It is difficult to envision peace coming soon to war-torn Syria. Lasting peace, the type that brings security and respect for human dignity, is unlikely without religious freedom, and there is no apparent will among Syria’s warring factions to embrace this inalienable human right.
In proclaiming the Year of Faith last October, Pope Benedict emphasized a need to re-evangelize wherever secular culture was tugging at Christianity’s deep roots. The recent publication of census data from Statistics Canada underscores why Benedict was so concerned.
Last week Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who resigned as archbishop of Edinburgh just before the recent conclave upon revelations of “lewd behaviour” and “drunken fumblings,” spoke for the first time since press reports led him to absent himself from the conclave. The accusations were made by Scottish priests who reported O’Brien had made advances after excessive drinking in years past. The accusations did not involve minors.
Millions of people across the developing world are longing to work and will take almost any job, at any wage in just about any workplace. They’re that desperate.
In the past two decades, government-sponsored gambling in Canada has more than quintupled. The average adult now spends about $515 annually on lotteries, slot machines, video display terminals, horse racing and casinos. Together, these dreamers and optimists drop almost $14 billion a year into government coffers.
TORONTO - Gambling is a cruel illusion that causes social harm and family breakdown and should not be promoted by governments, Cardinal Thomas Collins has written in a pastoral letter.
A doctor on trial as an alleged serial killer would normally be front page news. But the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, on trial in Philadelphia for seven first-degree murders, has received little media attention.
Only those who have run marathons fully understand the event’s power to shred body, soul and psyche. Runners of half-marathons don’t half understand that power because the full 42.1 kilometres does not split arithmetically in two. It is commonly said the marathon truly begins at 30 kilometres.
Fifty years after the publication of Pacem in Terris, one of the most important papal encyclicals of the 20th century, the world has changed radically but the 1963 teaching of Blessed Pope John XXIII remains as powerful as ever.
As someone who can smell the incense from the last pew of the church, it was no challenge for me to sniff the billows of the beer coming off Ralph Klein.
Voters in large, pluralistic democracies rarely reach consensus on any substantive issue, but the opinion of Canadians on sex-selective abortion is near unanimous. They overwhelmingly denounce it.