Humanists UK has campaigned for 16 years to open Thought for the Day.

Last year, the BBCs review of religious and ethics output rejected any change to the format.

The corporation said Thought for the Day and Pause for Thought - a similar item on Radio 2 - would "continue as religious slots in primetime radio, with speakers from a wide range of faiths reflecting on an issue of the day". Read more

The setting is a makeshift Ethiopian Orthdodox Church, built by volunteers in the "New Jungle" settlement, in and near which 5000 people from Eritrea, Libya and Syria live.

The programme, which will air on August 16, has been slated for sympathising with people who want to migrate illegally to the United Kingdom.

Critics have said it is a waste of the UK television licence fee and is political activism.

The Daily Express and the Sun both carried critical front pages of the BBC programme's decision to film in the church

The shanty towns near Calais are close to a Channel Tunnel entrance.

The Church of England's Bishop Nick Baines praised the BBC decision.

The bishop said the church is for the poor and vulnerable and Christian faith is about God in the real world.

"If we don't like being exposed to worship from Calais, then it is for us to face the hard question of why - not simply to project this on to the soft target of the BBC."

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, made it clear in a tweet that he fully supported the programme.

Rev. Michael Sadgrove, dean of Durham, applauded the BBC's decision.

"What's the answer to the scornful Pharisees at the Sun? It's pretty obvious. Just ask what Jesus would do," Rev. Sandgrove said.

"He would be in the Jungle, of course, just as he kept company with a lot of other people the establishment of his day found it difficult to tolerate."

A BBC spokesman said: "Church leaders from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury have spoken out about the human response to migration and asylum which is a subject of interest to churchgoers up and down the country."

Catholic charities are at the forefront of efforts to support to migrants in the Calais shanty towns.

The Catholic charity Secours Catholique-Caritas France has pooled resources with Médecins du Monde, Solidarité Nationale and Secours Islamique to help migrants camped among the sand dunes.

Sources

• The Daily Express
• The Guardian
• Image: The Daily Express

Sir Cliff, who vehemently denies the abuse claim, is often in the company of former priest John McElynn, who is one of the supporters dubbed "Team Cliff".

The singer's Berkshire home was raided and searched by police last week, as part of an investigation into an alleged sexual assault on an underage boy at an evangelical rally in 1985.

Sir Cliff is currently staying at his Portuguese vineyard retreat.

In his biography "My Life, My Way", Sir Cliff said that soon after they met, Mr McElynn agreed to help manage his charitable projects.

"Our arrangement has worked out really well," he said.

"John now spends most of his time looking after my properties, which means I don't have to.

"John and I have over time struck up a close friendship. He has also become a companion, which is great because I don't like living alone."

All of Sir Cliff's properties are now managed by Mr McElynn, who has lived with him ever since his manager, Bill Latham, moved out after 30 years.

Meanwhile, the BBC has been accused of participating in a witch-hunt over the way it covered the raid on Sir Cliff's home.

It used knowledge of the investigation to leverage exclusive coverage of the raid.

The BBC filmed and broadcast the raid live from a helicopter which was flying above Sir Cliff's residence before the officers arrived.

South Yorkshire police admitted they had struck a deal with the broadcaster after a BBC reporter learned of their investigation into Sir Cliff and approached the force with the story, weeks before the raid.

In a bid to ensure the BBC did not jeopardise the investigation, the force said they had reluctantly given the broadcaster exclusive information in advance of the raid, enabling it to be shown live on TV.

Among those who have voiced their concerns is broadcaster Sir Michael Parkinson, who said the BBC's actions "would have done the reds top credit".

Sir Cliff said he is yet to hear from police.

Sources

• The Telegraph
• The Guardian
• Image: Daily Mail

Back in 1978 - which went down in history as the "year of the three Popes" - I remember meeting a gregarious American priest and journalist who drew up a pithy job description for the leadership of the Catholic Church on the death of Paul VI.

"We need a happy, holy man, who smiles!" he said.

Well, we got just such a man in Papa Luciani, the Patriarch of Venice who charmed the world with his breezy manner and his simple, endearing smile in the 33 days he reigned as Pope John Paul I before his sudden death - most likely from a heart attack.

Dark plots

Conspiracy theorists leapt to the conclusion that he might have been poisoned because some Vatican cardinals feared that he planned revolutionary changes in the running of his Church. Continue reading.

