Access to places of worship will have to be “supervised” when they reopen, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said.

Places of worship come under step three of the Government’s coronavirus recovery strategy, which means they cannot open until July 4 at the earliest.

But when they do reopen, certain sections of buildings could be closed to allow for cleaning to take place, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, has suggested.

Speaking during a Zoom panel briefing hosted by the Religion Media Centre on Tuesday, the cardinal said: “I think one thing is very clear, access to a church in the foreseeable future will be supervised, so it’s not as if the church doors will be flung open and say ‘come in when you want’.

“There will have to be people there, the whole process will have to be supervised.”

He added: “Each day a different section of the church might be made available, it doesn’t have to be the whole church, the whole time.

“So you could have the right hand back part (of the church) for one day, and then the next day it will be the next session, so that would enable a cleaning routine to be more feasible, and it would leave parts of the church unused for maybe three days, which would help in terms of the hygiene.

“I would see the request to have access to churches for individual prayer both as a response to spiritual need and as a practical trial run, in which we can learn quickly.”

Asked if worshippers should wear masks while visiting places of worship, the cardinal said he was not in a position to comment until July, but added that church leaders should not be “overreacting”.

Elsewhere on the panel, it was said the timeframe of synagogues reopening would be based on the profile of the community they are situated in.

Jo Grose, communities director of United Synagogue said: “We know that reopening is going to be more drawn out, more complex and the decisions we make are really going to depend on the profile of the community.

“So there will be setting-by-setting decisions about how we do that based on their demographics and their buildings.”

A former Australian archbishop, the most senior Catholic cleric in the world convicted of concealing child sex abuse, was spared jail on Tuesday when he was ordered to serve his one-year sentence at home.

Newcastle Court Magistrate Robert Stone allowed Philip Wilson, 67, to serve his detention at home after an assessment by prison authorities due to a range of health issues, including heart disease, faced by the former archbishop.

Wilson was ordered to begin serving his detention on Tuesday in New South Wales state and would be eligible for parole in February 2019, the court said, without disclosing the address of where he would be held.

Australian Broadcasting Corp. Television showed Wilson being driven away from the court in Newcastle, about 170 km (105 miles) north of Sydney. It said he would be staying at his sister’s house.

Wilson has said he planned to appeal against his conviction for failing to disclose to police abuse by a priest, Father James Fletcher, after being told about it in 1976 by two victims.

An angry victim of Fletcher who was not involved in the case against Wilson confronted the former archbishop outside the court, pressing him to apologise and saying the appeal process would prolong the pain suffered by abuse victims.

“Where is the contrition from former Archbishop Wilson? His Grace, as somebody just said upstairs, has shown no grace,” abuse survivor Peter Gogarty said outside the court.

“This man said two weeks ago he was resigning as the Archbishop of Adelaide because of the hurt done to people like me, but I am still here and still hurting,” he said.

Wilson resigned as archbishop of Adelaide in July, two months after being convicted. He wanted to hold on to the position until he completed his appeal but came under pressure from Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, fellow clerics and abuse victims to quit.

Pope Francis named Bishop Greg O’Kelly to run the Archdiocese of Adelaide until a new archbishop has been appointed.

“Bishop O’Kelly said he was keeping Archbishop Wilson in his prayers as he formally commences this stage in his life, while also remembering the victims and survivors of abuse in the church,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

Wilson would be staying at a relative’s home, it said.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, the country’s top Catholic body that Wilson once led, had no immediate comment.

Pope Francis recognised on Monday measures that Chile’s bishops said they would take to assist prosecutors investigating allegations of sex abuse that have plagued the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, including that they would work to reach an agreement with prosecutors on an exchange of information.

The pontiff wrote in a letter released to media on Monday by the Chilean Church that the steps taken at a conclave last week were “realistic and concrete” and that he was confident they would make a “decisive” difference.

After a week-long leadership conclave, the bishops asked for forgiveness, saying in a statement on Friday that they had failed to aid and accompany victims who had suffered “grave sins and injustices committed by priests and clergy.”

Fernando Ramos, secretary-general of the Episcopal Conference, said last Friday that they also wanted “to reach an agreement [with prosecutors] to assure a fluid exchange of information, one that meets our standards, as well as the requirements of the Public Ministry.”

