Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has urged Christians to wear a cross every day, following a number of cases in which people say their employers have barred them from doing so.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, will call in his Easter Sunday homily for Christians to “wear proudly a symbol of the cross of Christ on their garments each and every day of their lives”.
Two British women are fighting to get their cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that they were discriminated against when their employers stopped them from wearing the cross.
British Airways employee Nadia Eweida was suspended by the airline for breaching its uniform code in 2006.
Shirley Chaplin was barred from working on the wards on a hospital in Exeter, southwest England, after refusing to hide a cross she wore on a necklace chain.
An interior ministry spokesman told the BBC: “People should be able to wear crosses. The law allows for this, and employers are generally very good at being reasonable in accommodating people’s religious beliefs.”
The outspoken O’Brien recently blasted the British government’s plan to permit civil gay marriage, calling it “madness” and a “grotesque subversion”.
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