Religion News Australia

June 27 – July 4, 2021

Religion news stories from Australia

(Research: Greg Spearritt)

 

ABUSE

Indigenous survivors add voice to concerns over National Redress Scheme following critical review b
July 2 – After decades of living with trauma from the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Catholic institutions, Nyul Nyul man David Francis received compensation earlier this year through the National Redress Scheme.

Pell’s $3m legal bill to clear his name (The Australian)
July 3 – Cardinal Pell confirms huge bill yet to be fully paid after supporters helped fund the elite legal team that helped end his 404-day incarceration.

EDUCATION

Private schools reap hundreds of millions of dollars in jobkeeper funding (The Guardian, Australia)
June 29 – The private school sector in Australia has likely reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in extra government funding from jobkeeper and other schemes designed to support not-for-profits during the Covid-19 crisis, despite few recording any significant impact on their revenues.

INTERNATIONAL STORIES
Abuse

Pope Francis to meet Indigenous survivors of Canadian schools abuses (The Guardian, Australia)
July 1 – Pope Francis has agreed to meet Indigenous survivors of Canada’s notorious residential schools in December, amid calls for a papal apology for the Catholic church’s role in the abuse and deaths of thousands of children.

Catholic Church

Behind the Vatican’s London real estate scandal and charges faced by senior officials  (ABC News)
July 4 – The Vatican has set the trial date for 10 people, including Cardinal Angelo Becciu, on charges related to the Holy See’s 350 million euro investment in a luxury London real estate venture.

Islam

‘We won’t be silent!’: Women clash with police in Istanbul over femicide (Sydney Morning Herald)
July 2 – Istanbul: Women marched in Istanbul and other cities to protest Turkey’s formal exit from a European treaty aimed at preventing violence against women, saying the move stripped them of critical protection at a time when femicides are on the rise.

Religious Violence

Islamic State schoolgirl ‘poses no danger and should return’ (Brisbane Times)
June 30 – Syria: Shamima Begum does not pose a danger to the British public and should be allowed to return, according to a retired US ambassador who helped free a Canadian woman from the same Syrian detention camp where the former schoolgirl from east London is held.

Fashion brands face inquiry over suspected links to Uighur slave labour (The Age, Melbourne)
July 3 – France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into four leading fashion retailers over suspicions that they benefited from and concealed crimes against humanity by using forced labour by Uighurs in China.

How women of Isis in Syrian camps are marrying their way to freedom (The Guardian, Australia)
July 3 – Hundreds of foreign women with links to Islamic State in Syria’s sprawling al-Hawl detention camp have “married” men they met online and several hundred have been smuggled out of the facility using cash bribes gifted by their new husbands.

Other

America’s evangelical church is being torn apart by culture wars (The Guardian, Australia)
June 29 – (Opinion: Barry Hankins) Is the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest and arguably most powerful Protestant denomination in the United States – being held together by culture wars instead of Biblical teaching?

ISLAM

Police missed opportunities amid ‘ISIS-inspired’ attack (The Australian)
June 27 – Despite ‘deficient’ Victoria Police intelligence procedures, the terror attack by Hassan Khalif Shire Ali couldn’t be averted.

Half of Aussies say they’re ‘feminist’. For Muslim women, it can be more complicated  (ABC News)
July 1 – Maab doesn’t look like a typical ‘feminist’. Or at least, that’s how she’s been made to feel.

POLITICS

The B-team’s deeply cynical politics will generate more, not less, persecution of the religious (Brisbane Times)
July 3 – (Opinion: Malcolm Knox) Last time the country was locked down, the Morrison government put its religious freedom law, three years in the making, on hold.

RELIGION & SOCIETY

Why some Aboriginal people are too scared to get vaccinated (ABC News)
July 4 – Indigenous pastor Geoffrey Stokes and his paediatrician wife Christine Jeffries-Stokes are worried something sinister is deterring Aboriginal people in their community from getting vaccinated against COVID-19.