A minister whose mother and 19 other family members were murdered by terrorists a decade ago has told of how he was able to resist revenge.

Rev Aftab Gohar says he found peace through Jesus Christ after a double suicide bomber attack at All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan on September 22 2013.

There were 122 people killed and 250 injured in the bombings.

The parishioners had just left the church for a meal in the grounds when the bombers struck.

Among them was Mr Gohar’s 79-year-old mother, Iqbal Gohar, as well as his nieces, nephews, cousins, uncles, aunts and friends.

The minister, who oversees Eddleston, Peebles Old Parish, and Stobo and Drumelzier churches in the Scottish Borders, said his relatives “died for their faith”.

Although Pakistan’s official religion is Islam, the country’s constitution gives citizens freedom of faith.

However, religious minorities are often attacked and the country’s blasphemy laws have been used to discriminate against non-Muslims.

Mr Gohar believes the law is used as a means to justify attacks, such as a number of church and house burnings in Jaranwala near Faisalabad, Pakistan, last month.

Open Doors, a charity that supports persecuted Christians around the world, ranked Pakistan in seventh place in its top 50 countries where Christian persecution is most rife.

Reflecting on the attack, Mr Gohar said: “It was a very hard time for us all and I was questioning ‘why did it happen to those who were very regular churchgoers?’

“Those who didn’t go to church on that day, did they do the right thing?

“The Bible says ‘when you are persecuted because of your faith in Jesus, you are blessed’. They all died for their faith.

“It was hard for me to forgive those responsible but with the strength of God I did so and freed myself from the extra burden of hatred and revenge.”

He added: “On the cross, Jesus prayed for those who were crucifying him: ‘Forgive them Father, they don’t know what they are doing’.

“Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ – a lesson that some people find impossible to follow.”

Last week Mr Gohar and a number of campaigners handed a petition to Syed Zahid Raza, consul general of Pakistan for Scotland and Northern Ireland, at the Consulate of Pakistan in Glasgow.

The petition called on Pakistan’s government to improve safety for religious minorities, and for the blasphemy law to include punishing those who destroy Bibles or burn down churches and homes.

Mr Gohar says he was inspired by Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who helped Jewish people escape the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The minister commented: “She said ‘forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuff of hatred’.

“It is a power that breaks chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.”

The minister was ordained into the Church of Pakistan in 1995, having come to Scotland to study at the University of Edinburgh in 1998-1999.

He later came back to Scotland to work as a full-time minister in 2008.

Mr Gohar and his wife Samina and their two adult sons, Shahan and Zeeshan, are now British citizens.

Shahan married in Pakistan last year.

Mr Gohar says the loss of his family was felt strongly at the wedding.

Rt Rev Sally Foster-Fulton, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, said: “Our thoughts and prayers are with our brothers and sisters in Christ in Pakistan as they mark the anniversary of this horrific and unjustified attack on peaceful churchgoers.

“We are united in sorrow as we reflect on the impact this atrocity had on the families of the victims and survivors and sadly Christians continue to be persecuted today.”

She added: “The Church continues to engage with ecumenical and international partners on the misuse of the blasphemy law and we call on the government of Pakistan to redouble its efforts to protect minority groups.”

The Consulate of Pakistan in Glasgow was contacted for comment.

A Christian convert at a church connected with the Liverpool bomber has received a death threat in the wake of the Remembrance Sunday terror attack.

Iraq-born Emad Al Swealmeen, the 32-year-old bomber, converted to Christianity in 2015 and in 2017 lived with Christian volunteers Malcolm and Elizabeth Hitchcott, who attended St Philemon’s Church in Toxteth.

The Rev Brian Elfick said Christian converts at St Philemon’s have felt “fearful of coming to church” since the bombing on November 14, with one former asylum seeker receiving a death threat.

“The bombing will have affected our church in a number of ways… those from the Middle East feel much more distrusted and unwelcome,” Mr Elfick told the PA news agency.

“One member of our church family received a death threat… despite having residency.

“Because St Philemon’s has a number of asylum seekers, some on the fringes of church life are fearful of coming to church, but we expect that fear to pass.”

Mr Elfick said Al Swealmeen’s attendance at his church was not “habitual” but many of the congregation “will have met him at some point” through the Hitchcotts, who attended St Philemon’s between 2017 and 2019.

