Youth ministry is about awakening souls and being alive in God’s love and mercy, said Dan Dematte, the keynote speaker at last week’s Canadian Catholic Youth Ministry Network conference.

MONTREAL - Canada’s first Syriac Catholic bishop says his immediate challenge is to minister to refugees from the Middle East and at the same time move forward with plans for evangelization in his vast new Canadian diocese as he prepares for the demands of the Easter season.

It was a good idea that didn’t work. Before the reform of the Roman calendar in the 1960s, the octave day of Christmas — Jan. 1 — was celebrated as the feast of the circumcision and holy name, as Jewish boys were named on the eighth day after birth. There was a minor feast of the divine maternity of Mary in the calendar on Oct. 11, which St. John XXIII chose for the opening of Vatican II, and now serves as his feast day.

Blessed Junipero Serra’s motto was “always forward, never back.” But as the date nears for his canonization by Pope Francis, Serra’s life of faithful evangelization is being fiercely — and many say unfairly — questioned by detractors who insist on looking back into the life and times of the 18th-century missionary priest.

ROME - The canonization of Blessed Junipero Serra honours a famous missionary who was motivated by love of God, but it also is a call to recognize how the process of evangelization must respect peoples and their cultures, said the head of the Franciscan order.

LONDON - Catholic bishops in England and Wales hope to establish evangelization teams to transform about 5,000 churches into "missionary parishes."

QUITO, Ecuador - Catholics will never be effective evangelizers if they are squabbling among themselves, and they cannot show the world how faith in Christ responds to the human yearning for freedom and peace if they are divided, Pope Francis said.

VATICAN CITY - The Institute for the Works of Religion, commonly known as the Vatican bank, showed a large jump in profits in 2014 as it continued to winnow its accounts.

WINDSOR, ONT. - Between the feast days of Canada’s newest saints, the archbishop of Quebec City argued for an authentically Canadian approach to the evangelization of native peoples that offers a model for the evangelization of culture today.

Twenty years of youth ministry is a big deal, which is why NET Ministries of Canada decided to celebrate the milestone with a year-long celebration.

In Sr. Anna Chan’s earlier career in retail management, she sought happiness through a love of fine clothes, shoes and bags.

“I was looking for happiness,” said Chan, “but I was looking in the wrong place.”

One of the hardest things about moving to a small town is integrating into the community. After my last column was published, I was offered a job in northeastern Alberta and found myself moving to the town of St. Paul. It’s the centre of the diocese and at approximately 6,000 people it’s the smallest municipality I’ve ever called home.

TORONTO - Giving advice to the Pope is not a one-way street. It begins with Pope Francis giving advice to his advisors — including Canadian theologian Moira McQueen.

In mid-November, Pope Francis gave an address to new communities and ecclesial movements in the Church that was, even by his high standards, utterly inspiring.

Growing up in Nigeria, Fr. Maurice Emelu never imagined his calling would take him around the world and eventually put him in front of TV cameras that reach up to 230 million homes in 144 nations.