Peter Stockland

The golfer who sits unshakeably atop the game’s pantheon as the sport’s greatest player ever is also regarded by many who follow its 500-year history as a paragon of rule-bound propriety.

About a decade ago, I concluded that the underlying affliction in North American society is potato chips.

On a car ride from Kingston to Ottawa, I tested my hypothesis on Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and my then-colleague Fr. Raymond de Souza, with whom I co-founded Convivium magazine. Both of these supremely brainy Catholic clergymen looked at me as if I were mucho nachos shy of a full bag.

An interview with Francis Leo, Canada's youngest bishop heading its largest English-speaking diocese.

His Grace Francis Leo offered up gratitude to Christ as he was made Archbishop of Toronto at a Mass in a packed St. Michael’s Cathedral Basilica that was equally filled with the spirit of the Annunciation.

About mid-way through his speech at what conceivably might be his last Cardinal’s dinner, Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins paused and seemed to lean into the podium just after articulating the word homeless.

As a child, I was fishing off a wooden dock at the small lake near the town in B.C. where I grew up when a farmer from Saskatchewan and his son appeared  as if out of a dream I didn’t know I was having.

The Toronto archdiocese’s St. Monica Institute opened its doors Sept. 24 although Executive Director Matthew Marquardt acknowledges that technically it doesn’t yet have any doors to open.

In summer 2021, I had the pleasure on the local public golf course where I play to be part of a foursome of walk-ons that included a diminutive albeit athletic 30-something Asian woman.

I once interviewed the Irish Times columnist and author John Waters, a very devout and public Catholic, about changes roiling through Irish society that were creating pressures to amend the Constitution in areas such as abortion and gay marriage. I noted that despite the Church’s long dominance over Irish politics, an equally long-standing antipathy toward it could be found in figures such as James Joyce.

In the past two months, courts gave the go-ahead for class-action lawsuits involving 100 plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Quebec and the Diocese of St. Hyacinthe near Montreal.