Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are turning to religion in the midst of the brutal war Russia has unleashed on their nation.

The number of people in Ukraine asking for Bibles has more than doubled since the Russian invasion in February, according to figures released by the Ukrainian Bible Society.

“People usually ask ‘if God loves the world why did He allow this to happen?’ Many of them saw a lot of brutal behaviour from the Russians, torturing other people, killing civilians,” said Anatoliy Raychynets, deputy general secretary of the Ukrainian Bible Society.

“I expected that they would be blaming God or don’t want to receive Bibles but it’s totally the opposite. They have difficult questions, but they want to be close to God.”

Priests in the capital Kyiv have separately confirmed a resurgence in faith such that congregations had not dwindled despite an exodus of regular churchgoers overseas.

Abbot Lavrentiy, deacon of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, said that he was now seeing people of a kind he had never encountered in 23 years of service.

“They address precisely such spiritual questions: how to cope with all this now?” he said, adding that new attendees were either seeking divine guidance or protection during the war or had decided to turn their backs on the Russian Orthodox church after the invasion.

People who had not been believers, “realised that human power is not enough to solve urgent problems,” he said.

A Massachusetts court has ruled that the state constitution gives no protection to doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to mentally competent patients with terminal illness.

While it found no right to assisted suicide, it said the state Legislature is free to enact laws in the area.

“Although we recognize the paramount importance and profound significance of all end-of-life decisions, after careful consideration, we conclude that the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights does not reach so far as to protect physician-assisted suicide,” the Supreme Judicial Court wrote in its decision. “We conclude as well that the law of manslaughter may prohibit physician-assisted suicide, and does so, without offending constitutional protections.”

The suit was originally filed in 2016 by Dr. Roger Kligler, a retired physician with stage 4 prostate cancer, and another doctor who feared prosecution on manslaughter charges if he prescribed a cocktail of fatal drugs to terminally ill patients.

The decision was lauded by organizations opposed to physician-assisted suicide.

“Patients should be able to trust their doctors to support and care for them,” said Chris Schandevel, senior counsel for the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. “Offering terminally ill or disabled patients a ‘quick exit’ through death-inducing drugs destroys that trust.”

Catholic schools have dominated a survey of top performing schools in the North, taking the top three spots and five out of the top 10, the Irish Catholic reports.

St Mary’s Grammar School, Magherafelt, Co. Derry, took top spot for the second year running in the 30th edition of The Sunday Times ‘Parent Power’ poll, which identifies the highest-achieving schools in the UK.

Principal of St Mary’s Paul McLean expressed “delight” at the news, saying students leave the school “with a value system that sets pupils up for life”.

“There are so many challenges and competing priorities in young peoples’ lives that the safety and support of parents and schools working closely together is a necessary element to each pupil reaching their potential,” Principal McLean said.

More than 1,600 schools were studied for the survey, with rankings based on grades achieved in the schools.

“The quality of Northern Irish grammar schools shines through yet again in the national rankings, with seven schools in the top 50” across the UK, the release states.

Canada is delaying plans which would have allowed people suffering only from mental illness to access medically assisted suicide.

Legislation was due to take effect in March 2023, but now Justice Minister David Lametti  has said the government would seek to delay the expansion of so-called ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ (Maid), following criticism from psychiatrists and physicians across the country, including some who headed up Maid teams in hospitals.

When Canada first passed laws allowing assisted suicide in 2016, only patients with a terminal illness were eligible for the procedure. But in 2019, a Quebec judge found the rule unconstitutional, pushing lawmakers to amend the existing laws to include adults who didn’t have a reasonably foreseeable death. The judge said the law was discriminatory because it didn’t allow for ‘Maid’ in cases of ‘unbearable suffering’ where a person was not terminally ill.

Bill C-7, which passed in March 2021, reflected the court decision, but lawmakers implemented a two-year ban on patients with mental illness as the sole cause of accessing assisted death, giving them more time to study the issue. That study would have ended 17 March.

In recent weeks, psychiatrists have spoken out about a lack of preparedness within the healthcare system. The Association of Chairs of Psychiatry in Canada, which includes heads of psychiatry departments at all 17 medical schools, issued a statement last week calling for a delay.

Media reports have also highlighted controversial cases, increasingly polarizing the issue.

Italian MEP Carlo Fidanza has called attention to the persecution of religious minorities internationally through the criminalisation of “blasphemy” in countries such as Nigeria.

The politician highlighted the case of a Sufi-musician, Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, who was sentenced to death by hanging in August 2020 for posting song lyrics to WhatsApp that were deemed blasphemous.

