Heart and Soul

Helen Berhane has the type of voice that you may think could only have come from God. There was a long time though when the only people who could hear her were her captors and the fellow inmates of the shipping container that was her gaol.

In fact it was her singing that led to her being imprisoned, beaten and abused in her native Eritrea, after she refused to put a stop to her evangelising. In this first episode of Faith In Freedom, Helen tells John McCarthy about those two years of imprisonment and how she refused to denounce her faith.

The BBC’s Nuala McGovern is with an audience and panel of speakers to ask what the next generation of Catholics want from their Church.

We are at the Teatro Flaiano in Rome, for Heart and Soul Gathering, as Bishops from all over the world gather with the Pope at the Vatican for a special meeting, or Synod, on Catholicism and the young.

In March, over three hundred people aged between 16-29, plus fifteen thousand more on social media, came together in Rome, to say what is important to them and their faith. Heart and Soul Gathering continues that conversation and adds to the voices being heard now at the Synod.

We bring together Catholics from across the globe, from countries such as Nigeria, Brazil and Samoa, to discuss their views on issues such as sexuality, leadership in the Church, and the role of women. How should the church engage with its young people? What are the priorities for young Catholics?

This special Heart and Soul Gathering from the BBC World Service is the second programme in a series of faith-based community discussions.

Produced by Louise Clarke-Rowbotham for the BBC World Service.

Whatever is said in the confessional stays in the confessional; it is a sacred, unyielding law throughout Catholicism, but in Australia it's now being challenged.

In certain states laws are being introduced so priests can now be fined if they are found to have withheld information from the confessions of child abusers. Priests across the country have said they won’t adhere to the law, saying it breaks a sacred trust.

But the Catholic church in Australia isn’t on steady ground. The law change is a recommendation from a Royal Commission which, over five years of hearings, revealed the enormous extent of sexual abuse by clergy and its cover up. Australia’s most senior Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, is facing a trial over charges related to abuse and an Archbishop has been found guilty of withholding information on a paedophile priest.

Breaking the seal of the confessional can mean excommunication, withholding evidence could mean prosecution. It's a story that pits Church law against civil law. Janak Rogers will hear both sides of the row, hearing how the church is fighting to retain one of its most important laws.

Image: Placards outside the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney on March 1, 2016 (Credit: AFP/Getty Images)

Brazil has one of the worst records in the world for violence against women, and to combat these attitudes Nadiedja Souza is leading Brazilian women who are challenging the sexism of Brazil and she’s doing it using her Christian faith.

Nadiedja travels from church to church across the state of Pernambuco educating women to challenge long held attitudes towards women, as well as dealing with the physical and psychological violence that often accompanies it.

Women across Latin America have been calling for an end to femicide through the #notonefewer movement. In Brazil, Evangelical Protestant Christian women are pushing to challenge and transform rape culture and using the Bible to make their case.

Zoe Sullivan follows Nadedja as she uses her own faith to educate churchgoers about rape culture and sexism. Brazilians have left the Catholic church to join Pentecostal churches in their millions in Brazil.

Brazilians will vote in October for a new President and women’s rights are a central part of the campaign; the highly powerful and conservative Pentecostal churches are looking to gain even more political power.

Presenter and Producer: Zoe Sullivan

Fifty years after the death of Rev Dr Martin Luther King, and in the era of campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, how are black churches relevant in the fight for social justice today?

Two-time Emmy Award winning presenter Sherri Jackson asks a local audience and a panel of speakers about the role of Christianity in America's new civil rights movements.

Sherri is joined by the next generation of activists and by those who were part of the original civil rights movement at 16th Street Baptist Church, an iconic city location which survived a 1963 bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan and the murder of four young girls.

Producer: Louise Clarke-Rowbotham

Photo: L-R Rev Eva Melton, Tef Poe, Rev Dr Bernard Lafayette, Sherri Jackson, Justin Smith, Laveeda Morgan Battle, Rev Arthur Price. Credit: BBC

Abraham of the Old Testament, or Ibrahim of Islam, is a vital figure across Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

His prophetic fame, arises from the story of his offering of one of his sons to God, because He commanded him so. God however, spared the son and a sacrificial lamb was offered instead.

In the city of Hebron, are the Caves of The Patriarch where Abraham is said to be buried and above them stand a Mosque and Synagogue where Jews and Muslims pray. It is an uneasy understanding between two communities that share this ancient city and this home of worship.

Photo: Hebron resident Kholoud in front of old town. Credit: BBC

Nihal Arthanayake was born into a Sri Lankan Buddhist family. As he grew up, he saw it as a peaceful and thoughtful religion - but now the traditionally peaceful faith has made headlines in Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka with stories of violence and persecution.

He returns to Sri Lanka to explore why Buddhists have been violently harassing the Muslim minority there. He witnesses monks in the orange robes recasting their role as peacemakers to defenders of a strident Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism.

Nihal fears his faith has been corrupted, but there is an argument that may actually justify violence in Buddhism; one that was revealed in a text over 1500 years ago.

Photo: Gnanasara Thero, Buddhist Monk and head of Bodu Bala Sena, a Sinhalese nationalist organisation

When Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979, half the population turned out to see him, the BBC World Service presenter Nuala McGovern was amongst them. When Pope Francis arrives for the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, he will find a changed country and a Catholic Church rocked by the scandal of clerical sexual abuse.

Nuala returns to her home city of Dublin, to find out if the “Francis Factor” can turn the tide of a Catholic Church whose once mighty hold on this country is has been undermined

Pope Francis will certainly fine a more secular Ireland with the role of the church greatly diminished and changes to the constitution including the vote to legalise same sex marriage, reform to strict abortion laws and divorce.

Many will still come to see him, half a million tickets have been taken for the papal mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park and another visit to the shrine at Knock in the west of Ireland, was booked out within hours.

Nuala discovers ash returns home that its more than just the waning influence of the Catholic Church that has caused this most radical shift in culture and country.

Photo: Pope Francis Credit: Vatican Pool/Getty Images

Ibtihaj Muhammad has had many firsts in her career in fencing. An African American Muslim woman, she was the first athlete from the U.S. to compete at the Olympics. Her team won bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But at the same time, the U.S. presidential campaign back home was revealing a strong anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim in the very country she was representing. Muhammad tells David McGuire about what drives her fighting spirit, and the place of Islam in her success.

Photo: Fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad won a bronze medal at the Olympics for the US in 2016. Credit: Getty

On July the 11th every year, the bodies of those who Sasa helped to identify over the past 12 months are re-buried in a Muslim service and Anna will witness the ceremony at the sprawling Potocari Cemetery and meet the families on a pilgrimage to honour the ones they loved and lost.

Anna Holligan has listened to the details of unspeakable terror as the BBC’s correspondent in The Hague and will travel to the scenes of Mladic’s crimes to meet the Muslim families still haunted by the war of 25 years ago and the massacre of thousands at Srebrenica.

Sasa was four years old when soldiers drove into his home town of Mostar – his family was a mix of Bosnian Muslim and Serbian Orthodox and the war ripped it apart. He is now a translator, and recently worked at the trial of Ratko Mladic.

Samir Chosić is shovelling earth, a job that stirs his own painful memories of fleeing for his life, as thirty-five freshly dug graves readied for fragments of bones to be laid to rest.

An estimated 12,000 people of all faiths, Muslims, Christians, Jews and others are still missing - feared slaughtered - right across this troubled Balkan territory.

As she travels around Bosnia-Herzegovina, Anna witnesses a country officially at peace, but more religiously divided than it was before the war.

Presented by Anna Holligan

Photo title: The 11th July memorial at Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina Credit: BBC