Al Swealmeen reportedly arrived in the UK from the Middle East in 2014 and had an application for asylum rejected the following year, but had a fresh appeal ongoing at the time of his death.

The Home Office is reportedly concerned at the role of the Church of England in converting refugees and Mr Elfick said his church is aware some people fraudulently claim conversion in order to gain asylum.

“We recognise our limits, we cannot look into another person’s heart,” he said.

“We do not facilitate any ‘gaming of the system’ – we are about discipling people, not coaching them through a process.”

Many of St Philemon’s members have converted from other religions, and the church regularly holds services and bible studies translated in Farsi and Sorani.

“We are delighted to have asylum seekers and ex-asylum seekers as members of our church family and we seek to love them as we would anyone else,” Mr Elfick said.

“We are conscious that those who gain asylum often need help in building a new life here and we seek to help them in practical ways to become rooted in their new community.

“St Philemon’s often writes letters of support for church members for any number of reasons, such as school applications, and so does the same for asylum applications.”

A spokesman for Liverpool Cathedral confirmed that the bomber had been baptised in 2015 and confirmed there in 2017, but lost contact with the cathedral the following year.

Bishop Cyril Ashton said he had conducted the confirmation of Al Swealmeen and that the Christian convert “would have been thoroughly prepared with an understanding of the Christian faith”.

Al Swealmeen detonated a homemade bomb outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital just before 11am on November 14, killing himself and injuring taxi driver David Perry.

The Charity Commission has launched a new inquiry into a south London church which was found to be selling a coronavirus “plague protection kit”.

Bishop Climate Wiseman, head of the Kingdom Church in Camberwell, claimed earlier this year that the £91 small bottle of oil and piece of red yarn would protect people against Covid-19.

Media reports about his claims led to an investigation by the charity watchdog in April, resulting in the link to buy the kits being removed.

But the commission has now launched a new inquiry into the church, which is registered as a charity, over concerns about its management and finances.

The commission said it had examined the charity’s records, and was “concerned” about the accuracy of the information provided with regard to its income and expenditure.

The new probe, which was launched on August 7, will examine the charity trustees’ compliance with their legal duties around its administration, governance and management.

This will include an examination of its relationship with a connected organisation called Bishop Climate Ministries, which the charity claimed was responsible for the sale of the “plague protection kits”, the commission said.

Helen Earner, director of regulatory services at the Charity Commission, said: “Charities should be organisations that people can trust. Many will have been concerned by allegations about this charity’s activities in relation to Covid-19, and so it is right that we, and others, have intervened.

“Our own examination into The Kingdom Church GB has identified further concerns that require investigation, which is why we have now opened an official inquiry.”

In a blog post earlier this year, Bishop Wiseman claimed his concoction of cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet yarn acts as “an invisible barrier to the powers of darkness”.

He wrote: “It is by faith that you can be saved from the coronavirus pandemic by covering yourself with the divine plague protection oil and wearing the scarlet yarn on your body.

“That is why I want to encourage you, if you haven’t done so already, to get your divine plague protection kit today!”

He told the PA news agency in April that the church had sold more than 1,000 of the kits.

“This is based on the Bible – I’m a Christian and there is a way that the Bible says to protect us from plagues,” he said.

He previously insisted that the church was not selling the kits, and that the price tag was just to cover the cost of the ingredients, yarn and postage and packaging.

Bishop Wiseman said at the time that his church was not telling people to ignore the Government’s advice.

The Charity Commission said it would continue to work with Southwark Council Trading Standards’ investigation into the sale of the kits.

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.

Church leaders in Jerusalem shut the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Sunday in protest at a new Israeli tax policy and a proposed land expropriation law which they called an unprecedented attack on Christians in the Holy Land.

Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian church leaders said the holy site, a popular stop for pilgrims and where many Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried, would remain closed until further notice.

After the protest move, an Israeli cabinet committee delayed by a week its scheduled consideration on Sunday of a bill that would allow the state to expropriate land in Jerusalem sold by churches to private real estate firms in recent years.

The stated aim of the bill is to protect homeowners against the possibility that private companies will not extend their leases of land on which their houses or apartments stand.

The churches are major property owners in the city. They say such a law would make it harder for them to find buyers for church-owned land – sales that help to cover operating costs of their religious institutions.

