A former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II is to be received into the Catholic Church.

Bishop Gavin Ashenden of the Christian Episcopal Church will become a Catholic Dec. 22 in Shrewsbury cathedral. He said he had reached the conclusion that only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches “have the capacity to defend the faith” from the influence of secularism.

A Dec. 17 statement from the Diocese of Shrewsbury said Ashenden’s Anglican orders will be suspended and he will become a lay Catholic theologian.

In a Dec. 17 statement sent by email to Catholic News Service, the bishop said, “The claims and expression of the Catholic faith are the most profound and potent expression of apostolic and patristic belief” and that he now accepted the primacy of the pope.

Ashenden said he was grateful to Catholic Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and the Catholics of his diocese for the opportunity to “be reconciled to the church that gave birth to my earlier (Anglican) tradition.”

“I am especially grateful for the example and the prayers of St. John Henry Newman,” he said.

“He did his best to remain a faithful Anglican and renew his mother church with the vigor and integrity of the Catholic tradition,” he said. “Now, as then, however, his experience informs ours that the Church of England is inclined to be rooted in secularized culture rather than the integrity and insight of biblical, apostolic and patristic values.”

In a Dec. 17 statement, Davies said it was “very humbling to be able to receive a bishop of the Anglican tradition into full communion in the year of canonization of St. John Henry Newman.”

The Islamic State group in Nigeria released a video on December 27 claiming to show the killing of 11 Christian men. The Dec. 26 video shows masked militants be-heading 10 blindfolded captives, and shooting an eleventh. The west African province of Islamic State, which broke off from Boko Haram in 2016, said the killings were in vengeance for the October deaths of Islamic State’s caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and of its spokesman, Abul-Hasan al-Mujahir, Reuters reported. Another video claimed the captives were taken in recent weeks from the Maiduguri area in Borno state.

According to the latest report of the Observatory on Intolerance and discrimination Against Christians in Europe, there have been in the last year about 500 cases of anti-Christian discrimination on European soil.

Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.

In Europe, the persecution might be subtle or take place in the form of attacks on  sites of worship. The situation in the world is different. This is the reason why the exiting European Commission looked attentively at the religious persecutions and established the office of the EU Special Envoy for Religious Freedom outside  the European Union.

EU announced the establish-ment of the office on the very day Pope Francis was given the Charlemagne Prize in the Vatican.

Jan Figel was chosen as the EU special envoy for religious freedom. In that capacity, Figel was able to carry out some remarkable successes, as the liberation of Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death. The woman won her final appeal, but she was in danger in her country. It was thanks to Jan Figel that she and her family were able to leave Pakistan and find a haven in Canada.

A new analysis from the Pew Research Centre shows that many Catholic priests are holding to Pope Francis’ advice to keep their homilies on the shorter side, especially compared to Protestant denominations.

An analysis of nearly 50,000 sermons, given across a variety of Christian denominations during the months of April and May this year, found that the median length of a sermon was 37 minutes, but for Catholic priests, the average length was just 14 minutes. Pew found that historically black Protestant sermons had the longest median length of 54 minutes, while mainline Protestant sermons were an average of 25 minutes long, with evangelical churches falling in between at 39 minute per sermon.

The analysis was published on Dec. 16, and was titled “The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons.”

While the terms “homily” and “sermon” are often used interchangeably, they are actually different in nature. A “homily” refers to an explanation or further commentary of scripture during a Mass. A sermon is usually defined as a talk on a religious or moral subject, especially one given by a religious leader during a liturgy.

For the purposes of this study, Catholic homilies were counted as “sermons.”

Pew took data from 6,431 different church websites to create the analysis. The churches all posted all or part of their religious services online. For this research, “online sermon” was defined as “a portion of a religious service posted to a church website that contains a commentary from the pulpit but sometimes may include other parts of the service as well.” The analysis found that while sermons at historically-black and evangelical churches typically contained roughly the same number of words, the sermons at the black churches were longer in length. The study’s authors suggested that this was due to the inclusion of “musical interludes, pauses between sentences or call and response with people in the pews.”

In analyzing the content of the sermons, Pew found that 98% of Catholic homilies included the terms “God” and “Jesus.” The only word that included in 100% of the Catholic sermons examined was “say.”

After accepting the resignation of 92-year-old Cardinal Angelo Sodano as dean of the College of Cardinals, Pope Francis changed the norms of the office so that the dean would be elected to a five-year term renewable only once.

Cardinal Sodano, the former Vatican secretary of state, was elected dean in April 2005 after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean under St. John Paul II, was elected Pope Benedict XVI.

In his apostolic letter issued “motuproprio” (on his own accord), Pope Francis said that given the size of the College of Cardinals and the workload being dean entails, he decided it was best for the office to have a defined term of service. The letter was released by the Vatican Dec. 21 after Cardinal Sodano performed his last official task as dean by offering Pope Francis Christmas greetings on behalf of the cardinals and top officials of the Roman Curia.

Pope Francis used the occasion to express “my gratitude, including in the name of the members of the College of Cardinals, for the precious and punctual service he (Cardinal Sodano) has offered as dean for many years with availability, dedication, efficiency and a great ability to organize and coordinate.”

The dean is charged with officially informing the other cardinals and heads of state that a pope has died; he establishes the date the cardinals will begin their “general congregations” to discuss the current status and needs of the church; and he presides over those meetings before the cardinals enter the conclave to elect a new pope.

If the dean is under the age of 80 and therefore eligible to enter the conclave, he issues the oath of secrecy to the cardinals and determines whether the college is ready to begin the election. He also is the one who asks the person elected if he accepts and what name he wishes to use.

Cardinal Sodano was already over 80 when Pope Benedict resigned, so he was not in the conclave that elected Pope Francis. Those duties were assumed by the sub-dean, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re.There are these damaging allegations against the cardinal who for 16 years served as Vatican secretary of state. The two most serious cases involve his dealings with Father Maciel and his blocking of an investigation into Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, the late archbishop of Vienna, who was found guilty of sexually abusing children in 1998.

The ongoing reform of the Roman Curia is a necessary part of the Catholic Church’s fidelity to its mission to proclaim the Gospel, recognizing that very few countries today can be described as “Christian” and that new ways of evangelizing are necessary, Pope Francis said.

But attempts to meet the new challenges are threatened by “the temptation of assume an attitude of rigidity,” the pope said Dec. 21 during his traditional pre-Christmas meeting with cardinals and top officials of Vatican offices. “Rigidity, which is born of the fear of change, ends up erecting fences and obstacles on the terrain of the common good, turning it into a minefield of incomprehension and of hatred,” the pope said. “And today this temptation of rigidity has become very evident.”

“Christendom no longer exists,” he said. “Today we are not the only ones who produce culture, nor are we the first or the most listened to.”

On a nightly basis this month – and on weekend afternoons – “the word” is becoming flesh in lower Manhattan with a one-man performance of the “The Gospel of John” at the Sheen Centre for Thought and Culture.

Longtime Broadway actor Ken Jennings has memorized the entirety of his favourite Gospel – which he first began to commit to memory as a personal prayer – and at age 72, is thrilling audiences with his new dramatic staging of it. In an interview with Crux, Jennings said that it took him somewhere between two to three years to memorize the full text, which he turned to when he was going through a rough period in his personal life.

Throughout the performance, he often carries a small pocket-sized Bible around the stage with him – a Bible that dates back to when he was a part of the original Broadway cast of Sweeney Todd in the 1970s.