PETOSKEY, Mich. - Off the picturesque tourist town of Petoskey lays a beautiful white marble crucifix. But you won’t find it in or even near any church.

That’s because it is submerged offshore, in Lake Michigan, in the waters of Little Traverse Bay where it has been since 1962.

How it came to be there is an interesting story.

TORONTO - Michael Carrera knows how vanity driven the fitness industry is. Having worked in gyms for more than a decade, he sees showoffs all the time. And since you can’t change vanity by focusing on vanity, he decided to focus on his faith, pairing it with his profession.

Carrera is a certified exercise physiologist and personal trainer with a masters in exercise physiology. He’s also a parishioner at St. Benedict parish in Toronto.

TORONTO - On TV serious, scientific crime scene investigators appear within hours of a murder to gather minute, detailed evidence. Fr. Patrick Desbois of France and his team of micro-historians show up three generations after 1.5-million murders committed by Nazi Einsatzgruppen soldiers to piece together precisely who was killed, when, how and by whom.

“Each time when we land in Belarus or Ukraine or Russia I tell my team, ‘They are waiting for

us,’ ” Desbois said in an interview from Paris. “Very frequently people ask me, ‘Father, why do you come so late?’ ”

TORONTO - He endured permanent estrangement from most of his relatives after converting to Catholicism and faced suspicions from some of his fellow bishops. But these crosses couldn’t dim the light of faith that guided Cardinal John Henry Newman in living out his ministry as scholar, preacher and teacher.

Today, Newman’s light and legacy are embodied in the Newman Centres and clubs on campuses across North America and Australia which bear his name.

Newman lived a life of prayer, study and sacrifice and his example of faith was to be celebrated and recognized on Sept. 19 when Pope Benedict XVI was to beatify the 19th-century English cardinal in Birmingham, England.

In the hustle and bustle of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, one of the places students can seek refuge is at the Newman Centre and its chapel just across from the Robarts Library.

TORONTO - This year marks 500 years of the Dominicans fighting for the rights of the underdog in the Americas.

“The Dominican order in the Americas has promoted justice, education and intellectual life all over the Americas,” said Dominican Friar Marcos Ramos, superior of the Dominicans’ Aquinas House in Toronto.

Actor and director Emilio Estevez reluctantly went to Spain to tell a story about how faith, hope and walking are all part of the American way of overcoming hard times.

Estevez told The Catholic Register his new film The Way is about American spirituality. The story follows four characters walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Spain.

The pilgrimage is to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galacia, where tradition has it the remains of the apostle St. James are buried.

TORONTO - Aisha Aberdeen wasn’t born on third base, and she doesn’t imagine she hit a triple. But as the school year starts, the former foster child is ready to trot home.

Aberdeen has done what almost no kid who has been through foster care ever does. She’s graduated from the University of Toronto with a double major in forest conservation and Caribbean studies. Now she’s planning graduate studies in the forests of Kenya this year.

Fewer than 44 per cent of children who wind up in foster care complete high school before they’re 21. Only 20 per cent of those (8.8 per cent of the total) go on to any form of post-secondary education.  

Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan is about to unleash a new dimension in a spiritual crisis that already grips nearly 80,000 problem gamblers in Ontario, addiction counsellors say.

Duncan announced in August that the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation will be “extending its brand” into the Internet. By 2012 the province will deal poker, sell lottery tickets and run bingo games online. The province worries its citizens already spend $400 million a year on unregulated, off-shore gambling sites. It expects the provincial take from OLG-run web sites will be in the neighbourhood of $100 million. Charities may be given the opportunity to fundraise directly by running online bingo games.

But the toll in addiction will be high, particularly for young males most at risk for Internet gambling addictions, said Christiana Ashabo, Southdown Institute’s addiction and relapse prevention therapist.

It’s been 13 years since Mother Teresa died of a heart attack at age 87 on Sept. 5, 1997 in Calcutta. Aug. 26 marks her 100th birthday.

How well I remember those days . . . my own father died on Aug. 27 that year. One week later, Mother Teresa was called home to God. I provided commentary of her funeral for several networks in Canada. The pomp, precision and sombre majesty of Princess Diana’s London farewell one week earlier were hardly visible in the turbulent scenes of Mother Teresa’s simple wooden casket riding on a gun carriage through the streets of Calcutta for her state funeral.

Mother Teresa’s life was not a sound byte, but rather a metaphor for selfless devotion and holiness. Her most famous work began in 1950 with the opening of the first Nirmal Hriday (Tender Heart) home for the dying and destitute in Calcutta. Her words remain inscribed on the walls of that home: “Nowadays the most horrible disease is not leprosy or tuberculosis. It is the feeling to be undesirable, rejected, abandoned by all.”

Canada is not like Calcutta. Mother Teresa was not like most Canadians. But somehow the life of the tiny Albanian nun who ministered to the abandoned, the forgotten and the dying in Calcutta speaks to Canadians.

August 26 is the centenary anniversary of the birth of Blessed Mother Teresa and events are taking place worldwide to honour the occasion.

At a July showing of relics of Mother Teresa at St. Barnabus parish in Toronto, Sr. Mary Frank of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity saw people standing in line with tears in their eyes.