Madeleine Teahan

In the story of Pope Francis’s papacy, the same thread ran through the first and final chapters. On the evening of his election in 2013, he appeared on St Peter’s balcony dressed in plain white – shunning the red papal mozetta – delivering a simple ‘buonasera’ with a shy wave to the rapturous and adoring crowds. He was a pope among the people from beginning to end Just as he kept things simple then, he opted for a modest wood coffin today rather than the three-casket option made of cypress, lead and oak. Although popes are usually buried with a new mitre, which costs hundreds of pounds, Francis insisted his current mitre would do just fine. No frills. No fuss. He was, as Cardinal Battista Re said earlier, ‘a pope among the people’ from beginning to end.

We now know the names of the 156 schools across the country with crumbling reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) inside their buildings, resulting in partial or full closure for 104 of those listed. What struck me as I glanced down the list of schools is the frequency of the word ‘Saint’ which, more often than not, means that the school in question is Catholic. A quick count showed that 30 Catholic schools are listed in total — which amounts to about a fifth of schools affected. Given that only 9 per cent of state funded schools and academies in the UK are Catholic, that seems alarmingly high and begs the question: why? Well, the clearest answer is timing.

I’m starting to feel sorry for Miriam Cates. Every time she expresses an opinion, her words are either coarsely inflated beyond recognition or fiercely spat back at her.  Her latest remarks on children, some of which were made on a Daily Telegraph podcast and others in a speech at National Conservatism Conference on Monday, have already been branded many things from naïve to ‘chilling'. The Mirror ran a piece mockingly entitled ‘Tory fumes we are not having enough kids in rant at Marxist threat to children’s souls.’ Do women not deserve the option to fully be present in those early years?

A few weeks ago the Dutch parliament announced that euthanasia will be licensed for children between the ages of one and 12, for cases involving ‘such a serious illness or disorder that death is inevitable, and the death of these children is expected in the foreseeable future’. The coverage of this latest development was eerily muted, considering the enormity of what had just been communicated; namely, that a European liberal democracy had deemed it appropriate for seriously sick infants and primary school-aged children to receive lethal injections. How have liberal democracies become so enticed by the sinister notion that children should be eligible for euthanasia?