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October 8, 2014
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis is tipped to win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, according to some of the world’s leading bookmakers.
LAGOS, Nigeria - Nearly 200 churches in the Maiduguri Diocese in northeastern Nigeria have been destroyed or razed by Boko Haram insurgents since August, a diocesan official said.
The film is called The Good Lie but if offers a lot of truth.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis may be the universal Church's undisputed master of metaphor and analogy, but other members of the Synod of Bishops on the family are showing a willingness to use snappy images to get their points across, too.
October 9, 2014
In cases of unprovoked violence the use of reasonable force may be justified to stop an aggressor.
New Democrat MP Paul Dewar flushed with surprise when asked whether, as someone raised Catholic, he considers Canada’s involvement in the bombing of ISIL terrorists to qualify as a just war.
This Sunday in Rome there will be a papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to give thanks for the “equivalent canonization” last April of two new Canadian saints: St. François de Laval and St. Marie de l’Incarnation. The process of “equivalent canonization” permits the Holy Father to declare a beatified person to be a saint, waiving any requirement for a miracle to be certified after the beatification, and to dispense with the canonization ceremony itself.
How vividly I can still hear them — as though it were recently — the raucous cries resounding across university campuses in the 1960s and early ’70s: “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go.”
WASHINGTON - After the U.S. Supreme Court Oct. 6 declined to review rulings overturning five states' bans on same-sex marriage, several U.S. bishops criticized the court's inaction and reiterated that according to Church teaching, traditional marriage is a union between one man and one woman.
OTTAWA - When I was a teen, Bob Carty asked me if I could drive his standard-transmission blue Corolla. “It’s a long way to Mexico,” he said, “and we’ll have to drive hard to get there as fast as the others going down by bus.”
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) Oct. 19 (Isaiah 45:1, 4-6; Psalm 96; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5ab; Matthew 22:15-21) Who are the “good guys” and “bad guys” in our world? We are prone to dividing the world into the sheep and the goats and attaching the appropriate tags. It can be rather satisfying, and it doesn’t take much reflection or discernment. A mere negative visceral reaction to someone is usually sufficient grounds for a damning label.
ROME - Captors released a Franciscan priest who was among about 20 Christians kidnapped from a Syrian village near the border with Turkey, said the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.
VATICAN CITY - A married couple from Brazil told Pope Francis and the Synod of Bishops that the Church should stop giving "contradictory advice" on birth control and help Catholics obey Church teaching against contraception.
VATICAN CITY - The Church needs to find better ways to show how the Gospel message is a way of life meant to bring great joy to couples and families, and is not a burdensome set of rules aimed at exclusion, Archbishop Paul-André Durocher told the extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the family.
Although I grew up in a loving, safe and nurturing family and community, one of the dominant memories of my childhood and teenage years is that of being restless and somehow discontent. My life always seemed too small, too confined, a life away from what was important in the world. I was forever longing to be more connected to life and I feared that other people didn’t feel that way and that I was somehow singular and unhealthy in my restlessness.
OTTAWA - Prostitution Bill C-36 passed third reading in the House of Commons Oct. 6 by a 156-124 vote and now heads to the Senate, on track for passage by December.
MONTREAL - A Montreal parish is rallying behind a Catholic family that is battling deportation to Cameroon where it faces an uncertain and perhaps even dangerous future.
October 10, 2014
It has been a month since recent high school graduates like me began their lives outside of the walls of high school. Be it post-secondary education or the workplace, beginning a new chapter in life is like moving away from a place you once called home. The “real world” — that is, the people and culture outside of your home — is seemingly heedless.
Conchita D’Souza, a second-year Christianity and Culture student at the University of Toronto, equates voting with flipping a stone into a pond. Each vote can create “ripples that will go towards influencing society,” she said.
As the ebola death toll in West Africa surpassed 3,300, North American media were reporting a single, isolated case in Dallas with minute-by-minute, 24-hour coverage. For the Caritas network the focus is on Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone where fragile, underfunded health care systems are faced with daily deaths and new infections.