Source: BBC News

Image: Reuters/JSOnline

Still current is the fallout of actions of 2DAY FM employees who appeared to have prompted the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, who was vulnerable to suicide. Also recent is the criticism that, while the media were empowering church sexual abuse victims by telling their stories, the victims and their stories were providing fodder for one of the year's biggest media events, so that media outlets were in effect capitalising on lives broken by the church. Earlier the BBC was exposed for suppressing coverage of the exploitative behaviour of one of its own, Jimmy Savile.

Back in January, we were reflecting on the film The Iron Lady, and Meryl Streep's determination not to make a plaything of Margaret Thatcher. Instead she would continue her own lifelong effort as an actor to 'defend the humanity of people that we've made into emblematic figures of one sort or another'. Continue reading

Sources

• Michael Mullins in Eureka Street
• Image: The Guardian

Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street

In his opinion piece, Simon Jenkins suggests that we have mistaken electronic connection for genuine conversation. "Talk is reduced to the muttered, heads-down expletives brilliantly satirised in the BBC's Twenty Twelve," he says, "which psychologists have identified ... as 'fear of conversation'. People wear headphones as 'conversational avoidance devices'." While the internet connects us to the whole world, it is not the real world. When every fact can be checked on Google, "doubt and debate become trivial. There is no time for the thesis, antithesis, synthesis of Socratic dialogue, the skeleton of true conversation".

He offers some practical suggestions about how to start a conversation as well as a list of conversation killers.

• Read Jenkins' article
• Image: Prade Films

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC.

"News that a publicly funded radio station - BBC Radio 5 - is going to record inside an abortion clinic is being seen by many of us as biased support for the abortion lobby," said Josephine Quintavalle of the ProLife Alliance.

Quintavalle called the move "contrary to the neutrality that is obligatory under the BBC charter," in comments to CNA April 27.

The two-hour live program will take place next month at a location yet to be disclosed. The BBC says it will feature interviews with mothers who are having their babies aborted as well as with clinic staff. Continue reading

Fr Brian D'Arcy, who is also a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2's "Pause for Thought", as well as a best-selling author and columnist with the Irish tabloid the Sunday World, has been told he must submit his writings and broadcasts to an approved church censor.

The disciplining of Fr D'Arcy, a Passionist priest, brings the number of Irish priests silenced by Rome to six. Continue reading

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview about faith and broadcasting, Mr Thompson disclosed that producers were faced with the possibilities of "violent threats" instead of normal complaints if they broadcast certain types of satire.

He suggested other faiths had "very close identity with ethnic minorities" and as a result were covered in a more careful way by broadcasters.

"Without question, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms', is different from, 'I complain in the strongest possible terms and I am loading my AK47 as I write'," he said. "This definitely raises the stakes."

Thompson said Islam was a religion "almost entirely" practised by people who already may feel in other ways "isolated", "prejudiced against" and who may regard an attack on their religion as "racism by other means".

Mr Thompson said: "The kind of constraints that most people accept around racial hatred, the fact that it may be in certain forms of expression or certain forms of depiction, may be outlawed because of the way in which they go to racial hatred and potentially the promotion and incitement of racial hatred."

"I think religion should never receive that level of protection or sensitivity."

On the other hand Thompson, a church-going Catholic, said that secularists make the mistake of not understanding the nature of blasphemy and how it feels to a believer.

Source

• The Telegraph
• Image: Cumbria Crack News

Scaraffia draws parallel attempts from history such as the imposition of the French Calendar dating history to the day of the French Revolution and similar attempts by Lenin and Mussolini.

The editorial concludes, "In sum, the idea of removing the Christian calendar has very bad precedent, leaving numerous failures in its wake. It should be noted that this time, the BBC has limited itself to changing only the description, rather than the computation of time, but in doing so, it cannot be denied that it has made a hypocritical gesture: the hypocrisy of those who pretend not to know why years began to be counted precisely from that moment."

Scaraffia argues that the terms BC and AD are not just a statement of religious importance, but that they mark a significant cultural and historical moment in time. She states, "...from that moment was the idea affirmed that all human beings are equal because they are children of God? A principle upon which human rights are founded, and on the basis of which people and leaders are judged. A principle which, until that moment, no one had supported and upon which the Christian tradition is based.

"Why should it not be recognized that from that moment the world was changed? That taboos and material impurity disappeared and that nature was liberated from the presence of the supernatural precisely because God is transcendent? Out of this was born the possibility for European peoples to discover the world and for scientists to begin the experimental study of nature which led to the birth of modern science"

Full Article: L'Osservatore Romano

The Corporation has replaced the familiar Anno Domini (the year of Our Lord) and Before Christ with the obscure terms Common Era and Before Common Era.