A pastoral Charter of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference on social ethics, with the title “Joint responsibility for the common good” will be published on 15 September. The document is the outcome of the last general assembly held at Fatima in May, and subsequent permanent councils. The document will tackle various issues of social ethics of particular concern to Portuguese society today, in particular the high rate of accidents on the workplace and on the roads, and the problem of tax evasion. The permanent council that met at Fatima on 9 September discussed, among other things, the question of religious education in the first school cycle. It noted, in particular, the existence of “a degree of arbitrariness in the procedures for the provision of Catholic moral and religious education in lower schools, due to the fact that the legislation itself leads to this arbitrariness”. Don Tomaz Silva Nunez, secretary of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, has, in a submission to the Ecclesia agency, listed the difficulties, also economic, encountered by Catholic schools. The bishops have also set up a group of experts in the area of bioethics, because the questions posed in this area are “very complex from the ethical point of view and demand exhaustive reflection so that appropriate legislation be approved on the matter in Portugal”. The Church, commented the secretary, “cannot remain alien to the problem”.