Chilean law enforcement is investigating 38 accusations of sexual abuse against 73 bishops, clerics and lay workers, involving 104 victims.

“I was impressed by the reflection, discernment and decisions that were made,” the pope wrote. “But what struck me most was the example of a unified episcopal community. Thank you for this edifying example.”

Chilean prosecutors said last week that they had asked the government to submit a formal request to the Vatican for information about nine clergymen and lay workers who have been accused of sexual abuse of children.

“We will make public every prior investigation into alleged sexual abuse of children that has occurred in our jurisdictions. We will ask the same of officials at all religious congregations,” Santiago Silva, president of the Episcopal Conference, told reporters last week.

Two special envoys sent by Pope Francis to investigate a child sex abuse scandal in Chile were meeting priests and church workers at a university in the Chilean capital last month when aides rushed into the room with an alarming development: police and prosecutors were about to start raiding church offices.

The envoys were 90 minutes into a seminar on how to investigate allegations of sex abuse committed by fellow clergy following revelations that hundreds of children might have been molested. For decades, the Roman Catholic Church in Chile quietly investigated such allegations without alerting police, but it now stands accused, even by Pope Francis himself, of a cover-up that allowed abusers to operate with impunity.

One of the clergymen listening to the envoys was Jaime Ortiz de Lazcano, the legal adviser to Santiago’s archbishop. The aides rushed to his side and told him, ‘”Father, go to the (church offices) because there’s going to be a raid”,’ Ortiz later recounted.

Police and prosecutors were staging simultaneous raids on church offices less than a mile away from the university and outside the capital, looking for evidence of sex crimes the Church had not reported to police.

The surprise sweeps, ordered by Emiliano Arias, a provincial prosecutor, marked the start of what experts who track sex crimes in the Roman Catholic Church say is one of the most aggressive investigations ever undertaken by a judicial authority anywhere in the world.

Since that cold June afternoon there have been five more raids on church offices to seize documents, phones, tablets and computers, leaving the Vatican scrambling to respond to a rapidly unfolding scandal that is the worst image crisis of Francis’ papacy, now in its sixth year.

Leading the charge against the Church is Arias, 45, who is experienced in fighting organised crime and has a showman’s fondness for taking television news crews on the raids.

Arias told Reuters in an exclusive interview that documents seized by his team contained 30 cases of alleged abuse dating back to 2007 that the Church had not reported to the police. While Reuters was allowed to film his investigators poring through seized documents, he declined to give details from the files because he said they named victims of abuse.

He also alleged that some local Church officials had tried to destroy documents but that his team – made up of two prosecutors, three lawyers and a unit of specialist sex crime police – had salvaged them. He declined to say who had tried to destroy them or how they had tried to get rid of them.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm those assertions.

Víctor Villa Castro, head of communications for the Santiago archbishopric, said he could not comment on any cases under investigation by Arias.

“We would however say that we have no knowledge of the destruction of documents, nor the covering-up of crimes,” he said. “The victims are the first, and most important, in this and we will cooperate with the civil authorities in any way that can help to get to the truth of these matters.”

Arias says he wants to arrest both those who perpetrated the abuse and those who he says helped to cover it up. He arrested Oscar Munoz, a top aide to Santiago’s archbishop, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, after seizing church documents in which Munoz confessed to sex crimes. Munoz’s lawyer has acknowledged that some of the accusations in the documents are true but says he will challenge some others.

Arias last week named Ezzati, the most senior Roman Catholic in Chile, as a suspect, accusing him of covering up his aide’s alleged abuses. Ezzati has denied any wrongdoing and promised to cooperate.

Arias said he launched the raids after Church officials in Rancagua, the capital of O’Higgins region, told him he would have to make a formal petition to the Vatican to obtain information he was seeking because it was protected by ‘pontifical secret.’

A spokesman for the Rancagua archbishop’s office said they were told to do this by the Vatican and insisted they were cooperating fully with civil authorities. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke declined to comment.

The Roman Catholic Church says the ‘pontifical secret’ provision in canon law is intended to protect the privacy of all involved in sex abuse claims. Critics say bishops have historically used it as a shield to block inquiries from civil authorities.

