England: too many young people in prison “Too many young people are being unjustly detained in prison”, says Danny Curtin, national President of the movement of young Christian workers in Britain, commenting to SIR Europe on the report recently published by the charity Barnardo’s, according to which over a third of children aged between 12 and 14 sentenced by the courts are being wrongly imprisoned in England and Wales, breaking the government guidelines. The guidelines that ought to be followed by the courts clearly state, on the contrary, that children aged 14 and under should not be locked up unless they have committed a grave offence and are deemed to be persistent offenders. According to the charity, this situation is “a tragedy” and a “waste of public money”: in the space of a year it is calculated that 170 children in England and Wales will unjustly end up in prison cells, whereas up to ten years ago it would have been illegal to send a child of this age to prison unless he/she had committed a grave crime. “We must help children who break the law”, says Curtin. He points out that “in Great Britain a ‘youth worker’ exists in every city whose job it is to protect children and promote effective projects to improve relations within the local community. We need to help the young to understand the consequences of their actions, for example, by enabling them to meet elderly prison inmates who can explain to them the consequences that the crimes they committed had on their life”.Greece: Catholic cemetery profaned in Crete”Respect the memory of the dead”: this is the warning that the archbishop of Syros, Santorini and Crete, mgr. Francesco Papamanolis, sends to the unknown authors of the vandalism committed a few days ago in the Catholic cemetery of Chanià, in Crete. It is the fourth time that graves are profaned, crosses are broken up, and inscriptions on graves are destroyed in that graveyard. In the past (2005 and 2007), the prelate states, “the damage was assumed to have been committed by unknown drug-addicts, but it seems it must have been committed, instead, by people who would like to remove or make the Catholic cemetery disappear from Chanià. To all of them, we say: respect the memory of the dead”. “Two years ago – Papamanolis adds -, something similar had happened in the Orthodox cemetery of Constantinople and our Government had turned it into a national problem. But when the two previous times our cemetery of Chanià was damaged by sacrilegious people, none of the authorities did anything, they hushed up the problem and did nothing to fix the outrage to the memory of the dead, and they did not even help us repair the damage. Don’t the bones of the Catholic Christians deserve the same respect as the bones of the Orthodox brothers?” “We ask the Ministries of Justice and Public Order to protect us, because the injustice we suffer as a Catholic Church, especially in Crete, is rising all the time”.Scotland: act of compassion for al-MegrahiThe archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti, took part in the debate on the release of the author of the Lockerbie attack that aroused lots of controversy, stating that “he praised the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds”. “I and many others in the Catholic community – the prelate states in a message – have praised the decision to release him on compassionate grounds, that is after all one of the inspiring principles of the Scottish Parliament, on the basis of which the government should work”. “Showing compassion in any circumstance is not a sign of weakness. On the contrary, in this predicament, under such pressure and in such circumstances, it seemed to me to be a clear sign of strength”, Conti writes. “Although there are voices to the contrary, I firmly believe it is a decision that will be a source of satisfaction for many Scots and that will be respected in the international community”. “I have been impressed at the expressions of sympathy from Jim Swire and other relatives who lost family members on the Pan Am flight – he concludes – who acknowledged it is a fair compassionate gesture and admitted they doubt the sentence was a fair decision back then”.Spain: Congress of European JesuitsThe “Congresso Eurojess” 2009 opened at Granada (Spain) on 25 August. Promoted by European Jesuits involved in social issues, this year’s congress is focused on the theme “Moslem populations in European societies”. The meeting is just one of a series of initiatives taken by European Jesuits to come to terms with the growth in the number of Muslims in the Old Continent. The choice of the conference venue is not casual: Granada, the heart of the last Muslim kingdom in Western Europe, was re-conquered by the Catholic kings in 1492. The presence of those of Islamic faith in Granada, and more generally in Andalusia, is of ancient origins, and continues today, not least as a result of the more recent phenomenon of immigration. The congress provides a forum for reflection, debate, meetings and also cultural visits to Granada and Córdoba. On the first day, the reports tackled the central theme from the demographic point of view, supplemented with the testimonies of those with experience of working among the Muslims present in Europe and in Andalusia. The Congress will continue on 27 August with a debate on the impact of European democracies on Muslim communities; national and local policies for the integration of Islamic groups will also be presented. On 28 August the delegates will discuss what opportunities for action exist for Jesuit institutions and review projects now underway from which some signs of hope for dialogue and friendship between Catholics and Muslims are emerging.
