KILIS, TURKEY - While diplomats shuffle between Geneva, Moscow and Washington, their plans to place Syria’s chemical weapons under international control are having no impact on the war of attrition Syrians are fighting with rifles, rocket propelled grenades, tanks and bombing raids. As the violence that’s killed more than 100,000 Syrians wears on, Turkey is seeing more and more of the human toll in the form of refugees and wounded fighters.

TORONTO - The Philippines was colonized first by the Spanish crown and then by the more democratically inclined Americans, but through it all the nation has been carried forward by a lively, vigourous Catholicism that Filipinos have claimed and made their own. Which is why Filipina women love the Daughters of Isabella — an American offshoot of the Knights of Columbus named after a Spanish queen.

TORONTO - While the Syrian refugee crisis grows, Toronto parishes continue to welcome Iraqi refugees. The archdiocese of Toronto’s Office for Refugees is expecting between 60 and 70 Iraqis to land here over the course of September.

TORONTO - As U.S. President Barack Obama and Western allies continue to debate whether military action is the answer to Syria’s Aug. 21 chemical weapon use on its own citizens, Christian observers are uniformly warning of grave consequences and urging more diplomacy.

Toronto’s patron is St. Michael. Canada’s patron is St. Joseph. So why name the seminary established to train priests for Toronto and Western Canada after a fourth-century North African bishop?

Few of us associate Scarborough with Florence. But next door to the Scarborough Bluffs architect Arthur W. Holmes deposited a little taste of Italy from Florence’s greatest architect.

For its 100th birthday one of Toronto’s architectural masterpieces will be hiding behind a massive fretwork of scaffolding.

A Presbyterian prayer around the turn of the 20th century rather summed up the position of Toronto’s Irish Catholics before the First World War.

TORONTO - As if church bombings weren’t bad enough, northern Nigeria is also suffering from oversimplification in Western media reports. Reports of Islamist terrorism directed at Christians in Nigeria very often lack context and depth, said Bishops Anselm Umoren, auxiliary bishop of Abuja, Nigeria.

TORONTO - The Syriac Orthodox parish of St. Barsaumo has rallied around Sammy Yatim’s mother and sister in the aftermath of the youth’s July 27 shooting at the hands of Toronto police.