The number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in England and Wales has fallen for the third year in a row, according to new figures released this week.
The statistics, published by the National Office for Vocation, showed a total of 21 ordinations in 2021 for the 22 Catholic dioceses in England and Wales, as well as the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
In comparison, there were 35 ordinations in 2018, 32 in 2019, and 27 in 2020.
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An estimated 3.8 million adults in England and Wales identify as Catholic, while an autumn 2021 count found that 370,000 Catholics regularly attend Mass.
The number of ordinations in England and Wales has fluctuated considerably throughout the early 21st century, reaching a high of 44 in 2001 and a low of 15 in 2008.

The Church in Belgium has reported a sharp rise in the number of people asking for their names to be removed from baptismal registers. The Catholic Church in Belgium reported on a sharp rise in the number of people asking for their names to be removed from baptismal registers.
The Church’s latest annual report, published on Nov. 30, said there were 5,237 such requests in 2021, compared to 1,261 in 2020 and 1,800 in 2019.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark of his belonging to Christ.” While a person can lapse in the practice of the faith, or even renounce it altogether, it is impossible to reverse the effects of baptism.
Nevertheless, a rising move-ment in Europe promoting “deba-ptism” has encouraged Catholics to write to Church authorities asking to be removed from parish baptismal records. The movement is a consortium of several political and philosophical factions among European secularists.

A pioneering institute to investigate the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world has been launched in the United Kingdom.
The Lindisfarne Centre for the Study of Christian Persecution is the brainchild of Dr. Martin Par-sons, a former aid worker to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served in those two countries both under the Taliban and after the Taliban had been evicted from power.
The first of its kind, the center aims to generate research focused on countries like Nigeria, where Christians are currently being subjected to crimes against huma-nity and are at risk of genocide.
“The Lindisfarne Centre aims not just to describe what is ha-ppening but also to explain why it is happening, as well as seeking to predict where it is likely to spread to,” Dr. Parsons, a world-renowned expert on Islam and the persecution of Christians, told Church Militant.
“It is quite extraordinary that respected major human rights organizations and even the United Nations will simply ignore the persecution of Christians – pre-ferring to focus on other minority groups,” Parsons, who has a doct-orate in Islamic studies, explain-ed.
“It is urgent that the perse-cution of Christians, particularly in the Islamic world, is put back on the agenda of international bodies, governments and NGOs,” he emphasized.
“We are seeking to produce research that is both academically valid and accessible but without being merely anecdotal. We want to produce something that is sufficiently credible to be acce-pted as evidence in court cases involving persecuted Christians,” Parsons added.

In Nigeria, you can be put to death under the law for the “cri-me” of blasphemy. Sufi musici-an Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, current-ly imprisoned for blasphemy, has petitioned the Nigerian Supreme Court to put an end to his criminal case, which centres on his sharing religious lyrics on the popular messaging platform WhatsApp. For exerci-sing his fundamental rights to free expression and reli-gious freedom, Yahaya’s life is on the line. This potentially land-mark case could abolish once and for all Northern Nigeria’s Sharia blasphemy law — an urgently needed step for the peaceful co-existence of faiths in the country.
In March 2020 Yahaya shared song lyrics via WhatsApp that others viewed as insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. His house was burned to the ground by a mob, and he was promptly arrest-ed and charged with blasphemy under the Sharia Penal Code of Kano State. Without legal repre-sentation, he was tried, convict-ed and sentenced to death by hanging by a local Sharia judge.
Nobody should be punished, much less killed, for their religi-ous ideas. Any person of faith or no faith at all can be sanctioned, and even killed, as a result of a blasphemy accusation. In a country of over 200 million, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims, everyone stands to lose under these laws. Their abolishment would dramatically improve the prospects for human rights in Nigeria.

Pope Francis enthusiastically greeted Italian actor and come-dian Roberto Benigni at the Va-tican on Wednesday morning.
Benigni, best known for his Oscar-winning film “Life is Beautiful,” met privately with the pope to tell him about his latest project, a new show about St. Francis of Assisi.
The comic, who recited a line from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy from memory on the Oscars stage in 1999, now serves as the host of the Italian program based on St. Francis’ poem “The Canticle of the Sun.”
The show, “Francesco Il Cantico,” is currently streaming on Paramount Plus in Italy. Benigni also gave the pope a copy of the program on DVD, accor-ding to Reuters.
Pope Francis meeting with Roberto Benigni, Dec. 7, 2022. Vatican Media.
Greeting the pope with a hug, Benigni joked that the pontiff was “emanating light.”
Pope Francis told him not to exaggerate, to which the actor replied: “I have to exaggerate, I’m happy to be here.”

Pope Francis has firmly slammed the door on admitting women to holy orders on the grounds that women’s ordination constitutes a “theological problem” and a violation of the “Petrine principle.”
In an interview published Monday with left-wing Jesuit magazine America, the pontiff categorically stated that a woman “cannot enter ordained ministry … because the Petrine principle has no place for that.”
The pope was responding to a question that asked what he “would say to a woman who is already serving in the life of the Church but who still feels called to be a priest,” especially since “many women feel pain because they cannot be ordained priests.”
Francis stressed that focusing exclusively on “the ministerial dimension of the life of the Church” or the “Petrine principle” of the “ordained ministry” would be to “amputate the being of the Church.”
Instead, the “Marian principle, which is the principle of femininity in the Church, of the woman in the Church, where the Church sees a mirror of Herself because She is a woman and a spouse,” was “still more important” but sadly ignored, the pope explained.
“The ministerial dimension, we can say, is that of the Petrine Church. I am using a category of theologians,” Francis reiterated. “A church with only the Petrine principle would be a church that one would think is reduced to its ministerial dimension, nothing else.” Francis said the Church had failed “to develop a theology of woman that reflects” the “Marian principle, which is that of the spousal Church” and had neglected to explain through catechesis how a woman “looks more like the Church, which is mother and spouse.”