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September 10, 2014
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will visit Turkey in November, eight years after his predecessor, Benedict XVI, made a landmark visit to the predominantly Muslim country.
OTTAWA - The Catholic Organization for Life and Family (COLF) is urging families to live up to a vocation of promoting life, peace and a culture of love.
WASHINGTON - The conflict in which Islamic State fighters are driving out Christians and other minorities must not be seen as a war between Islam and Christianity, said the head of the Vatican Congregation for Eastern Churches.
September 11, 2014
Our bodies and our souls each have their separate aging process, and they aren’t always in harmony. Thus, T.E. Laurence, in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, makes this comment about someone: “He feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought and finished art, but which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life ... his rangeful, mortal soul was aging faster than his body, was going to die before it, like most of ours.”
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS - As William Carmona lay gravely ill in a San Antonio hospital bed, he repeatedly questioned his classmates from nearby Assumption Seminary: "Where is Bishop Choby?" "When will he get here?" And finally: "How many more hours until he ordains me?"
Shimon Peres has been a witness to inter-religious strife most of his life. The former Israeli President, now 91, shared a Nobel Peace prize with Yasser Arafat and has lived through several Middle East wars. He has experienced the link between religious extremism and terrorism.
CHENNAI, India - The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India has appealed to Catholics to mobilize funds and materials to augment church relief work in northern Jammu and Kashmir state, devastated by floods.
When I started my work in church music in 1976 in small-town Alberta, it really was the Wild West. We photocopied music and made Duo-Tang hymnals with words-only versions of copyrighted materials. We didn’t ask anyone for permission.
In late August, shortly after my wife and I celebrated our anniversary, the secretary-general of the Italian Bishops Conference, signalled a possible massive change in Church teaching on marriage.
WINDSOR, ONT. - Last week I wrote about the impressive evangelical energy of young Chinese Catholics and how encouraging it was to be with them. Not two days later I was confronted with the grim reality of ecclesial life in Canada — the pockets of vitality are just that, pockets.
If Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell did not actually coin the term “tipping point” he popularized it in his book of that title.
VATICAN CITY - Among the men and women Pope Francis was set to unite in marriage were Catholics who have been living together as well as couples who already have children.
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) Sept. 21 (Isaiah 55:6-9; Psalm 145; Philippians 1:20-24, 27; Matthew 20:1-16) It is often said that God is merely a projection of human wishes and fears. An ancient Greek philosopher once said that if cows, horses and lions had hands and could draw, they would depict gods that looked just like them.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis will address the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, Nov. 25.
TORONTO - Olivia Chow, John Tory and long-shot candidate Ari Goldkind all offered prayers for Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who was being treated in hospital with a stomach tumour detected the evening before Toronto mayoralty candidates were to answer questions from faith leaders at Metropolitan United Church.
BEIRUT - Sister Marie Claude Naddaf, provincial leader of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd for Lebanon and Syria, is still shaken by what she witnessed visiting Irbil, Iraq.
Grade 12 student Ramy Elsayed has been master of ceremonies at school events, plays saxophone in the school band and is looking forward to joining his school’s work-placement program. In many respects, he is a typical student at St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Toronto. But Elsayed, 18, has autism.
On Sept. 12 eight years ago, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria in which he seemed to diagnose Islam as a religion inherently flawed by fanaticism.
September 12, 2014
Grandparents are an undervalued resource
TORONTO - Tuesday nights at the Newman Centre are a time to pray and play.