“We are not talking about a fraud, or a theft, we are talking about crimes against children,” Arias said in an interview in his office in Rancagua, explaining his decision not to submit the request to the Vatican and instead get a judge to approve the raids.

‘CULTURE OF ABUSE’

Allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy are not new, but under Chilean law governing the separation of church and state, the Catholic Church, a powerful and politically influential institution in this conservative Andean nation, has no legal obligation to report the allegations to police.

The sex abuse scandal came to a head after Pope Francis visited in January and was initially dismissive of claims by survivors of a cover-up by top Church officials there. A backlash among advocates for abuse survivors prompted him to dispatch an investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who produced a confidential 2,300-page report on the allegations.

After receiving the report Pope Francis wrote an open letter to Chile’s faithful in May in which he decried “the culture of abuse and the system of cover up” by the Church in Chile.

He summoned all 34 of Chile’s bishops to Rome in May where they offered to resign en masse. He has so far accepted five resignations and is expected to accept more.

Arias speaks mostly without emotion during the hour-long interview until he talks about how, according to their accusers, priests convinced their victims that they were doing nothing wrong. Then he displays flashes of anger, sometimes so impassioned that he trips over his words.

“I have seen some tough cases but what shocks me about all this is the abuse of conscience – how an accused (Church worker) has entered into the soul of another person and is capable of convincing him that satisfying his desires is not even a sin,” said Arias, who describes his family as “very Catholic” but says he is lapsed.

Arias said he can prosecute senior Church officials for covering up the abuses if he can prove they knew about systematic abuse and failed to do anything to stop it, or hid evidence to prevent civil authorities from getting involved.

But first he must prosecute the abusers, said Maria Ines Horvitz, a senior lawyer at the State Defense Council of Chile, a public agency that provides legal advice to the Chilean state. And to do that he must find cases within the 10-year statute of limitations – a potential problem that has bedevilled prosecutors in other countries – or turn to the one court in Chile that still handles cases from before roughly 2000, which is backlogged.

PROSECUTORIAL ZEAL

The national public prosecutor instructed all provincial prosecutors last month to pursue sex abuse allegations more vigorously.

But Arias has gone much further than his colleagues in his zeal to bring prosecutions. He has repeatedly widened his remit, from a handful of cases to dozens, from his provincial base to the capital, and from investigating claims of abuse by 14 priests in Rancagua to the alleged complicity of Ezzati, Santiago’s archbishop, himself.

As a result of his uncovering new cases in Church documents, the national prosecutor last week authorized him to expand his investigation into other regions.

BishopAccountability.Org, which tracks allegations of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests, says the only comparable investigation into sex abuse in the Church was in Belgium in 2010 when police launched coordinated raids on Church offices and the home of a cardinal. That investigation did not lead to any prosecutions because of the statute of limitations.

Arias is carrying out his investigation in the absence of any public backing from the centre-right Sebastian Pinera government. Shortly before becoming president in March, Pinera criticized the Church for its “defensive” attitude to the scandal and “insufficient” investigations but has remained silent on the issue since.

A government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

WHY NOW?

For decades allegations of sexual abuse by priests swirled through Chilean society, but little was done to address them. The Church was largely left to police itself.

But this year that suddenly changed.

Church watchers say several factors contributed to this watershed moment – the international attention received by several victims who went public; the pope’s initial poor handling of the claims; and the ripple effect of the global #MeToo movement.

The Church’s grip on Chile is also weakening, public opinion polling shows, even though the formerly predominately Catholic nation remains largely conservative on social issues.

The waning support for the Church was evident when the pope visited Chile in January – there were many empty seats at his public masses. This was “a turning point for Francis’ papacy”, a Vatican official said. “It is when he realized that he was listening to the wrong people about the real situation in Chile.”

For Arias, the pope’s subsequent mea culpa that the Church had covered up abuses gave him the impetus he needed to act. “His description of what was happening in Chile was powerful and should concern us all,” he said.

The canonisation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta on Sunday will be  the culmination of a process – sometimes called “the saint-making machine” – that is long, complex, expensive, opaque and often contentious.

