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The future of Iraq, peace in the Holy Land and Europe were among the main issues discussed by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales during their plenary assembly held in Cardiff, capital of Wales, from 17 to 20 November. The meeting opened with a prayer for and a commemoration of Margaret Hassan, the aid worker kidnapped and murdered in Iraq in recent days. This was the first episcopal assembly to be held in Wales, as the archbishop of Westminster and Catholic Primate, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, recalled: “the visit of the bishops is an important sign of the existing communion between English and Welsh Catholics who share the task of spreading the Gospel”. The European questions on the agenda – the referendum on the European Constitution, the new European Commission and EU enlargement were analysed by Stephen Wall, consultant of Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor and former aide of Premier Tony Blair. “Key areas for the development of the Union – said Wall will be relations with the USA, climate change and the difficult relation between poverty and development”. The plenary assembly also served to examine such issues as the formation of the laity, dialogue with Muslim communities within the dioceses and religious education in schools. As regards this latter point, the archbishop of Birmingham Peter Nichols emphasized that “religious education is increasingly being requested in British schools and the Minister for Education Charles Clarke is seeking ways of linking it with the churches and religious faiths. There is a tendency [in religious education] towards a living faith rather than towards religion as a neutral subject”. During the work of the assembly, Msgr. Tom Williams, auxiliary bishop of Liverpool, drew the bishops’ attention to the situation of Catholic chaplaincies in hospitals, which according to him “are under growing pressure and feel the need to bring a strong Catholic identity into their work”. In particular, after having examined the new law on the protection of personal information, the Data Protection Act, Williams discovered that “chaplains in hospitals have the right to know ‘the religious identity’ of patients”, but he added that “this type of information is kept confidential”. Various documents were approved by the bishops, including the third version of “The Gift of Scripture”, a doctrinal text on the Bible which the bishops decided, together with the Scottish Episcopal Conference, to send to the Holy See for final approval, and “A Place for Redemption”, prepared by the department for the Bishops’ Conference that deals with prisons headed by Monsignor Peter Smith. The bishops also discussed the organization of a national eucharistic congress, planned to be held in Birmingham in July 2005.
