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October 27, 2015
WASHINGTON - The U.S. House voted to block federal funding for a year to affiliates of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and redirect the money to community health centres.
OTTAWA - Canada’s Catholic bishops have issued a plea for “urgent action” to meet the unprecedented needs of refugees fleeing war, persecution, natural disasters and the effects of climate.
October 28, 2015
TORONTO - More than 105 refugee families fleeing unrest in the Middle East will be arriving in Canada in the next three to four months through the efforts of Project Hope.
VATICAN CITY - As the death toll from an earthquake in Pakistan and Afghanistan continued to rise, Pope Francis called for prayers and concrete aid for survivors.
VATICAN CITY - The world expects all people of religious faith to work with everyone for a better future, Pope Francis told representatives of major religions.
VATICAN CITY - The first task of the Church “is not to hand down condemnations or anathemas, but to proclaim the mercy of God,” Pope Francis said in a blunt address to delegates at the Synod of Bishops on the Family.
VATICAN CITY - If the Catholic Church did more to recognize and promote women it could help their status across society, said the Synod of Bishops on the Family.
October 29, 2015
The Synod is not over. Synod delegates may have returned home after three weeks of intense work that produced 94 paragraphs of advice to Pope Francis, including three vaguely worded paragraphs concerning communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics and what sort of welcome the Church extends to gay Catholics. But that’s not the last word.
VATICAN CITY - One of the most repeated themes during the Synod on the Family was the need for a more biblically based approach. The original working document for the Synod — the Instrumentum Laboris — came in for repeated and severe criticism for taking as its starting point sociological data rather than the Word of God.
In his closing address at the Synod of Bishops on the Family, Pope Francis said the meeting of Church leaders was never intended to solve all the problems that afflict modern families. The Synod, he said, was a forum to study the family and assess its many challenges “fearlessly, without burying our heads in the sand.”
The brutality of life on the streets could not defeat this ‘I used to be famous’ woman There are evenings when I am walking the streets that deep theological insights come abruptly to my mind. This was one such evening.
32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) Nov. 8 (1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44) Fear is often the enemy of generosity and can choke off the better parts of our nature. Many people are unwilling to share from fear of not having enough rather than conscious selfishness.
The world takes our breath away as we honour its author, the Lord “Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of Heaven and a son of Earth.”
A woman was sitting with her spiritual director. Not quite “sitting”; collapsed like a rag doll, listlessly staring at the floor. He looked at her. He urged her to pray: stop doing, stop trying to get herself out of the dark place she was in. “What good will it do?” she bleated, equally unsurprisingly. She hadn’t read Richard Dawkins’ description of prayer as uselessly “murmuring in our heads,” but would have resonated. Then, bitterly: “Is God going to send me a rose?”
Pope Francis says God can only love and not condemn and that love is His weakness and our victory. He said we are so closely bound to God’s love that nothing can sever us from it. That was the message at the heart of the Pope’s homily delivered on Thursday (29th October) at the Santa Marta residence.
VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state, said an apostolic exhortation on the family following the recently concluded Synod of Bishops could be released soon.
The largest private alumni donation ever to St. Francis Xavier University will help bring post-secondary education to more of Nova Scotia’s marginalized people.
BEIJING - China's Communist Party leaders announced they would change the nation's one-child policy, which most strictly applied to Han Chinese living in urban areas of the country.
October 30, 2015
During my high school years, I struggled with mental illness. I felt hopeless. I was alone. I was hurting and I knew that nothing could change the way I felt. It was during this time that I grew in my faith.
TORONTO - Fourteen “highly invested” parishes and nine new parishes will be hiring new youth ministers within the next few months thanks to funds raised through the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Family of Faith campaign.