New figures show an increase in the number of pupils taking Religious Studies at both GCSE and A level.
Entries to Religious Studies GCSE have jumped to their highest level since 2002.
The rise has come despite the subject’s exclusion from the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), a government measure of school performance.
It is compulsory for schools to offer Religious Education for pupils aged up to 16 but it is not compulsory for students to take a GCSE in it.
Three years ago the then Education Secretary Michael Gove, said Religious Education had been an “unintended casualty” of his reforms. He said he would try to work with churches and other religious groups to raise standards in the subject.
This year the number of A level entries has also increased, with a rise of 6.8 per cent compared with 2015.
Short course GCSEs in Religious Studies, however, have continued to decline, from 254,698 in 2010 to 55,093 in 2015. The short course, which covers half the content of the full course, is only worth half a GCSE. Department for Education performance figures no longer take account of short courses; as a result, it seems, fewer schools are offering them. This has a disproportionate effect on Religious Studies, as almost two-thirds of short course GCSEs taken in England and Wales are in Religious Studies.
Rudolf Eliott Lockhart, chief executive of the Religious Education Council of England and Wales, said it was “fantastic” to see increasing numbers taking the full course GCSE, but added the “troubling” decline in short course entries “means that more than 100,000 fewer young people have studied the subject at GCSE level this year than in 2010”.
The Vatican has taken a major step along the road to declaring an English aristocrat related to Princes William and Harry to be a saint.
A 20-year investigation into the life and works of Fr Ignatius Spencer has been approved by Vatican historians, it emerged this week.
The document, known as a positio, has now been passed to theologians of the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood.
If they decide there is “evidence of sanctity”, they will ask Pope Francis to declare the Victorian Passionist priest Venerable.
At that point, the Church will begin the search for two miracles needed first for his beatification and then his canonisation.
Fr John Kearns, the British Passionist provincial, described the development as a “step down the road” to sainthood.
He said: “The positio has been finished and finalised and has been submitted to Rome and has got through the historical commission and is now going to the theologians.
“We would invite people to pray that the sanctity of Fr Ignatius Spencer can eventually be recognised by the Church.”
Princes William and Harry are related to Eton-educated Fr Ignatius through their mother Diana, Princess of Wales. He was her great-great-great uncle and also a great uncle of Winston Churchill.
He was given the name George when he was born in Admiralty House in 1799, the youngest son of the 2nd Earl Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty. He grew up at the Spencer home at Althorp, Northamptonshire, where Diana was buried after she was killed in a car crash in August 1997.
As a child he would have met such people as Lord Nelson, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who were regular visitors to the family. But he turned his back on a life of immense wealth by converting to the Catholic faith – a move which horrified his contemporaries. He later joined the Passionist order, and was ordained priest under the name Fr Ignatius of St Paul.
He ministered among Irish migrants in the West Midlands and he also took advantage of the rail network being laid out to travel widely throughout Britain to preach missions. He died from a heart attack in 1864.
Church scholars say Fr Ignatius was about 150 years ahead of his time in his quest for Christian unity. He has been credited with “preparing the ground” for the ecumenical movement of northern Europe in the late 20th century.
Fr Kearns said: “He was always asking people to pray for Christian unity. The expression he used was ‘unity in the truth’.
“The mainstream thing [among Catholics] would have been ‘everybody convert to Catholicism’. He wasn’t against that and had done that himself, but he could see that something else was needed.”
In addition to his commitment to his faith Fr Ignatius retained a great love for cricket, which he described as “my mania”. He often organised matches among the servants of his household as a young man. Later, while serving as Dean of St Mary’s Seminary in Oscott, Birmingham, he taught students for the priesthood also how to play.
His body is entombed in the Church of St Anne and Blessed Dominic in St Helens, Merseyside.
Police are treating graffiti sprayed on the wall of a Catholic school in Glasgow as a hate crime.
St Aloysius’s College is Scotland’s only private Jesuit school, taking boys and girls aged three to 18. The graffiti, found on Sunday, read: “The famine’s over! It’s time to go home” – referring to the 19th-century migration of Irish Catholics.
A spokeswoman for Police Scotland said: “The incident is being treated as a hate crime and inquiries are ongoing.”
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