Proposals to change the law on assisted dying have their second reading in the House of Lords today.

They’d allow doctors to help end the lives of terminally-ill patients in certain circumstances.

While peers discuss the plans, which have been put forward by Lord Falconer, pro-life campaigners will gather outside Parliament to show their concerns.

The demonstration which has been organised by the groups ‘Not Dead Yet UK’ and ‘Care Not Killing’ will include ten empty wheel chairs, a reference to the concerns that disabled and doctors groups have raised about the lack of protections for vulnerable people.

Former Disability Rights Commissioner Baroness Jane Campbell and former Paralympian Baroness Tani Grey-Thompson will also be present.

Peter Saunders is the Chief Executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship and is part of the Care Not Killing alliance.

He said: “We’re concerned that this will especially affect those who are disabled, elderly, sick or depressed.

“The right to die can so easy become the duty to die and the law that we have at the moment is there to protect vulnerable people from exploitation.”

James Harris is from the group Dignity in Dying and is supporting Lord Falconer’s bill.

He said: “I would much rather prefer that they raise concerns openly, that they have the opportunity to speak to independent carers and their fears can be reassured, rather than leaving them to their own devices to go onto the internet and other forms of communications in order to find ways to end their lives.

Yesterday a new poll found the majority of the public support a terminally-ill person’s right to die.

The ComRes survey found 54 per cent of those questioned agreed that people ‘should have the right to end their lives whenever they choose’.

But 58 per cent accepted it was ‘impossible to make the system completely safe from abuse’.

Source and Original Content by Premier Christian Radio

Pope Francis has excommunicated a convicted paedophile from the Catholic Church.

Argentinian Jose Mercau was the priest at St John the Baptist Church in the San Isidro diocese, which is on the outskirts of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires.

He also ran a home for destitute children.

Mercau admitted sexually abusing four teenage boys between 2000 and 2005, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

He spent fifteen days in prison, before he was moved to a monastery in Buenos Aires to serve the rest of his sentence.

Pope Francis asked victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church for forgiveness in a meeting with them earlier this year.

He pledged to hold bishops accountable for the way they deal with paedophile priests and allegations of sexual abuse.

Victims are still criticising the Vatican because it hasn’t banished another Argentinian priest convicted of paedophilia.

Julio Cesar Grassi was sentenced to 15 years in jail in 2009 for sexually abusing a boy.

Source and Original Content by Premier Radio

Leading British evangelist Canon J John has warned that the cultural climate for Christians in Britain has changed from support to opposition.

“For far too long in this country we have needed to do nothing to survive because we had the wind behind us,” he says in a blog on the Huffington Post. Now, this has reversed.

“We need to realise that we are very much in opposition. The wind — and it may soon be a very chill one — blows in our faces.”

He was responding to a Huffington Post poll this week that showed that more than half of Britons believe that religion does more harm than good and less than a quarter believe faith is a force for good.

Even one in five of those who claimed to be “very religious” said religion was harmful to society. A quarter said atheists were more likely to be moral individuals than religious people.

Fewer than one in ten said they were very religious and more than six in ten were not religious at all.

Canon John, director of the Philo Trust, said there were two possible responses to the findings. “The first is to turn inwards, to slip into the ‘encircle-the-wagons’ mode, worship behind closed doors and, in comfortable privacy, bury our beliefs. That may preserve our faith but what will be preserved is not an authentic Christianity. The second response is to accept the challenge, turn outwards and go out boldly to confront our culture. To do that will not be comfortable, but it will be authentic. We Christians in Britain need to be prepared to live more wisely, think more deeply and, just maybe, die more willingly for what we believe.”

Source and Original Content by Christian Today