“This abhorrent bill … if approved, would make the expropriation of the lands of churches possible,” said the statement by Theophilos III, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Francesco Patton, the Custos of the Holy Land, and Nourhan Manougian, the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem.

Rachel Azaria, the lawmaker who sponsored the legislation, said in a statement she agreed to delay the committee’s discussion by a week so that “we could work with the churches” to try to resolve the dispute.

The churches’ protest was also aimed at the recent cancellation by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality of a tax exemption it has granted to church-owned commercial properties in the city.

“This reminds us all of laws of a similar nature which were enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe,” the church leaders said.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said on Twitter it was illogical to expect that church-owned commercial property, including hotels and retail businesses, would continue to enjoy tax-exempt status.

“Let me make it clear: we are not talking about houses of worship, who will still be exempt from property tax, according to law,” he wrote.

Outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, pilgrims voiced their disappointment at finding its doors shut.

“I am very upset. It’s my first time here and I made a big effort to get here and now I find it closed,” said Marine Domenech from Lille, France.

Pope Francis on Saturday criticised the naming of the U.S. military’s biggest non-nuclear explosive as “the Mother of All Bombs”, saying the word “mother” should not be used in reference to a deadly weapon.

The U.S. Air Force dropped such a bomb, officially designated as the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) on suspected Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan last month. The nickname was widely used in briefings and reporting on the attack.

“I was ashamed when I heard the name,” Pope Francis told an audience of students on Saturday. “A mother gives life and this one gives death, and we call this device a mother. What is happening?”

Pope Francis is set to meet U.S. President Donald Trump on May 24 in a potentially awkward encounter given their opposing positions on immigration, refugees and climate change.

The bells have rung out after two years of silence in the Mar Korkeis church in the town of Bashiqa, some 15 km (10 miles) north of Mosul, Islamic State’s last major city stronghold in Iraq.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters retook the town on Nov. 7, ending two years of rule by the hardline Sunni group which persecuted Christians and other minorities in the Nineveh plains, one of the world’s oldest centres of Christianity.

Women trilled to celebrate the moment when a new crucifix was erected on the church, replacing one that was broken by the Islamic State militants.

The town is largely empty as the Peshmerga have not finished clearing explosives and mines left behind by the insurgents in their fight against U.S.-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces who launched an offensive on Mosul on Oct. 17.

“We want people to be patient and not to return here until we completely clear the area, as we want to ensure their safety,” said Peshmerga Brigadier General Mahram Yasin.

After seizing the Nineveh plains in 2014, Islamic State issued an ultimatum to Christians: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword. Most abandoned their homes and fled to the nearby autonomous Kurdish region.

The priest at the Mar Korkeis church, Father Afram, said he would prefer Bashiqa to remain under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and not revert to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad, about 400 km (250 miles) to the south.

“Of course we would prefer to be part of the KRG, because of our proximity to the area and because, for the past 13 years, the regional government has been looking after us,” he said.

“Nobody from Baghdad came here to say hello, at all,” since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, he said.

Christianity in northern Iraq dates back to the first century AD.

The number of Christians has fallen sharply during the violence which followed the 2003 toppling of Hussein, and Islamic State’s takeover of Mosul two years ago saw the city purged of Christians for the first time in two millennia.

From a Mosul mosque in 2014 Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a “caliphate” spanning parts of Iraq and Syria. The recapture of Mosul would mark the effective defeat of the group in Iraq.

Pope Francis said on Sunday that Christians and the Roman Catholic Church should seek forgiveness from homosexuals for the way they had treated them.

Speaking to reporters aboard the plane taking him back to Rome from Armenia, he also said the Church should ask forgiveness for the way it has treated women, for turning a blind eye to child labour and for “blessing so many weapons” in the past.

In the hour-long freewheeling conversation that has become a trademark of his international travels, Francis was asked if he agreed with recent comments by a German Roman Catholic cardinal that the Church should apologise to gays.

Francis looked sad when the reporter asked if an apology was made more urgent by the killing of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida this month.

He recalled Church teachings that homosexuals “should not be discriminated against. They should be respected, accompanied pastorally.”

He added: “I think that the Church not only should apologise … to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by (being forced to) work. It must apologise for having blessed so many weapons.”

