DAUPHIN, Manitoba – Ken Yakielashek, a Catholic and semiretired farmer in the Canadian Prairies, says he remembers when Christians of varying denominations “wouldn’t talk to one another.”

My youth had both its strengths and its weaknesses. I grew up on a farm in the heart of the Canadian prairies, a second-generation immigrant. Our family was a large one and the small farm we lived on gave us enough to live on, though just enough.