Features

EDMONTON - Basilian Father Terry Kersch is a walking enigma, previously living the life of a soldier and then another as a man of the Gospel.

“The religious life and the military life, in some fundamental ways, are not all that different,” said Kersch. “In the military life, it’s the mission that takes precedence and part of your identity is putting yourself at the service of an overall mission.

MISSISSAUGA, ONT. - The Resurrection Dance Theatre of Haiti is bringing its musical and dancing talents to the Greater Toronto Area to help it rise out of the rubble of the 2010 Haitian earthquake that devastated much of its home. 

The dance troupe will be coming to Canada as part of its “Rising from the Rubble” tour to raise funds for the rebuilding of its schools, while also bringing awareness to the continued plight of Haitians still recovering from the quake.

“Since the earthquake, it’s more demanding for us to go on tour so we can rebuild our home,” lead dancer Walnes Cangas, 26, told The Catholic Register on the phone from Haiti.

WASHINGTON - A Catholic Press Association-commissioned study showed that 26 percent of adult Catholics had read a print copy of their diocesan newspaper or magazine in the past three months, but only 4 percent had gone to their computer to view the online version of the publication.

The study also revealed that readership of Catholic newspapers has held steady over the past six years, a far cry from the daily newspaper business, which has recorded continuous declines in revenue, readership, advertising and employment.

One area that showed a drop was Catholic readers' awareness of nationally distributed Catholic newspapers and magazines. But, counterbalancing the low numbers of Catholics going to the Web to read their diocesan newspaper, there was a marked increase in the percentage of Catholics visiting their parish's website, up from 9 percent in a similar study in 2005 to 14 percent in the 2011 study.

Chai Ling, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and now the founder of the American NGO All Girls Allowed, believes China’s one-child policy is undermining the moral and spiritual values of the nation, going so far as to call what’s happening there a “gendercide” — a regime of coerced abortions that brings the state right into the wombs of China’s women and distorting Chinese culture and values.

“The one-child policy is becoming more than just a population control policy,” said Chai, author of the just-released book A Heart for Freedom. “It has become a policy of control of its own population — to put fear of the state into the hearts of women, into the most intimate part of the relationship between a man and a woman.”

The accepted premise that religion is withering away in Canada is being debunked by a new study from Canada’s most published and quoted sociologist of religion, Reginald Bibby.

Bibby has just released numbers showing the percentage of Canadians committed to regular church attendance is rock solid. He largely attributes the continued vitality to a Catholic Church that is constantly renewing itself through immigration.

“If we were thinking, as so many people have been thinking, in terms of secularization — where religion is in retreat mode and things are bad and getting worse — we’re saying that really has been an interpretation that has been very inaccurate,” said the University of Lethbridge sociologist.

WASHINGTON - Msgr. Stephen Rossetti is out to correct the myth that the typical Catholic priest is "a lonely, dispirited figure living an unhealthy life that breeds sexual deviation," as a writer for the Harford Courant once put it. And he's got the data to prove it.

The research is "consistent, replicated many times and now incontrovertible" that priests as a group are happy, Rossetti told a symposium on the priesthood Oct. 5 at The Catholic University of America in Washington.

The symposium was built around Why Priests Are Happy: A Study of the Psychological and Spiritual Health of Priests, a new book by Rossetti. A priest of the diocese of Syracuse, N.Y., he is a clinical associate professor of pastoral studies at the university and former president and CEO of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Md., a treatment facility for Catholic clergy and religious.

OTTAWA - Veteran Rome-based reporter and author John Allen Jr. says there is no such thing as “the Vatican” as commonly portrayed by the mainstream media.

“Only seen from afar” is the Vatican perceived as a bunch of “Stepford wives all in lockstep,” the National Catholic Reporter’s senior correspondent recently told the Canadian Catholic School Trustees Association annual conference here.

Those who work in the Vatican come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have sometimes widely differing viewpoints, he said. 

VATICAN CITY - The Catholic Church's position on capital punishment has evolved considerably over the centuries.

And as a result, "it is not a message that is immediately understood -- that there is no room for supporting the death penalty in today's world," said a Vatican's expert on capital punishment and arms control.

Because the church has only in the past few decades begun closing the window -- if not shutting it completely -- on the permissibility of the death penalty, people who give just a partial reading of the church's teachings may still think the death penalty is acceptable today, said Tommaso Di Ruzza, desk officer at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

St. Thomas Aquinas equated a dangerous criminal to an infected limb thereby making it "praiseworthy and healthful" to kill the criminal in order to spare the spread of infection and safeguard the common good.

OTTAWA - Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins urged Catholic school trustees not to compromise fidelity to the Catholic faith as they face government pressure to adopt policies contrary to Church teaching.

Speaking to the annual conference of the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association in Ottawa Sept. 23, Collins exhorted everyone involved in Catholic education to become disciples of Christ and to fully participate in the New Evangelization, which he described as proclaiming the Word in places where the Gospel has been forgotten and God has been squeezed out.

“We are marinated in secularism,” he said, urging those present to take a look at the working document for the upcoming Synod on the New Evangelization called by Pope Benedict XVI.

TORONTO - New Toronto Catholic District School Board’s director of education Bruce Rodrigues hopes to bring the “strong work ethic” and “humble leadership” he learned in Toronto Catholic schools to his new role as head of Canada’s largest Catholic school board.

Rodrigues, associate director at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board, begins his new job on Oct. 3.

“The things that I learned (as a TCDSB student) were strong Catholic values. I learned about having a strong work ethic and the importance of diversity,” he told The Catholic Register.

Rodrigues attended St. Francis Xavier Elementary School and Chaminade College High School in Toronto. He also taught summer school at Don Bosco High School and a few months at Cardinal McGuigan High School.