Michael Swan

Taking on China’s ‘gendercide’

October 14, 2011

Chai Ling, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and now the founder of the American NGO All Girls Allowed, believes China’s one-child policy is undermining the moral and spiritual values of the nation, going so far as to call what’s happening there a “gendercide” — a regime of coerced abortions that brings the state right into the wombs of China’s women and distorting Chinese culture and values. “The one-child policy is becoming more than just a population control policy,” said Chai, author of the just-released book A Heart for Freedom. “It has become a policy of control of its own population — to put fear of the state into the hearts of women, into the most intimate part of the relationship between a man and a woman.”

Christian unity week enlists technology and social media to get the word out

October 12, 2011

It’s a new day for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The 104-year-old call to Christians to atone for their deliberate and structural estrangement from one another is employing Facebook, Twitter and the very latest publishing technology to get the word out. Promoting the Week of Prayer via social media was basically a no-brainer as far as the Canadian Council of Churches is concerned, said CCC secretary general Rev. Dr. Karen Hamilton. “It was just obvious, given that we are continually thinking through communications issues and paying attention to what’s going on,” said Hamilton.

Egypt's Christians respond to attack with prayer, fasting

October 11, 2011

Prayer and fasting is the only possible response to a military attack on civilian, Christian protesters, a Canadian Coptic priest in Egypt told The Catholic Register. Fr. Bishoi Yassa Anis was just blocks away from a battle between Christian protesters and Egyptian soldiers on the streets of Cairo Oct. 9. Egyptian officials put the death toll at 26 with more than 300 injured. While protests began with the destruction of a church in Aswan, the Cairo protests were trying to draw attention to a long series of attacks on churches since the government of Hosni Mubarak fell in March of this year, said Bishoi (Egyptian family names come first).

New study shows thriving parishes engage people

October 8, 2011

The accepted premise that religion is withering away in Canada is being debunked by a new study from Canada’s most published and quoted sociologist of religion, Reginald Bibby. Bibby has just released numbers showing the percentage of Canadians committed to regular church attendance is rock solid. He largely attributes the continued vitality to a Catholic Church that is constantly renewing itself through immigration. “If we were thinking, as so many people have been thinking, in terms of secularization — where religion is in retreat mode and things are bad and getting worse — we’re saying that really has been an interpretation that has been very inaccurate,” said the University of Lethbridge sociologist.

Oratorio rises out of composer’s Holocaust obsession

October 5, 2011

TORONTO - Composer Zane Zalis has a story to tell. Give him 90 minutes, 200 singers and a huge orchestra and Zalis will lead you through an emotional tale of the Holocaust. I Believe is a 12-part oratorio that marshals enormous, complex orchestral forces but tells its story with popular, musical theatre singers. The work will get its Toronto premiere at Roy Thomson Hall Oct. 25 as a kind of lead-in to the 31st annual Holocaust Education Week, Nov. 1-9. Zalis, who grew up Ukrainian Catholic but later slid his family over to the Roman rite, intended his oratorio to be educational and accessible to young listeners.

Service cuts bad for your health

October 5, 2011

TORONTO - A new study by St. Michael’s Hospital that makes a link between poverty and poor health is being endorsed by Catholic agencies. The Toronto study indicates that people instinctively understand that poverty and income disparity are dangerous to their health, said epidemiologist Patricia O’Campo, one of the authors of the study. “It really is inequities that are driving risk for adverse health and mortality,” O’Campo said.

When the call came, the Callaghans answered

September 28, 2011

TORONTO - When Molly and Bill Callaghan went north to maintain a Chistian presence in small native communities they had years behind them of working in Toronto-area parishes as a deacon couple. Bill had the background in Scripture and theology that comes with the diaconate program while Molly had experience that goes with a lifetime of volunteering in the Church. But none of that mattered very much, said Molly. “We took an egg crate-sized box of stuff we had used in different days of recollection, training sessions, all of that,” Molly recently recalled of their 1991 trip to Sandy Lake, Ont. “We got up there and thought before we do anything about that we need to just be present to the people, keeping their trust and doing what we feel called to do. We came back (in 1998) with that box unopened.”

Whitehorse bishop pitches for priests

September 26, 2011

Bishop Gary Gordon has a one-time, can't-miss, double-your-money-back-guaranteed deal for the priests of the nation. "You want an opportunity to pray? You want an opportunity to connect with God in the vastness of His creation? An opportunity to actually know every single parishioner and have coffee with them, all the time?" begins Gordon's sales pitch to priests in southern Canada. He has just the spot for them — his Whitehorse diocese in the Yukon. Priests in the north get to actually read books, reflect on their work and take a second look at their homilies.

The Vaniers valued family values

September 25, 2011

The year 1959 is a couple of generations ago — hardly a blink of an eye in the gaze of history. But on Sept. 15, 1959, Georges Vanier took office as Governor General of Canada with words few leaders would speak in public today. “My first words are a prayer,” said the old soldier. “May almighty God in His infinite wisdom and mercy bless the sacred mission which has been entrusted to me by Her Majesty the Queen and help me to fulfill it in all humility. In exchange for His strength, I offer Him my weakness. May He give peace to this beloved land of ours and, to those who live in it, the grace of mutual understanding, respect and love.” A new biography of Georges and Pauline Vanier by Mary Frances Coady tells the story of their lives lived in tandem, driven by high ideals and understood as a spiritual enterprise. Georges and Pauline Vanier: Portrait of a Couple covers a century of history in which Canada emerged from a semi-colonial backwater to become a modern nation. But rather than a march through two world wars and into the Cold War, Coady presents this history through the intimate lens of a marriage.

D&P raises $4.7 million for Horn of Africa relief

September 22, 2011

As the curtain came down on 10 weeks of double-your-money matching donations for famine relief in East Africa, the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace had raised approximately $4.7 million. More than 13 million people face possible starvation in Horn of Africa countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. More than two years of drought and crop failure in the region have been compounded by political chaos in Somalia. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are on the move in the region. Development and Peace will put donations to work in both short term, emergency feeding and medical care through the Caritas network and longer term projects to support farming.