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news diary St Michael and All Angels at 60 St Michael and All Angels (formally Holy Angels school), Kirkby, have celebrated their 60th Anniversary. The school opened in 1956 before the church. They celebrated with a Mass at St Michael and All Angels church and had a day of celebrations reliving the 1950’s era with children and staff wearing clothes from the 1950’s. Each class also
had the opportunity to go to the ‘Hop,’ whilst using the Juke Box that was hired for the day. Children also took part in lessons about the 1950’s in addition to a singing competition and a hula hoop competition. It was a special time for the school community to celebrate the successes of teaching and nurturing children for the past 60 years.
Archdiocese to help Medaille Trust in fight against slavery
Harriet is the best geographer in the country A Year 11 pupil at St Edmund Arrowsmith High School, Wigan, has been given a top national award after she achieved the highest mark in the country in her GCSE Geography examination. Harriet Olurankinse has been recognised by the Royal Geographic Society for achieving the highest raw mark in the 2016 AQA Entry Level Certificate in Geography. Known as the ‘Excellence Award’, the certificate aims to reward superlative attainment in geographical examinations by the national learned society. Harriet also received a cash reward of £30 from the society and a top-up cheque of £50 from the school. Headteacher, Mark Dumican, said, ‘We are delighted to see that Harriet’s hard work and talent have been nationally recognised by the Royal Geographic Society. And a special mention should also go to the dedication of her teacher, Matthew Kennedy, who taught Harriet for four out of her five years at our school.’
‘A crime against humanity’ is how Pope Francis has described modern-day slavery – and Liverpool Archdiocese has joined forces with a Catholic charity to help provide a local response to the problem of human trafficking here in the northwest. The Medaille Trust, founded in 2006 by Catholic religious congregations, provides eight safe houses across England for men and women who have been trafficked – and dependent children – and the charity has now agreed to work together with the Archdiocese of Liverpool to create another safe house by converting disused facilities at a former parish church. The 2015 figures for cases of slavery in this country underline the scale of the problem: 3,266 people were identified as potential victims, which was a 40% increase on 2014. Of this number, 982 were children. There were potential victims reported from 103 different countries of origin, though the top six nations were Albania, Vietnam, Nigeria, Romania, the UK and Poland. The Medaille Trust works with colleagues in the Police Service and National Crime Agency to tackle slavery, and it believes in creating a supportive environment which is more likely to lead to prosecutions of perpetrators. Its supporters include TRAC (the Trafficking – Raising Awareness and Campaigning group), the Brothers of St John of God, Caritas Salford and many female Religious Orders in the UK. In 2014 Pope Francis headed a conference at the Vatican to tackle 21st century slavery, which he spoke of as ‘an open wound on the body of contemporary society, a scourge upon the body of Christ’. This led to the establishing of the Santa Marta Group, an alliance of international police chiefs and bishops from around the world led by Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols. The Catholic Church’s response nationally was the Bakhita Initiative, named after St Bakhita. A Sudanese slave girl who eventually became a Canossian Sister in Italy, she was canonised in 2000 and her feast is on 8 February. Her name lives on too in Caritas Bakhita House, owned by the Archdiocese of Westminster, which handles the emergency placement of women escaping human trafficking.
Catholic Pictorial
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