts to ensure that the blanket ban on worship will never be imposed again and to hold the government to account.

The businessman’s claim for a judicial review into the disproportionate ban mirrors that of Canon Tom White in Scotland. In March, the Glasgow priest joined with 27 other faith leaders to successfully have the Scottish government’s blanket ban on worship ruled unlawful and struck down.

Ganley is hopeful for a similar decision from the Irish court.

“I welcome the steps that the government is taking to reopen churches. However, this does not reverse the fact that for most of the past year, churches have been subjected to unfair treatment in comparison to places of commerce,” said Ganley, in response to the news that the government would allow services to resume this weekend.

“There is no clear explanation as to why the Irish people should have been deprived of an essential source of comfort and hope in such a time of national grief. There’s no clear logic as to why an airy, open church, with plenty of space, should be considered somehow more dangerous than a bicycle shop. Are people of faith really more contagious than others?” he continued.

“We know from the case of Canon Tom White in Scotland that the decision to completely ban public worship is an unlawful one. While I am very thankful that church doors will once again open in Ireland, this case remains important. Now more than ever, we need a clear decision from the court as to whether this draconian ban was ever justified in the first place. And it is also a critical moment for the future of faith in Ireland. The courts now have the opportunity to ensure that the community is never again deprived access to a place to meet with God and minister to the suffering at a time of need.”

Source: adfinternational.org