Caroline Wyatt, the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent, is to step down as a reporter after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) late last year.
Wyatt said she was “tremendously sad” to be leaving her reporting job “at a time when understanding religion has rarely been more important”. She will continue to present radio programmes for the BBC, beginning from this autumn.
In a statement, Wyatt said: “I have been utterly overwhelmed by the support I’ve had from my colleagues, friends and family in recent days and months, and am so grateful for the support the BBC is giving me while I recover from my current relapse.”
Wyatt had lived with MS for 25 years before last year’s diagnosis, which she said “came as a relief as it enables me to have treatment and to do all I can to manage it.”
Wyatt joined the BBC in 1991, and worked as defence correspondent and as a foreign correspondent in many countries before becoming religious affairs correspondent in 2014.
Last year, Wyatt said journalists needed to be “braver in how we think through and apply the religious dimension, and I don’t just say that only because I’m now covering religious affairs”.
She added: “Globalisation has meant that there is a whole world out there to whom religion is very important and for whom secularism or the idea of separation between religion and state is not necessarily something people believe in or want. We need to start getting our minds in the West around how other people think.”
Wyatt was born in Australia but educated at a Catholic school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart School, in Surrey.
She has reported regularly for the BBC including as a war reporter in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wyatt said it had been a “privilege” to cover the leaderships of Pope Francis and of Justin Welby, and “to meet the many Muslims in the UK and elsewhere who are making clear that the theology and ideology of the so-called Islamic State does not represent the mainstream of their faith”. She said she was “really looking forward to starting a new chapter as a presenter for BBC radio. She also planned “to raise both awareness and money for more research into MS.”
Catholic teenager ‘tied to a cross in workplace bullying’
A Catholic teenager was tied to a wooden cross by work colleagues in a mock crucifixion that was part of a “sustained course of bullying”, a jury at York Crown Court was told.
Four men face charges of religiously aggravated assault, which they deny.
As well as being tied to the cross, the boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had crosses and phallic symbols drawn on his face and body, the court heard.
The boy started as an apprenticeship at a shop-fitting company in Selby, North Yorkshire, in July 2014. He subsequently worked alongside the four defendants: company manager Andrew Addison, Joseph Rose, Christopher Jackson and Alex Puchir. Three of the defendants accepted their involvement but claimed it was “banter” and was not motivated by hostility to the boy’s faith, the court heard. Mr Addison had refused to comment on the incidents to police.
Mr Addison told the court: “It was never against his will. People get tied up all the time on building sites. There was no bullying. It was the lads just playing pranks on each other.”
He claimed the apprentice had not objected to the mock crucifixion.
The trial continues.
Calligrapher made papal knight
Pope Francis has conferred a papal knighthood on one of the world’s leading calligraphers.
Donald Jackson, artistic director and principal illuminator of the handwritten St John’s Bible, was inducted into the Order of St Gregory the Great by Cardinal Vincent Nichols at Westminster Cathedral. He was nominated for the award by Bishop Donald Kettler of St Cloud, Minnesota, who said his St John’s Bible had “touched the lives of … millions around the world”.
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