The Church teaches that homosexual tendencies are not sinful but homosexual acts are, and that homosexuals should try to be chaste.

Francis repeated a slightly modified version of the now-famous “Who am I to judge?” comment he made about gays on the first foreign trip after his election in 2013.

“The questions is: if a person who has that condition, who has good will, and who looks for God, who are we to judge?”

FORGIVENESS, NOT JUST APOLOGY

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said that the pope, by saying “has that condition”, did not imply a medical condition but “a person in that situation”. In Italian, the word “condition” can also mean “situation”.

“We Christians have to apologise for so many things, not just for this (treatment of gays), but we must ask for forgiveness, not just apologise! Forgiveness! Lord, it is a word we forget so often!” he said.

Francis has been hailed by many in the gay community for being the most merciful pope towards them in recent history and conservative Catholics have criticised him for making comments they say are ambiguous about sexual morality.

He told reporters on the plane “there are traditions in some countries, some cultures, that have a different mentality about this question (homosexuals)” and there are “some (gay) demonstrations that are too offensive for some”.

But he suggested that those were not grounds for discrimination or marginalisation of gays.

The pope did not elaborate on what he meant by seeking forgiveness for the Church “having blessed so many weapons”, but it appeared to be a reference to some Churchmen who actively backed wars in the past.

In other parts of the conversation, Francis said he hoped the European Union would be able to give itself another form after the United Kingdom’s decision to leave.

“There is something that is not working in that bulky union, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water, let’s try to jump-start things, to re-create,” he said.

He also denied reports that former Pope Benedict, who resigned in 2013, was still exercising influence inside the Vatican.

“There is only one pope,” he said. He praised Benedict, 89, for “protecting me, having my back, with his prayers”.

Francis said he had heard that when some Church officials had gone to Benedict to complain that Francis was too liberal, Benedict “sent them packing”.

Pope Francis issues one of the most eagerly awaited documents of his pontificate on Friday, a treatise on marriage and the family following  two gatherings of Catholic bishops that exposed divisions in the Church.

There is keen anticipation on what the 260-page document “Amoris Laetitia,” (The Joy of Love), will say about the full re-integration into the Church of Catholics who divorce and remarry in civil ceremonies.

Under current Church teaching they cannot receive communion unless they abstain from sex with their new partner, because their first marriage is still valid in the eyes of the Church and they are seen to be living in an adulterous state of sin.

The only way such Catholics can remarry is if they receive an annulment, a ruling that their first marriage never existed in the first place because of the lack of certain pre-requisites such as psychological maturity or free will.

Francis, who has made numerous calls for a more merciful Church, has changed procedures to make obtaining annulments less cumbersome and expensive.

Following an unprecedented poll of Catholics around the world, bishops held two summits, known as synods, at the Vatican in October 2014 and October 2015 to discuss family issues, such as why fewer Catholics are getting married and more are getting divorced.

The bishops’ final document at the second synod spoke of a so-called “internal forum” in which a priest or a bishop may work with a Catholic who has divorced and remarried to decide jointly, privately and on a case-by-case basis if he or she can be fully re-integrated and receive communion.

While progressives such as Cardinal Walter Kasper of Germany, who is one of Francis’ favourite theologians, favour this approach, it is opposed by conservatives, who say it would undermine the principle of the indissolubility of marriage that Jesus established.

At the end of the synod last year, Francis excoriated immovable Church leaders who he said “bury their heads in the sand” and hide behind rigid doctrine while families suffer.

The papal document, formally known as a Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, is also expected to call for better programmes for marriage preparation and echo the synod’s stand that homosexual unions cannot be equated with heterosexual marriage.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Andrew Hay) – Reuters

In a bid to bring people back into the fold of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis has given priests the right to formally forgive women who have had abortions and seek absolution during the upcoming Holy Year.

The move is aimed to bring people back into the fold and to show a Church that is willing to grapple with issues that are affecting women today.

The right to absolution was provided in a letter which was published by the Vatican on Tuesday and Pope Francis reflected on the “moral ordeal” that many women bear in the decision as to whether they will terminate their pregnancy.

Previous church teaching has been clear on this matter that any woman undertaking an abortion was conducting a grave sin against the grace and favour of God and this would lead to an automatic excommunication by the Church. This position, it seems, has been altered though the communication from Pope Francis is clear that forgiveness means turning to the Church.