Yahaya’s case has been appealed to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, challenging the constitutionality of the Sharia-based blasphemy laws.

Speaking at the European Parliament, Fidanza noted that there are seven countries in the world where a person can be sentenced to death for blasphemy, including Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria.

The MEP called for blasphemy law in Nigeria to be overturned, calling them “contrary to the human rights of religious minorities, international law and Nigeria’s commitments to its treaties.”

Fidanza continued: “this would be an important signal internally, against the Islamist militias that are bloodying the country, and internationally, towards all states that use anti-blasphemy laws to target religious minorities.”

Domestic surrogacy will also be green-lit, though the Government denies that it is recognising commercial surrogacy at home. However, it will allow surrogate mothers to receive ‘reasonable expenses’ and this can amount to commercial surrogacy in practice because of the size of the payments involved.

In Europe, only Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine allow commercial surrogacy contracts.

Minister Donnelly said: “The policy and draft outline legislative proposals approved by Government today have the potential to provide hundreds of Irish families with a route to formal recognition by the State of the surrogacy arrangements they have undertaken, or will undertake, in other jurisdictions.”

He said they had endeavoured to implement – in so far as possible and appropriate – the proposals of the Special Joint Oireachtas Committee on International Surrogacy and have accepted the majority of the committee’s recommendations.

Jailed teacher Enoch Burke will remain behind bars for the Christmas season after he again refused to obey a court order to stay away and not try to teach at the secondary school at which he is employed,

Despite refusing to purge his contempt Mr Burke, via a video link from Mountjoy, pleaded with Mr Justice Conor Dignam this week to release him from custody. There are examples of judges releasing prisoners from jail despite their contempt not being purged.

He told the court that he was “not a thief, a murderer or a drug dealer” and was behind bars because of his religious objections to “transgenderism”.

The judge said that he was not prepared to release Mr Burke, given that the teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Westmeath is not prepared to purge his contempt and comply with what the judge said is “a valid court order”.

Members of the Romanian Community are celebrating their first Christmas in their newly built church in Co Dublin.

The Betania evangelical Christian community of around 1,200 members, was established in Ireland over ten years ago by a small Romanian community, but is open to all nationalities.

As more Romanians arrived in Ireland, the church continued to grow.

In 2015, it purchased a piece of land from Fingal County Council and two years later planning permission was granted for construction.

When the architects and engineers on the design team asked what the budget for the project was, they were told that there was no budget, that the church would “build by faith”.

When the banks told those leading the project that they would not be able to fund the construction, the pastors turned to their own people.

“The whole church came together, and every family or member said, I can give a thousand or I can give five thousand towards the project, and we basically put all the money together,” according to Pastor Avram Hadarau.

That result has been described as “breathtaking”.

The sanctuary is a theatre with seating for 1,200 people, with top of the range acoustics and a high-definition video wall that spans the length of the interior.

It is quite the leap from the first service that was held in an empty field back in June 2018.

A Dutch court has ruled against activists who wanted to make it legal for anyone to perform assisted suicide procedures in the Netherlands.

In their written decision, the judges ruled that the Dutch law strikes a “fair balance between the societal interests of a ban on assisting a suicide – protection of life and preventing abuse of vulnerable persons – and the interests of an individual to have access to physician-assisted suicide in the case of unbearable suffering without the prospect it will get better”.

The Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide under strict conditions and when overseen by medical professionals in 2002.

Right-to-die organisation Cooperative Last Will brought the case with the aim of widening existing laws. It argued the ban on assisting suicide not overseen by medical professionals violated the right to self-determination and respect for private life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In testimony to a U.S. congressional human rights commission, two prominent human rights experts decried the ongoing repression of the Catholic Church by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and urged additional action by the U.S. to oppose Ortega’s regime.

Ortega’s government has in recent years detained, imprisoned, and likely tortured numerous Catholic leaders, including at least one bishop and several priests. His government has also taken action to repress Catholic radio and television stations, and driven Catholic religious orders, including the Missionaries of Charity, from the country. The regime also expelled Archbishop Waldemar Stanislaw Sommertag, the former apostolic nuncio in Nicaragua, from the country, a move the Vatican called “incomprehensible.”

“Every kind of religion is suffering the repression of this regime,” Bianca Jagger, a Catholic human rights activist, testified to the committee, but in particular, she said, Ortega is seeking to “destroy the Catholic Church in Nicaragua.”

Jagger is a former actress and ex-wife of Mick Jagger. She is also Nicaraguan and said she knows personally many of the Catholics who have been detained in the country.