The Catholic Education Service (CES) says just under a fifth of all pupils in Catholic statutory education meets the highest national deprivation criteria, compared to a 12.8 percent England average.

Similarly, the CES says a quarter fewer pupils from the more affluent areas attend Catholic schools.

"The number of Catholic school pupils on free school meals is marginally lower than the national average, as many parents are ineligible due to immigration status or low-paid employment, with barriers to take-up including the complexity of applications and financial privacy concerns," the CES says.

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This is because those bishops are in charge of diocese where there is a significant shortage of priests, said Bishop Crispian Hollis.

The former ordinary of Portsmouth diocese said he is increasingly convinced that, "sooner rather than later" the Church in Britain and further afield "will rightly have to move towards the ordaining of married men".

In his 23 years as Bishop of Portsmouth, he said, the tide had turned from there being plenty of priests to go round, to a situation where he was forever "scratching around" to find enough priests to run the parishes.

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Forty-five women chose to pursue their vocations last year, the highest number since the 1980s.

The number for 2014 was up from 30 the previous year.

The figures, released by the National Office for Vocation in England and Wales, showed that 18 women entered enclosed orders and 27 entered apostolic ones last year.

Sr Cathy Jones, the Religious Life Promoter at the NOV, attributed the rise to an increase in discernment groups, as well as taster weekends at convents and outreach on the Internet.

She also pointed to increased self-confidence among apostolic orders linked to positive publicity around their work with vulnerable people such as trafficked women.

"The Church is trying to help people neutrally to discover God's call - and it's about God, not about this order surviving, not about our agenda," she said.

She said that the number of women entering religious life would never reach the level of 40 years ago.

But the Assumption sister predicted steady growth as the Church increased opportunities for discernment, either in groups or with a spiritual director.

"Some have done what they were always expected to - they've got their job in the city, a nice flat, car, boyfriend - and it's not enough.

"They're not saying, as they might have 50 years ago, that religious life is a better way to get to God.

"They're saying: ‘I'm not quite sure why, and I think I'm completely not worthy, but it seems that God's calling me to this'."

NOV director Fr Christopher Jamison said the Church had moved from treating vocations as "recruitment to discernment".

He said that young people "value their freedom, and don't like to feel they are being dragooned".

The low point for women entries to religious life was 2004, when there were only seven in England and Wales.

The number of men entering religious life in 2014 dropped from 22 the previous year to 18.

Sources

• The Tablet
• Catholic Herald
• Image: The Telegraph

In England and Wales, Catholics are usually required to abstain from meat on Fridays.

A spokesman for the bishops noted that Boxing Day, or St Stephen's Day, falls within the octave of Christmas, which is an ongoing celebration.

He said it is "contrary to the mentality of what an octave is to consider one of its days as penitential".

Easter and Christmas are the only two official octaves left in the Catholic Church's year after others were discontinued in the calendar of Blessed Paul VI.

Octaves are weeks of joy, not abstinence, even though the Easter Octave ranks unambiguously higher than that of Christmas.

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Bishop Tom Burns of Menevia said the UK bishops should publish the findings of the survey.

It asked questions on cohabitation, contraception and same-sex marriage.

This is in the interests of transparency, he said.

In an article for The Tablet, Bishop Burns notes "the height and depth and width of the intense pleas made by God's people for urgent attention to their pastoral needs".

"Publish and be delighted!" wrote Bishop Burns in defiance of the England and Wales bishops' conference's insistence that it would not be publishing the survey results, at the request of the Vatican.

He said they should follow the lead of the bishops in Germany and Switzerland who have published the survey's findings.

In total, 16,500 responded to the survey in England and Wales, including many lapsed Catholics.

Eighty percent of those who filled out questions about Communion for the divorced and remarried, same-sex marriage, and contraception were laypeople and 69 percent were married.

An editorial in the The Tablet argued: "The failure to inform English and Welsh Catholics how their views have been summarised comes close to a breach of faith."

One lay Catholic wrote to Cardinal Vincent Nichols of Westminster to ask: "Can you explain why we are not being given access to the results which is, in fact, our data?"

In the United States, a Pew Research study found a majority of American Catholics favour changes to Church teaching, but few expect this to happen.

Sources:

• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter
• Catholic Culture
• Image: The Guardian

"Given the extent of employment by Catholic organisations and charities, it is likely that thousands of people could be affected and lifted out of ‘in-work poverty'," reports the Christian think-tank Ekklesia.

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