The Catholic Church posthumously confers sainthood on people  considered so holy during their lives that they are now believed to be with God and can intercede with him to perform miracles. Such is the status of the nun acclaimed for her work in the slums of the Indian city now known as Kolkata.

But the path to sainthood is often more bureaucratic than beatific.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 and the late Pope John Paul, who met her often, bent Vatican rules to grant a dispensation allowing the procedure to establish her case for sainthood to be launched two years after her death instead of the usual five.

He had even considered making her a saint immediately but cardinals convinced him that it would set a dangerous precedent for the future, even though in the early Church people were acclaimed saints upon their death.

The current process, known as a “cause”, begins at the local level when a diocese believes that someone in their community lived a saintly life. When it is formally open, he or she get the title “Servant of God.”

The postulator, in this case Canadian priest Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, sends voluminous documentation to the Vatican, where its Congregation for the Causes of Saints assigns it to a “relator”. The relator oversees it, and together with theologians, recommends if it is worthy enough to continue.

If it does, the candidate gets the title “venerable”. The next step is beatification. This requires a miracle, which is usually the inexplicable curing of a sick person.

The first miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, and which allowed the Church to beatify her, concerned an Indian woman, Monica Bersa, whose stomach tumour is said to have disappeared after she and others prayed to the nun in 1998, a year after Mother Teresa died.

A medical commission working with the Vatican reviews each case to decide if there is any known medical explanation for the healing.

MIRACLE OR MEDICINE?

Critics, such as the late atheist writer Christopher Hitchens, who made a documentary called “Hell’s Angel” on Mother Teresa, say the system is flawed. One of the doctors who treated Bersa at the time, Ranjan Mustafi, told Indian media the healing was a result of treatment.

After beatification, which for Mother Teresa was in 2003, a second miracle is required in order for the cause to move on to sainthood.

This involved Brazilian Marcilio Andrino, who the Church says unexpectedly recovered from a severe brain infection in 2008 after his family prayed to Mother Teresa.

The saint-making process has not been immune to corruption and mismanagement, with accusations that the system allowed for favouritism for causes with rich backers.

The conservative Opus Dei group was accused of using its considerable financial clout to push for the canonization of its founder, Father Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, who was declared a saint in 2002.

In 2015, a commission looking into Vatican finances found that the Vatican’s saint-making office had little or no documentation of funds used by postulators. According to a Vatican source, the Vatican bank in 2014 froze about a million euros in suspect funds held by postulators.

Kolodiejchuk said the cost of Mother Teresa’s sainthood cause – gathering documentation, interviewing witness, paying lawyers – came to less than $100,000 – very low compared to the cost of some canonisations in the past.

He said it was covered mostly by a single anonymous donation, that costs were contained because member of the Missionaries of Charity worked for free and that no contributions destined for the poor were diverted

Last year, Pope Francis made key changes to the financial side of saint-making with a decree ordering new controls on its costs and demanding more vigilance and transparency at each stage.

It stipulates that contributions from the faithful and groups must go into an account  managed by an administrator who must “scrupulously respect the intentions” of contributors, keep detailed documentation, and present budgets to a superior.

This article was reproduced from Reuters and the views here do not represent the views of Faith Matters

Pope Francis has made the annulment of marriage simpler and easier with a call for bishops to be more welcoming to divorced couples. It is one of the biggest changes around guidance regarding divorce in the Catholic church for over 250 years. Yet, all is not what it seems and the Catholic Church’s position is one where there are specific clauses to what may constitute a quicker annulment of the marriage.

Previously, couples looking for an annulment of their marriage would have to wait years and the frustration for some couples meant that they were unable to marry again and were left having to live in limbo until an annulment was granted some years down the line. With the new procedure highlighted in a document called Motu Proprio (meaning ‘by his own initiative’),  the Pope re-affirms the Church’s commitment to marriage though it will be easier for separated couples to receive an annulment within 45 days based on whether the Church decides that a marriage was not valid in the first place because of issues of psychological immaturity, co-ercion etc.

Previously annulments of marriages carried heavy fees, and delays due to a second tribunal which mandatorily reviewed the initial annulment decision. However, this ‘speeding up’ of the process may only be relevant for clear cut cases.