Next week, thousands of pro-lifers will gather in Ottawa for the annual March for Life. As they have every year for the past 12 years, they will promote respect for life at all stages, from conception to natural death, through prayer, Mass and a walk through downtown streets ending at Parliament Hill. Some MPs will attend. Clergy and at least one archbishop are planning to attend. There will be witnessing by members of the Silent No More abortion awareness campaign. Last year there were about 8,000 marchers. This year, there may be more.

If you’re a member of a pro-life group or Catholic media organization, or a regular Register reader, you probably know all this. If you only know what the mainstream news outlets carry, you probably don’t. Despite a large number of attendees and the presence of senior clergy and parliamentarians, the march has rarely attracted much media attention. Sometimes a handful of pro-abortion protesters will show up and make noise, creating a photo opportunity or two. Last year a police officer was injured directing traffic, but news reports still didn’t name the event that had caused the need for traffic direction. In the United States, the annual March for Life is at least 10 times as big, but the media situation is about the same.

{mosimage}Most people in 21 countries, nuclear-armed and not, now support the elimination of nuclear weapons, according to a survey conducted late last year by the Washington-based polling organization World Public Opinion.

In 20 of the 21 nations surveyed — the total included Canada, the United States, Russia and most European powers — majorities ranging in size from 62 to 93 per cent favoured an international agreement that would lead to the destruction of existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology to countries that don’t have it. (The single exception to this pattern was Pakistan, where only 46 per cent favoured such a scheme.)

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Ages 6-8 Part 1

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Ages 6-8 Part 2

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{mosimage}Along with a clear majority (54 per cent) of American Catholics who voted in the recent U.S. presidential election, I cast my ballot for Democratic candidate Barack Obama. And along with at least some of these Catholic voters, I picked Obama after a time of soul-searching.

I agreed with his liberal, interventionist policies on the economy, his ideas about America’s relationship with its friends and enemies, health care reform, the deplorable war in Iraq and other matters. I disagreed with Republican candidate John McCain’s stands on virtually every issue, from economics to Iraq.

{mosimage}The first decade of the 21st century will be remembered as a good one for the sacred books of the West’s great religions, but not so good for those getting the Book thrown at them.

Women in the sheikdoms and Islamic republics, for example, beat up by Qur’an-quoting police for accidentally flashing an inch of ankle, and moderate Muslims having their TV sets snatched away and destroyed by their more righteous brethren. Arabs thrown off their land by Jews obsessed by some pages in the Old Testament promising their ancestors most of the known world. These, and myriad others, have been victims of militants mouthing the same justification for wreaking holy terror: The Book told them to do it.

For all the damage it’s doing, the crisis shaking the foundations of the world’s financial system has spawned at least one booming industry: economic punditry.

If you haven’t been camped out in Algonquin Park for the last two months, you are surely familiar with what I’m talking about: the endless parade of experts before the cameras of cable TV news networks, each with learned opinions about what’s gone wrong with the world and what’s to be done about it. Finger-pointing abounds. Some blame consumers, chronically addicted to the cheap, easy credit of the last several years. Others confidently blame “predatory” lenders, or absent-minded regulators, or the profligacy of public-sector spending by governments living far beyond their means.

The worsening persecution of Indian Christians by fundamentalist Hindus is a black mark on India’s modernizing democracy and a violation of Hinduism’s basic principle of tolerance for other religions.

Western Christians should stand in solidarity with our Indian brothers and sisters who are being murdered, mutilated and driven from their homes, whose houses are being burned and whose churches are being desecrated and destroyed. In this Canadian election season, we should exact a promise from our prospective members of Parliament that they will urge the next government to encourage Delhi to beef up its current, woefully ineffective campaign to halt the violence.

{mosimage}Throughout his remarkable visit to Paris and Lourdes in mid-September, Pope Benedict XVI showed France and the world what is best about contemporary Catholicism. He reached out with great warmth to all the people he met, from the mighty of this world — his first stop was a conversation with French President Nicolas Sarkozy — to sick pilgrims and intellectuals, the youth of Paris, Jews and Muslims.

He preached the Gospel with zeal, witnessed to the love revealed 150 years ago at Lourdes, and encouraged the French clergy and others called to dedicated lives to stand firm in the face of Europe’s deepening unbelief. And he did these things with shining charity.

{mosimage}I’m fed up with Roman Catholic Womenpriests (RCWP) and their collaborators inside and outside the Catholic Church. And while I’m on the subject — I’m also not very happy with the namby-pamby way some representatives of Catholic officialdom are dealing with what RCWP is up to.

This summer, I am celebrating the 10th anniversary of my conversion to Catholicism. I didn’t make this turn in the usual, sensible manner, after a suitable period of study and reflection. I didn’t break with Anglicanism, the Christian path I had chosen early in life, because of any disagreement over doctrine or practice. I became a Catholic, as the Godfather movies has it, after getting an offer I couldn’t refuse.