TORONTO - Nobody is claiming Occupy Toronto protesters are a Catholic crowd. Not many have Bibles and copies of Pope Benedict XVI's latest encyclical in their backpacks. But it's amazing how many echoes of Scripture and Catholic social teaching there are in the worldwide Occupy movement, say Scripture scholars and social teaching experts.

"The issue is Mammon. To me it's very biblical," said Redemptorist Father Paul Hansen, director of the Redemptorist Biblical Justice Consultancy.

Hansen spent a day among the protesters camped out next to the Anglican St. James Cathedral in downtown Toronto. The demands he heard reminded him of Jesus cleansing the temple (John 2:13-25).

Pilarski celebrates the gift of motherhood

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TORONTO - At the height of her career, Dorothy Pilarski was training hundreds of women how to be successful in business. But Pilarski says her most rewarding endeavour has been as a mother to her two children.

In her new book, Motherhood Matters: Inspirational Stories, Letters, Quotes & Prayers for Catholic Moms, Pilarski invites women to reflect on the vocation of motherhood. She shares personal experiences through inspirational stories on the joys and challenges of motherhood that show how she has shared the Catholic faith with her son and daughter.

“We need a movement to reclaim motherhood to the dignity that Our Lady (gave) it,” Pilarski said.

Lisa LaFlamme - Reading the news and keeping the faith

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TORONTO - Lisa LaFlamme’s Catholic faith has helped her learn empathy, the concept of truth and “doing right by another person.”

“Those are the same principles that guide good journalism as far as getting to the truth on something and particularly focusing on the oppressed in the world,” the new chief anchor and senior editor of CTV National News told The Catholic Register.

She has taken these values with her to the prestigious position she assumed Sept. 5 when LaFlamme replaced Lloyd Robertson, the long-time anchor known as Canada’s “most trusted news anchor.”

The changing face of today’s university campus

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Along with every university in Canada, the nation’s Catholic colleges are stuffed to the gills with undergraduates. More than 90,000 Ontario students showed up for first-year classes this fall, almost 2,000 more than the double cohort year 2003, when the province’s universities were accepting two-years’ worth of high school graduates because Grade 13 had been eliminated.

“When I run a principal’s orientation session at the beginning of the year, I can only fit 250 into the room. We have 900 first-year students,” said David Sylvester, principal at King’s University College in London, Ont. “We can’t even fit them into a room to talk to them.”

Sylvester looks forward to running a more efficient orientation session in the fall of 2013, when the new $11-million Daryl J. King Student Life Centre will be completed. The new complex, designed to meet stringent environmental standards, will include a theatre, student union offices, informal meeting space, a cafe and games area and a learning commons.

Sacred Heart satisfies Peterborough’s hunger for Catholic education

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Peterborough’s first Catholic liberal arts college is responding to the need for solid Catholic education for youth in the diocese, says Fr. Joseph Devereaux, chancellor of the Peterborough diocese.

“The focus is to provide something for youth that will help them,” said Devereaux.

“(It’s about) what can we do for youth intellectually, spiritually, socially. A well-rounded education can help provide that.”

Research centre to mine insights of Vatican II

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OTTAWA - A new research centre at Ottawa’s Saint Paul University will study the contribution Canadians made to Vatican II as well as how the Council has shaped religious communities here.

A year before the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, the Research Centre for Vatican II and 21st Century Catholicism launched Oct. 13. It will examine ecumenism and interreligious dialogue in contemporary society and look at issues of progress and decline in the Catholic community.

College president sees similarities between priesthood, armed forces

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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.

Study finds divide exists in how Catholics read church news

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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.

Dance troupe rises from Haitian rubble

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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.

Taking on China’s ‘gendercide’

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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.”

Evidence 'incontrovertible' that priests are happy

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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.