I have been listening to people within my (Catholic) faith community wrestle in a deeper way with Truth and Reconciliation this summer. The reckoning has been too long coming. Saskatchewan columnist Doug Cuthandrecently wrote that Canadians may be waking up to face our collective residential school history.  I hope he’s right. And I hope that the same will be said of the Catholic Church in this season.

In the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar summons the magicians, enchanters and sorcerers of his kingdom to explain a troubling dream he has had. In a test of their ability, he declines to tell them what he dreamt, but instead insists that they reveal it to him and put it into context. The Chaldeans respond that no one could do such a thing “except the gods,” prompting the king to issue a decree that all wise men be executed.

Candidates for beatification don’t get to choose where they are beatified.

Warm weather can bring out the best and the worst in the parishioners of the church on the street. It can lull them into a state of lassitude that can only be equalled by a homily that has lost sight of its destination, or else stir them into frenetic anger fuelled by an assortment of illicit stimulants.

“We didn’t have any houses destroyed.”

Pope Francis’ decision to tighten restrictions on the use of the Tridentine liturgy has been the most significant global Catholic news story of the summer.

Ageless Mass

Thanks so much to Charles Lewis for his wonderful column “A discouraging message on Latin Mass” (Aug. 1-8). My sentiment was “he took the words right out of my mouth.” And I know many folks that agree 100 per cent, including young people who have discovered the beauty and truth of the Mass of the ages. And yes, unfortunately Pope Francis is causing far more division than the Latin Mass ever could.

The images are still so fresh in our memories, the feelings still so easily recalled, that it is incredible to realize that 20 years have passed since the events of a day that will always be known as 9/11.

When the Russian dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet empire in 1974, he wrote a famous exhortation to his countrymen entitled “Live Not By Lies.” Solzhenitsyn spent years doing hard labour in prison camps, survived and dared to write about his experience in The Gulag Archipelago. Not only did he write his own story, but he gathered and recounted the tragic stories of those who didn’t make it out alive.

Could this most troubling of summers for the Catholic Church across Canada spark its resurgence as a vital participant in the country’s public life? Call me a sun-addled optimist, but I carry a conviction it can so long as we avoid thinking of a phoenix rising from ashes and instead heed the Gospel call to commit ourselves to the long, hard, patient work of building Christ’s Church.