FREE access to the digital edition and archives until September 2. Click here. →
Browse › 2015 › September
September 8, 2015
VATICAN CITY - Given the ongoing crisis of people fleeing from war and poverty, Pope Francis asked every parish and religious community in Europe to take in a family of refugees as a concrete sign of hope and God's mercy.
GUATEMALA CITY - Mass at the Divine Providence Parish, celebrated shortly after polls closed in this country's recent elections, included intentions. The parishioners prayed for the "people and pastors" of Guatemala, along with the country itself -- where citizens, protesting peacefully for months, forced a president accused of corruption to resign in the days prior to the Sept. 6 vote.
JERUSALEM - Israel’s 47 Christian schools are entering the second week of an open-ended strike to protest ongoing cuts in government allocations, which they attribute to government discrimination against minority religious groups.
TORONTO - One hundred more families, three-million more dollars and an infinite well of compassion will be the Archdiocese of Toronto’s response to photos of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s tiny, lifeless body lying on a Turkish beach.
September 9, 2015
JERUSALEM - As Israeli students began their second week of classes Sept. 6, thousands of students and teachers from Christian schools converged in front of the Israeli prime minister's office to protest government budget cuts to their schools.
OTTAWA - Catholic bioethicist Moira McQueen has refused an invitation to sit on a provincial/territorial panel developing guidelines for physician-assisted death because she feared being used to show that all sides of the issue were consulted.
TORONTO - The Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, the most senior Catholic bishop in Syria, says the West must share responsibility for the fate of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler pictured drowned on a Turkish beach on newspaper front pages worldwide.
OKLAHOMA CITY - The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics briefly used its official Facebook page on Aug. 26 to debate marijuana and the Bible. After two commenters posted references to the Bible in response to a story about the detrimental effects of marijuana on the brain, a bureau employee engaged them in a theological argument.
OTTAWA- Bishop Raymond Poisson has been named by Pope Francis as new bishop of the Joliette diocese in Quebec.
PARIS - Europe’s refugee crisis has inspired faith communities across the continent to open their doors to the newcomers and advocate for more state and private help, but the urgency of their calls and the depth of responses to them vary from country to country.
September 10, 2015
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis warned against conflicts within the Christian community and said priests who struggle to be merciful should not be hearing confessions. He also reiterated his condemnation of those who produce lethal arms to be used in wars and said Christians must forgive and show mercy in all that they do. The Pope’s remarks came during his homily at Mass on Thursday (10th September) celebrated at the Santa Marta residence.
In a just-released book Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet has poured cold water on arguments that the Church should allow communion for divorced and remarried Catholics.
Just because something is politically correct doesn’t mean that it might not also be correct. Sometimes we have to swallow hard to accept truth.
25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) Sept. 20 (Wisdom 2:12, 17-20; Psalm 54; James 3:16-4:3; Mark 9:30-37) Why was Wisdom’s holy and righteous man such an inviting target? One would think that an inspiring example of goodness and righteousness would be welcome. But truly upright individuals generate a lot of resentment, guilt and anger. Their presence can provoke a nagging sense of what we could or should be.
Migrant crisis leads one to wonder: how many are real refugees, how many are queue-jumpers? The day after our friend George was elected MP, I walked to his house with a bottle of champagne. It wasn’t chilled, so George and his wife took another bottle from the fridge. When I left them I was a little woozy but not so woozy that I couldn’t do a little lobbying: “I know, George, that if the question comes up in the House, you will speak on behalf of the Middle Eastern Christians.”
Pictures of a dead three-year-old Syrian child washed ashore in Turkey made the world weep, but will little Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body move world populations and their governments to act?
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis' reformed rules for marriage annulment cases, making the process simpler, quicker and less expensive, respond to calls that bishops from around the world have been making since before the 1980 Synod of Bishops on the family convoked by St. John Paul II.
TORONTO - Revelation may be the last book of the Bible, but it certainly is not the least important when it comes to understanding the Bible, says Cardinal Thomas Collins.
VATICAN CITY - The Vatican's doctrinal congregation upheld a Spanish bishop's refusal to allow a transsexual person to be a godparent.
September 11, 2015
KINGSBRIDGE, ONT. - After an almost three-year hiatus, the echo of the uplifting song “Revival” by Robin Mark could be heard inside the former St. Joseph’s Church, a beautiful turn-of-the-century, red brick church building in Ashfield Township in Ontario’s Huron County.