OCOFOR, which stands for Our Children Our Faith Our Rights, held a demonstration at Parliament Square on Saturday to demand that the government allow parents to opt their children out of the LGBT portion of relationships education. 

Following the passing of the Children and Social Work Act (2017), as of September 2020 all secondary schools in England will be required to teach Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and primary schools to teach relationships education.

Tom Akinola, who took part in the protest, told Premier as a Christian parent of four children he’s concerned about the curriculum.

“A large chunk of it just goes against our Christian faith. It’s normalising LGBTQ relationships and it’s being enforced on faith groups,” he said. 

“It’s gone from being tolerant to now a forceful acceptance which goes against our Christian faith.”

Akinola said he was encouraged by other faith groups who have been speaking out against the curriculum and urged Christians to take an active approach to the issue.

“We see Muslims coming out, we Jewish communities coming out, but as Christians we would rather just sit in the armchair, sign a petition off, and pray in our closet, and hope that does the job. But we’re increasingly seeing petitions don’t do anything,” he said.

“We’ve constantly seen the Christian faith is being persecuted in this country…and…

In an article he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, Lord Carey said as violent conflict has erupted again in Syria he doubts that Syrian Christians will have much help from the UK government because they are of the “wrong faith”.

He referenced how refugees of other faith groups were supposedly favoured over Christians.

“Of the refugees who came here in 2015 under the Vulnerable Persons Scheme, only 1.6 per cent were Christians,” he said.

“That’s despite this group being 10 per cent of the Syrian population.The situation for Christians seeking asylum has worsened.

“In 2016 only 0.4 per cent were Christians. In 2017, 0.2 per cent. And in the early part of last year none of the 1,112 refugees we took in were Christians. The Yazidi and Druze minorities have been treated just as unfairly.”

He added that the government states that their selection of refugees who are allowed to settle in the UK is dependent on their suffering. However, Lord Carey highlighted what deems is an issue in the selection process.

“In their supposed blindness to religion they allowed the process of choosing refugees to be dominated by workers for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in refugee camps,” he said.

“Sunni Muslims – 74 per cent of Syria’s population – have made up 99 per cent of the refugees we admit.

“UK officials eventually conceded the obvious: Christian refugees are…

The majority of 180 bishops from nine Amazonian countries also called for the Vatican to reopen a debate on ordaining women as deacons, saying: “It is urgent for the church in the Amazon to promote and confer ministries for men and women in an equitable manner.”

The proposals were contained in a final document approved on Saturday at the end of a three-week synod on the Amazon, which Pope Francis called in 2017 to focus attention on saving the rainforest and better ministering to its indigenous people.

The Catholic Church, which contains nearly two dozen different rites, already allows married priests in Eastern Rite churches and in cases where married Anglican priests have converted.

However, if Francis accepts the proposal, it would mark a first for the Latin Rite church in a millennium.

The celibate priesthood has been a tradition of the Latin Rite Catholic Church since the 11th century, imposed in part for financial reasons to ensure that priests’ assets pass to the church, not to heirs.

Francis told the bishops at the end of the voting that he would indeed reopen the work of a 2016 commission that studied the issue of women deacons. And he said he planned to take the bishops’ overall recommendations and prepare a document of his own before the end of the year.

Some conservatives and traditionalists have warned that any papal opening to married priests or women…

Justin Welby told the Sunday Times there was a risk of pouring “petrol” on the country’s divisions on the issue of Britain’s departure from the European Union.

The archbishop said Mr Johnson had come to symbolise a climate in which Britain had become consumed by “an abusive and binary approach to political decisions”, and where those with opposing views treated each other as “total” enemies.

In an era in which social media had made it “extraordinarily dangerous to use careless comments”, and in which hate speech was on the rise, Mr Welby called for political leaders to take more care with their language.

He said his criticisms were not confined to Mr Johnson and his Government, but made it clear he considered the prime minister partly to blame for the fact society had become “quite broken”.

“I think we have become addicted to an abusive and binary approach to political decisions: ‘It’s either this or you’re my total enemy’,” Mr Welby told the paper.

“There have been inflammatory words used on all sides, in parliament and outside – ‘traitor’, ‘fascist’, all kinds of really bad things have been said at the highest level in politics.”

Mr Welby said he was “shocked” by Mr Johnson’s recent dismissal of concerns extreme language could encourage death threats against politicians as “humbug”.

And he added political leaders could no longer behave the same way as Mr Johnson’s…

Fr Anthony Dang Huu Nam, a Catholic priest in Nghe An province, says the victims are from a rural village called Yen Thanh.

He claimed to have heard that those found dead in Essex were part of a group of more than 100 people travelling to Europe.

He told the BBC: “According to a few sources that have told me, in this case they were many people, more than 100 were on their way to a new life, but 39 died.

“A few families confirmed the deaths of their relatives who are the victims of this tragic journey.”

Fr Anthony, who has among those who have led efforts to gather contact details for all the families involved in the tragedy, led prayers all day on Saturday for the situation.

“The whole district is covered in sorrow,” he told Reuters news agency. “This is a catastrophe for our community.”

Experts have said Vietnamese families are paying smugglers large sums of money to help transport relatives into Europe via Russia.

Bernie Gravett, a former Metropolitan police officer who now advises the EU on human trafficking, said migrants from Vietnam often enter Europe via a different route to people coming from China – the country of origin police previously identified for the container victims.

He told BBC Breakfast: “The Chinese would generally come down through Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, across through Turkey and then up what we call the Balkan…