TORONTO - The Pan Am Games will be a big deal for Toronto. They will cost $1.4 billion. With less than 100 days to go, more than 350,000 tickets have been sold. With athletes coming from 41 countries, it’s bigger than the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver — the largest multi-sport event ever held on Canadian soil.

TORONTO - If death is a part of life then we shouldn’t die alone any more than we should live in isolation. Our deaths should not be coldly institutionalized any more so than our lives. Our deaths should be as surrounded by family, love and compassion as the lives we lived.

The politics of prayer and the prayers of politics are being marshalled at Queen’s Park in advance of Ontario’s 2015 budget.

When you get to your 800th birthday there’s more than a cake involved. The 800th anniversary of the Dominican order will call the “Hounds of the Lord” (Domini Canes in Latin) to Toronto to study, pray and preach.

Already battle scarred in conflict with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario over the college’s insistence that doctors must actively help patients access abortion, morning-after pills, chemical contraception, hysterectomies and vasectomies, Dr. Agnes Tanguay is not backing away from a fight for her right to practise medicine according to her conscience.

Canadians are increasingly becoming ambivalent about religion or rejecting it outright, but people across the religion spectrum admire the Pope, according to an Angus Reid Institute study released before Easter.

Nobody has shot at Fr. Jesus Alberto Franco since Feb. 13, 2013. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the situation in Colombia is getting better.

I once found myself in a room full of photographers forced to make a passionate defence of the Pope. It was an odd sort of defence. I was defending the Pope’s right to look frail, weak, lost and vulnerable in public.

Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte of Montreal, one of the most popular Quebeckers alive even as the province grew more decidedly secular, has entered the last stage of his life.

Catholic bishops and religious orders from the high arctic to the southern tip of Patagonia are demanding accountability for Canadian mining companies operating in Latin America up to and including the right of villagers and farmers to sue in Canadian courts in the event of environmental disasters and human rights abuses.