Cardinals Keith O’Brien and Thomas J Winning and Archbishop Leo Cushley.
The most recent clergy to hold the office of Cardinal in Scotland were the late Keith P O’Brien and Thomas J Winning.
On the anniversary of the Hamas terror attack on Israel on 7 October and the beginning of the war in Gaza, Pope Francis wrote to the Catholics of the Middle East criticising the “shameful inability of the international community and powerful countries to put an end to the war”. He joined the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in marking the anniversary with a day of prayer and fasting, offering a Rosary for peace.
Church leaders and pro-life groups warned that the legalisation of assisted dying threatens vulnerable people, following a Labour MP’s proposal of a bill to give terminally ill people in England and Wales the right to end their life. A similar bill from Liberal MSP Liam MacArthur is making its way through the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh. “There is now ample evidence across the world that the legalisation of assisted suicide puts the most vulnerable members of society at risk,” said Bishop John Sherrington, the lead on life issues for the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales.
The second assembly of the Synod on Synodality began last Wednesday after a two-day retreat led by Mother Maria Ignazia Angelini OSB and Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP and a penitential service in St Peter’s. The Tablet leader column this week observes, the synod must explore and address the Church’s attitude towards women– “It will not be painless.” Austen Ivereigh, an advisor to the synod, provides a pen-portrait of its vision, based on the working document which portrays a Church “closer to the lives of her people, less bureaucratic and more relational.”
US campaigners against the death penalty voiced their dismay at the executions of five men in the space of one week at the end of September. “The spate of executions included the state of Missouri killing Marcellus Williams despite mishandling of DNA evidence and the original prosecutor calling to overturn the conviction,” said Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of the Catholic Mobilising Network. “Simply put, this disgraceful September spree confirmed everything we know to be true about the death penalty: it’s contrary to human dignity, immoral, flawed, and useless.”
On 8 October 1945, an exhausted 17-year-old Catholic orphan called Tomei Ozaki trudged up a steep hill on the outskirts of the southwestern Japanese city of Nagasaki and banged on the wooden door of a Franciscan friary built by Fr Maximilian Kolbe. Ozaki was a survivor of the atomic bomb blast over Nagasaki. Hours later, he began to detail his life in diaries. “Fr Kolbe gave me hope, and a reason to live, at a time when I was devastated and suicidal,” said Ozaki, who became a Franciscan friar himself. He died on 15 April 2021.
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