There are 146 items on the agenda for the three week synod meeting which began on Sunday.

They include lengthening the longevity of Church the region, supporting with indigenous communities, proposing married elders could be ordained priests to address the chronic priest shortages in the region, protecting human rights campaigners and addressing global warming effects on the rainforest.

Clare Dixon from Catholic charity CAFOD said climate change is a big theme in the series of meetings.

“The Amazon generates a fifth of the Earth’s freshwater supply and a fifth of the Earth’s oxygen supply. But its trees are being torn down and its rivers polluted at an alarming rate, and as the Synod will discuss, is now a place of pain and violence,” she said.

“Indigenous communities in the Amazon have been living in harmony with nature for many years, but they are being killed defending their lands, and criminalised in their struggle to protect the precious Amazon rainforest that we all depend on to survive.

“Human rights and land defenders’ tireless pursuit of social and environmental justice to prevent agribusiness and extractive industries destroying the Amazon entails great risks to their own lives, including threats of violence, murders and criminalisation with no recourse to justice.”

Dixon said she believes the meeting will have a big impact on these issues and encouraged…

Thousands of people have already booked to attend “Michelangelo – A Different View”, which opens to the public in Hull Minster on Tuesday.

The exhibition features more than 50 detailed reproductions of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, including the famous “Creation of Adam”, a depiction of God giving life to the first man, and a six metre square reproduction of “The Last Judgment”.

The touring exhibition gives the public the opportunity to admire the works, famously created by Michelangelo over four years in the 1500s, in a religious setting other than the Vatican for the first time.

Visitors will be able to get close to the images and have the chance to learn how the Italian master created the work and the meaning behind them, organisers said.

The 700-year-old minster is no stranger to hosting high profile art events.

The Turner Prize was awarded there in 2017 – at the end of Hull’s tenure as UK City of Culture.

The exhibition is free to enter but there is a ticketing system for specified time slots.

It runs until November 18.

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Ambassador Sally Axworthy described Cardinal Newman as a “giant” of the 19th century whose poetry, sermons and books went beyond a religious audience and spoke to all people.

The Prince of Wales will lead the UK’s representation at the open-air ceremony in Rome on Sunday, where Pope Francis will declare the cardinal a saint in front of tens of thousands of pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, the first English saint of the modern age.

Ms Axworthy, who is Britain’s top diplomat to the Holy See, the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, said: “It’s an important moment for the Catholic Church but also Holy See relations.

“It’s the first British saint canonised in over 40 years and the first post-Reformation saint, and I think Cardinal Newman is important as he’s someone who had a global impact.

“I know he has a strong following in the United States, Latin America and certainly a strong following in the Vatican, lots of people have talked to me about how they’ve been moved by Newman’s writings.

“Obviously he had a huge impact on theology, but he was someone who examined his own faith in enormous detail and that meant also asking some difficult questions about having faith in a world which was becoming increasingly secularised – he thought and wrote about that.”

London-born Cardinal Newman, who died in England in 1890 aged 89, had been hailed by former Pope Benedict XVI…

XR organisers have planned to shut down key sites in central London, in addition to demonstrating outside government departments.

The protests come following what’s been described as a series of disappointing climate commitments from rich world countries at a summit in New York and a major report from the UN’s expert science panel, the IPCC, which warned of unprecedented consequences to the world’s oceans and ice systems without drastic action from governments.

Together with charities Christian Aid, Tearfund, and CAFOD, CCA are demanding the Government reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025 and to be more transparent about the global impact of climate change on vulnerable communities.

They also want to see a citizens’ assembly established to combat the climate emergency.

CCA member Rev Helen Burnett is a vicar at St Peter & St Paul’s Chaldon in the Diocese of Southwark.

Speaking to Premier at the Lambeth Bridge protest she said a citizens’ assembly would help to protect the needs of those in poverty.

“It’s a way of divesting decision making away from the kind of combat models that we have in the House of Commons into something more cooperative, in which people are working for the common good, not for the good of the wealthiest.”

Helen says the locations of the London protests are strategic and the disruption they…

Currently all state funded schools in England and Wales are legally required to hold a daily act of worship of a ‘broadly Christian nature’.

It’s been reported that 42 schools have successfully applied to their local Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education (SACRE) board to opt out of the collective worship in the past three years, with many requesting to hold “multi-faith” assemblies instead.

Rev Steven Terry from the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education told Premier it is culturally inappropriate to require children of all faiths and none to adhere to this law.

“I think this is very welcome news. I only wish that more schools were doing it.

“We live in an increasingly diverse society and to have a situation where we’re still required by law to offer a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian character is, I think increasingly inappropriate, given how many different cultures and different faiths systems are now represented in our society today.”

Terry was optimistic that Christianity still had a presence within schools but went on to say that an exposure to different beliefs provides a realistic and balanced education for children.

“We’re not taking Christianity out of the school place. By doing this, we’re certainly allotting it a proper place within the context of a multi faith community.

“One shouldn’t feel threatened as a Christian by having other…