Melanie McDonagh

It is not, it’s fair to say, a universal view among Catholic priests that MPs who vote the wrong way on assisted dying and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth should be punished by excluding them from communion. But so it has turned out with Chris Coghlan, the Lib Dem MP for Dorking and Horley. He voted for assisted suicide and didn’t vote at all on the Antoniazzi amendment allowing women to abort up to birth. Now he’s complaining that his parish priest is intent on denying him communion at mass. Or as he put it on X: My Catholic Priest publicly announced at every mass he was denying me Holy Communion following the assisted dying vote. Children who are friends of my children were there. This followed a direct threat in writing to do this four days before the vote.

If yours is a sentimental bent, you’ll have been terrifically moved by the spectacle of Jess Phillips MP giving Kim Leadbeater a big hug after the Assisted Dying Bill was passed. Ms Leadbeater has a tendency to look agonised at the best of times. When MPs paid tribute to her in the course of the debate for her compassion, she looked as if she was on the verge of bursting into tears. Now, it’ll be tears of joy – at least for her.

Does anyone know what’s actually happening in Ballymena, in Northern Ireland? If you’ve just been following the news on the BBC, it’s actually quite hard to work out what has led to the violence which has injured at least 32 police officers. The initial news bulletins told us that there rioting youths were protesting about a sexual attack on a girl and that two teenage boys were in custody facing charges. My first thought – reverting to the Troubles – was that there was a sectarian element to the whole thing. But we also learned that the police condemned the riots as racist thuggery; so, not sectarianism, it seems, but something to do with race. A few further details came to light yesterday. We found out that the rioters were still rioting.

In theory, we’ve got the first American Pope, Robert Prevost. Born and raised in Chicago, university educated in Philadelphia. Parents French/Italian and Spanish – hence his command of four languages. Did Leo XIV so much as mention the US during his first speech from the balcony? He did not. Maybe conscious that being an American cuts less ice in the church than being Latin American, he mentioned the Peruvian pilgrims in St Peter’s Square and the Peruvian church (where he ministered as a bishop) during his address, and spoke to them in Spanish. But zilch about his country of origin, nada in the English language. It would have been fascinating to hear American-inflected English from that balcony. But we didn’t. This is significant.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission's clarification of the Supreme Court ruling on what is a woman is not as clear as it looks. It says that trans people may not use single-sex spaces – notably lavatories – but must not be left without spaces to use. So, the hunt is on in hospitals, restaurants, sports arenas for space that can be turned into gender neutral lavatories. Perhaps disabled loos can be turned into gender neutral ones, on the basis they're intended for one person, so long as wheelchair users can jump the queue. I don't think any of us have a problem with individual lockable lavatories; it's the ones with shared sink space and mirrors that seem problematic, and obviously those horrible changing areas without cubicles are another matter.

The funeral of Pope Francis is perhaps his last chance to set his mark on the papacy. The ever so slightly pared down ceremony today is symbolic of the man, as were so many of his other ways of being pope. It will be difficult for Francis’s successor to return to the more ornate habits of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, let alone the monarchical ways of earlier popes. In some ways this is a shame – those traditions weren’t about the individual, but about the office, though they may jar with modern sensibilities. The function of the pope is not to be liked as widely as possible One of the problems about Francis, in fact, was the extent to which he was successful as a personality pope.

It is an unfortunate truth that the picturesque Maundy Thursday service celebrated today in Durham, in which the King distributes Maundy money to deserving individuals, is a watered down version of the original. It started out in abbeys and churches when clerics would wash each others’ feet in imitation of Christ washing the feet of the Apostles before the Last Supper. Bad King John adopted the tradition in 1210 by washing the feet of poor men and it was maintained by monarchs until about the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – James II was the last to do it properly – until it was finally replaced with the hygienic but not very moving ceremony of distributing money by George II.