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May 22, 2007
If you want to find a cipher for society’s attitude toward the Roman Catholic priest, look to the priest figure in fiction and popular culture.
Pentecost Sunday (Year C) May 27 (Acts 2:1-11/1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13/Jn 20:19-23 or Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26) Pentecost was not only the birth of the church, but the rebirth of humanity.
OTTAWA - Alanna Dalton attributes her close relationship with God to her time spent at Waupoos Farm 30 minutes from downtown Ottawa.
TORONTO - At the ripe old age of seven Caroline D’ Souza penned her first two stories and sold them to family and friends to raise funds for needy children in India.
TORONTO - When Marie Comiskey and her younger brother Kevin heard Archbishop Collins was going to speak at a local pub they jumped on the opportunity to meet the archbishop for the first time.
I just turned 16 years old. Wow! I seem so old! If you’d asked me even five years ago what I thought I would be like, I don’t know what I would have answered, but it was probably not this. I imagined my birthday would be something huge, something life changing, something so big that I couldn’t even imagine it. Yet I woke up that morning and, surprisingly, nothing really seemed different. I didn’t physically change in any way and I didn’t feel that different emotionally either.
TORONTO — The sodalities of Our Lady which Jesuits earnestly planted in parishes and Catholic schools all around the world never died. The sodalities had dominated 19th- and early 20th-century Catholic piety. They re-emerged in 1953 as the Christian Life Community, or CLC.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. — A fund has been created to help the family of John Pham, the 10-year-old St. Alfred School student who was killed in a school bus accident on April 11. The Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board started the John Pham Memorial Fund to assist in covering funeral costs and getting the family back on its feet.
TORONTO - The Toronto archdiocesan council of the Catholic Women’s League of Canada passed a resolution calling for the restoration of prayer in all schools at its 86th annual convention held May 8 and 9.
TORONTO - Six men were ordained to the priesthood at St. Michael’s Cathedral May 12 for service in the archdiocese of Toronto.
APARECIDA, Brazil - On a five-day visit to Latin America, Pope Benedict XVI identified a host of social and religious challenges and said the church should respond by focusing more clearly on the person of Jesus Christ.
If C1+ reminds you of a mediocre grade you got in high school chemistry, that’s because you weren’t paying attention in French class either.
TORONTO - Scripture scholar Archbishop Thomas Collins is taking on a new role as liaison between the Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Biblical Association of Canada.
TORONTO - Sometimes religious people are the biggest reason why their opinions get short shrift in public debates on controversial issues, says Preston Manning, an Evangelical Christian and former leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.
OTTAWA - Concern for human rights and the growing use of abortion for sex selection dominated the annual March for Life May 10.
One of Canada’s most outspoken Catholic bishops is going to the nation’s capital, where legislators, judges, policy makers and media will be counted among his flock. Pope Benedict XVI appointed Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, S.J., 63, to replace Archbishop Marcel Gervais as head of the archdiocese of Ottawa May 14. Prendergast will take possession of Ottawa’s cathedral in late June or early July. Gervais submitted his resignation when he turned 75 last September, as required by canon law.
May 24, 2007
The Greater Glory, Thirty-Seven Years With the Jesuits by Stephen Casey (McGill-Queen’s University Press, hardcover, 243 pages, $34.95). The immigrants to Canada in the mid-1800s brought with them their skills, dreams, fears, languages, customs, foods and their religions. As they clung to their heritage and memory from the Old World, they implanted what they considered to be the best of what they had known in Europe. This immigration married their religious expectations and traditions, for better or for worse, with those of the French Canadians who had preceded them in the flight from Europe.
It’s difficult to comprehend why Amnesty International has persisted in going down the dark path toward embracing abortion as a human “right.” Yet it has done so, despite entreaties around the globe from both its members and friends outside the organization.
The suffering imposed on Christians by the Communist regime of the now-vanished Soviet Union was one of the tragedies of the tormented 20th century. The clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church were humiliated and co-opted by the Stalinists. Scandalized by the compromises of the Moscow patriarchate with Communism, many Russian Orthodox believers in exile cut themselves off from their mother church in the 1920s, initiating decades of hostility and suspicion on both sides.
“I would die without the Trinity,” my friend Fr. Peter said once. How many of us would echo Fr. Peter? Does the Trinity make much difference to our lives or our faith? Yet it’s one of our key doctrines, distinguishing Christianity from all world religions.