You know an app must be right when Pope Francis gives it his official blessing. 

From Oct. 3-28, our YSN reporting team followed the discussions taking place in Rome at the Synod of Bishops on young people. Below, a few members from across the country share their own thoughts. 

At 60, Fr. Ron MacDonell is the youngest of the Scarboro Missions priests. Even as his fellow priests back home in Toronto move into a seniors’ residence, MacDonell is working today in the upper reaches of the Amazon basin among Brazil’s Makushi people, bringing together village elders and young people to recover their vanishing language and culture.

CALGARY – Maddie Catling is ready to be a Catholic warrior for the Church. 

Thanks to the excellent coverage by Salt + Light Television, I was able to follow the “Catholica 200” celebrations in St. Boniface, Man., marking the bicentennial of the arrival of the first French missionaries in the Canadian West. 

The Lord God called to the man and said, “Where are you?”

Recently I found myself in the basement of a downtown church surrounded by a confirmation class of children, teachers and parents. The church sits in an area where the outreach of the Church on the Street is most challenging, and the class had responded to the call of Pope Francis in The Joy of the Gospel: “We cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings; we need to move from a passive ministry of mere conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral mission.” 

Mark Mallett was close to losing his religion when he rediscovered his Catholic faith through music.