Societies which undermine traditional marriage weaken themselves, Cardinal Sean Brady has said.

A leading Constitutional expert who expressed serious reservations about the Charter of Fundamental Rights that is part of the Lisbon treaty has said that the guarantees secured by the Government in June will be effective in ensuring the primacy of our Supreme Court on issues relating to the family and education.

A child in the US state of New Hampshire who has been homeschooled by her Christian mother has been ordered by a court to attend a state-run school so she can learn about other belief systems.

Senator Rónán Mullen has welcomed new recommendations to create a statutory presumption that unmarried fathers obtain guardianship rights vis a vis their children.

A key Church of Ireland committee has welcomed Cardinal Sean Brady's warnings on the threat posed to marriage by the Government's proposed Civil Partnership Bill.

Humans are ‘programmed’ to believe in God and the supernatural, scientific researchers claim.

The head of a leading UK children's charity has said that more children should be taken aware from their parents at birth to prevent them being brought up in “completely broken” families.

Martin Narey, the chief executive of the charity Barnardo’s, said that social workers try “too hard” to keep children with their biological parents rather than taking them into care where their needs might be better addressed.

His remarks come after criticism of the failure of social services to intervene in the case of two young boys who beat, tortured and sexually abused two other boys in South Yorkshire. The case came in the wake of a number of other child abuse cases in the UK, including the Baby P case.

An inquiry is under way into how the brothers, aged 10 and 12, were left free to lure their victims to an isolated spot outside Edlington, near Doncaster, and subject them to a horrific ordeal which has drawn parallels with the murder of James Bulger in 1993.

It has emerged that the two brothers had a long history of violence and involvement with social services and had been exposed to drugs and alcohol from an early age in a dysfunctional family.

The pair were finally placed in foster care just three weeks before the attack.

But Doncaster’s beleaguered social services have been criticised for failing to keep them under better supervision and placing them with foster parents rather than in residential care given their violent record.

In London, Haringey social services saw Peter Connelly, the toddler who came to be known as Baby P, up to 60 times before his death but failed to removing him despite signs of abuse.

Mr Narey, a former director general of the Prison Service, said that it was time for the authorities to recognise that there are families which “can’t be fixed”.

He said his views represented “illiberal heresy” in social services circles where there remains a determination to give “failed” parents a second chance.

“We just need to take more children into care if we really want to put the interests of the child first,” he said.

“We can't keep trying to fix families that are completely broken.

“It sounds terrible, but I think we try too hard with birth parents... If we really cared about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put them into permanent adoptive families, where we know they will have the best possible outcome.”

Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness at the NSPCC, called for the authorities to act more quickly with babies to remove them from failed parents.

"Babies are particularly vulnerable so timescales generally need to be shorter in assessing their needs," he said.

Stopping short of calling for children to be removed at birth, he said the Government should issue clearer guidelines on when children should be taken away from their families.

But Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, said: “I don't think the right thing to do in these cases is immediately to put children into care.

“The right thing to do is to say can we sort out the problems in that family?”

Tim Loughton, the Conservative shadow children’s minister said: “Martin seems to have this predetermination that kids are destined to be problem kids and I don’t agree with that.

“The bottom line is that the people who know best how to look after their children are the parents of those children.

“There will be a small number of cases where clearly they are not up to it but Martin … sees a far greater role the state as being corporate parents, I just look at the record of the state and it is appalling.”

A controversial law which has been used to prosecute individuals deemed to have offended minorities has been found to violate the right to free speech.

The long-awaited report by the Commission on Taxation has recommended that Child Benefit should be taxed.

A leading UN organisation held a conference in Berlin last week to train 400 activists to demand that countries fund and provide sex education programmes and abortions.

Carrie Prejean is suing Miss California pageant officials, claiming that the state organisation discriminated against her on the basis of her religious beliefs and caused her emotional distress by stripping her of her Miss California title, her lawyer confirmed on Monday.

The number of people addicted to cocaine has risen sharply since 2002, according to a new report by the Health Research Board.

Ireland saw another drop in the number of suicides last year, but the country still has one of the highest levels of youth suicide in Europe, although the suicide rate as a whole is low by European standards.

Lone-parent welfare benefits in Ireland are too high, and do too little to improve the wellbeing of children, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

New York's Catholic Bishops have been given the go-ahead to defend traditional marriage in court by the state's highest court. The case will examine whether New York state should recognise out-of-state same-sex marriages which have been lawfully contracted in other states.

Aggressive secularism is a major threat to traditional British society, one of the Church of England's most outspoken bishops has warned as he steps down.

Married cancer patients live longer than those who are divorced, separated or never married, according to a new study.

Two pharmacists prosecuted by the US state of Illinois for conscientiously objecting to distributing abortifacient contraceptives obtained a court ruling in their favour last Friday.

A leading Tory has warned that family breakdown and the devaluation of marriage has led to a generation of children with no concept of right and wrong.