Catholic Register Staff

Catholic Register Staff

The students from Sudbury, Ont.’s Marymount Academy have let Canadian military serving overseas that they aren’t forgotten this Christmas season.

There is one sure sign that Christmas is around at The Catholic Register — the sudden surge of mail into the office on deadline day for the our annual children’s Christmas drawing contest.

Cardinal Thomas Collins has approved a short service to give parishes in lockdown regions within the Archdiocese of Toronto the option of offering Holy Communion on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day while maintaining the 10-person limit in churches.

Legal opening

Re: Liberals to implement UN’s Indigenous rights declaration (Dec. 3):

The Trudeau government’s vow to implement Bill C-15, legislation based on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), is certainly a welcome move in that it will inject the full colour and spirit of that document into the Canadian legal system. At its core, the declaration expresses the uniqueness of Indigenous cultures, their ties to the land itself, their spirituality and the necessity of preserving their right to self-determination; this is necessary for their survival and undoing the harm of colonization and racism.

The following is the Christmas message from Archbishop Richard Gagnon, president of Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and Archbishop of Winnipeg:

Catholic churches in York Region and Windsor-Essex County are joining Toronto and Peel Region in lockdown Dec. 14 following new restrictions to battle the pandemic by the Province of Ontario.

After seven years as the Pope’s diplomatic representative in Canada, Archbishop Luigi Bonazzi is off to Albania.

Ordinary acts

We commend Glen Argan for his courageous column (Nov. 22) on the sexual abuse by clergy.  He says “ordinary people” have done great things for the world by “telling the truth … or witnessing to an injustice.”

Thin disguise

It is so hard to understand how so many educated, God- loving people actually accept the lies poured out by Donald Trump (DT). DT looks for the hot topics that push people’s buttons i.e. abortion, then promotes his supposed stance on that topic for one solitary reason, to garner and stay in power. He does not care about abortion personally one way or another, but if saying he is against it garners him some votes he is against it. The devil comes under many disguises but when it comes to DT his disguise is very thinly veiled.

Risky business

Pope Francis should be commended for his persistent attempts to reach a mutual agreement with the Chinese government on exercising the rights of the papacy in the governance of the Catholic Church in China. The probability of his success, in my opinion, is minimal, based on China’s recent unilateral abrogation of its “one country two systems” treaty with the UK.