Ann Widdecombe joins appeal for churches to commemorate eight million lives lost since 1967

Aid to the Church in Need accuses the international community of failing to take the situation seriously enough

Scholars and clerics fear being punished for speaking out over Amoris Laetitia

Last Saturday hundreds of thousands of Poles headed towards the border. This was not a mass holiday getaway, but a different kind of ritual – one not seen for decades. At around 2pm, they gathered in 320 churches and 4,000 “prayer zones” along the 2,000-mile frontier. They fished rosary beads out of their pockets and

✣ Tories to introduce ‘opt-out’ organ donation What happened? The Government will introduce “presumed consent” for organ donation in England, Theresa May announced at the Tory conference last week. May said the government was “shifting the balance … in favour of organ donation”, meaning that authorities will automatically assume people are organ donors unless they have

✣ Highlights from the week online A composer retires from the liturgy wars In Standpoint magazine, the composer James MacMillan recalled that liturgical disputes had afflicted the planning for the papal visit. “There were countless battles behind the scenes,” MacMillan wrote, about the public liturgies. “For example, the bishops asked me to write a new

A convent in Norfolk will take centre stage in a reality television series about “party girls” swapping sex, parties and alcohol for religious life. The four-part series, to be aired on Channel 5 on Thursdays, features five girls who were told they would go on a “spiritual journey” but were horrified to discover they had

A priest in west London has asked his parishioners to pray the rosary for the re-routing of a “cycle superhighway” expected to pass in front of his church. Fr Michael Dunne of Our Lady of Grace and St Edward, Chiswick, said the proposed cycle path, called CS9, would do the parish “more harm” than “the

Bishop Mark O’Toole of Plymouth has said that bishops and priests must pray every day to be rid of cynicism. The bishop said it was a “particular fault” of clergy and was a “manifestation of a practical form of atheism”, before suggesting that priests “ask the Holy Spirit to rid us of it daily.” Bishop

Hundreds of thousands of Poles gathered to pray the rosary along their country’s border on Saturday. The “Rosary to the Borders” event was organised by lay Catholics but had official support too, with 320 churches from 22 dioceses taking part. Poles gathered in 4,000 locations, from the Baltic coastline in the north to the mountains

Evil has found “new, effective and pervasive ways” to flourish on the internet, Pope Francis has said. The Pope said the spread of “extreme pornography” meant that society may no longer be capable of protecting children. He also listed several “extremely troubling things” found on the “dark side” of the web, including the rise in

Cardinal Charles Bo of Yangon (Rangoon) has defended Burma’s leader in the face of global criticism over the reported ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority. Cardinal Bo said Aung San Suu Kyi, state counsellor, still represented the best hope that Burma (Myanmar) would emerge from a military dictatorship into a democracy. He suggested that she