There was a headline on a story from a reputable Canadian website earlier this month that posed a rather startling question: “Will COVID-19 kill Christmas?”

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it is the fragility of our lives.

There were more than 30,000 people gathered around the National War Memorial in Ottawa for Remembrance Day ceremonies last year. This Nov. 11 — with COVID-19 restrictions — there will be no more than 100.

The news that the Vatican and the Chinese government extended their ground-breaking but controversial 2018 provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops was met with a mixture of skepticism, hope and dismay.

Religious leaders across Canada are making a valiant attempt at slowing down this speeding train called Medical Assistance in Dying, and we can only hope their appeal is not falling on entirely deaf ears.

The four nuns who arrived in Toronto (population 30,000) on Oct. 7, 1851 had a single task — to care for children orphaned by the typhus epidemic that had ravaged the Irish Catholic immigrant community.

It has been 794 years since St. Francis of Assisi left this Earth, but you can find his fingerprints all over the Pope’s latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti .

Canada joined an exclusive international club last month, but there is no reason to brag.

As Canada’s bishops gathered on computer screens this past week, bypassing the “norm” of their usual annual plenary, the old saying “what a difference a year makes” was probably uttered more than once.

The Pope’s first official trip outside Rome in more than seven months couldn’t come at a better, or more critical, time.