TORONTO - With anywhere between 240 and 350 Assyrian Christians kidnapped by ISIS as it swept up Syria’s Al Khabour River in late February — quickly taking the villages of Tal Shamiran, Tal Tawil, Al Hourmiz and more villages surrounding the town of Tal Tamer — Assyrian-Canadians are living a bad dream and a recurring one.

TORONTO - Despite an overwhelmingly negative response from members of the public, physicians and organizations during a three-month online consultation, the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons voted 21-3 to force doctors to refer for abortions, contraception and other legal treatments or procedures even if they have moral or religious objections.

In the end, after 70, 80, 90 years on the planet, chances are the people you will have known best, longest and most thoroughly will be your brothers and sisters. They are the people who came with you into the world out of the same womb.

A number of voices have called on the federal government to trump the Supreme Court’s assisted-suicide decision with the notwithstanding clause — the controversial section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which allows Parliament to pass laws contravening some rights and liberties for up to five years before legislators have to re-vote on the matter or craft new legislation.

Anti-terror legislation currently before Parliament needs thorough debate and close scrutiny to ensure civil liberties, including religious freedom, are fully protected, said the president of the Catholic Civil Rights League.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - The Coptic Christians of Toronto and their friends gathered in Mississauga Feb. 22 to answer the murder of 21 Egyptian Copts by Islamic State allies in Libya. They answered the Feb. 15 beheadings with Bible readings, prayers, songs, hope and forgiveness.

Prof. David Seljak has been standing up in front of classrooms and teaching young men and women how to think about their society for approximately a generation. There’s always been an ebb and flow of students, but lately the ebb has the upper hand.

Twenty of the 70 Catholic dioceses in Canada are using their web sites to ask Catholics for opinions about family life — questions that range from how the Church can welcome families with gay members to how economics and media are shaping family life.

Pope Francis is hardly the first Catholic to express dismay over long, expensive, bureaucratic processes laid out for people seeking annulment of a mistaken, failed marriage. But in most of Canada, annulments are available at no cost and canon lawyers from coast to coast have been working on making the process faster and less bureaucratic.

TORONTO - Very soon church choirs around the world will have 900 manuscripts of music, most of it lost, forgotten and long out of print, available for free download from the St. Michael’s Choir School web site. The music, almost all of it liturgical and most of it set to Latin texts, was written by Msgr. John Edward Ronan, founder of Toronto’s St. Michael’s Choir School.