Recent sexual abuse civil suits against leaders in the Canadian Catholic Church, including Cardinal Marc Ouellet and Quebec City Cardinal Gérald Lacroix, can leave the faithful struggling to find signs of hope. They won’t get any help by relying on typical media stories, says Gatineau Archbishop Paul-André Durocher.
So it is with every artisan and master artisan …
they set their heart on painting a lifelike image,
and they lose sleep in order to finish their work
Sirach: 38: 27
As a writer I have always had an interest in the complexity of language: the way words could be constructed to say one thing when an entirely different message was intended. This perhaps is most obvious in coded messages — words spoken into dangerous situations that must be disguised to protect the speaker.
In 1949, Abbé Pierre, a young French priest, welcomed Georges Legay, a homeless man who had tried to commit suicide, into his rundown home in Paris. Instead of giving Legay housing, work and money, Abbé Pierre said, “You are totally miserable, and I have nothing to give you. So why not help me help others?”
Verbatim: Overview of the legal action filed Feb. 2, by Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine
Overview of the legal action filed Feb. 2, by Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine to prevent Quebec forcing MAiD into a palliative care centre in former church still owned by the Archdiocese.
Deacon Andrew Bennett was certainly right in his Feb. 11 column to correct my error in generalizing the “approval” understanding of blessings as being “corrupted and secularized.” I was unaware of the Eastern understanding of blessings. An online commenter graciously corrected me after my article was published.