{mosimage}TORONTO - The Ten Commandments will take the spotlight at the Royal Ontario Museum this month.

Visitors to the ROM Oct. 10-18 will be able to see the world’s oldest and best preserved parchment scroll of the Ten Commandments in a display separate from the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition. The display will only be open a total of 80 hours over the eight days.

“I doubt these will come to Canada again,” said Dan Rahimi, a ROM curator. “The scrolls are very sensitive to light and that’s why we have it for such a very short time.”

Like the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are being displayed on rotation every few months — eight at a time — the age of the scrolls makes them prone to deterioration the longer they are open to the public eye.
The Ten Commandments, the largest of the Hebrew scrolls found, is a must-see document during a ROM visit, Rahimi added.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Widowed, separated or divorced Catholics can find hope again through New Beginnings, a ministry founded and operated in Toronto since the late 1970s.

Often mistaken for a dating service, the ministry actually aims at guiding its participants through their grief, anger, confusion or guilt, while helping them on a spiritual level.

The ministry’s director, Fr. Rudy Volk, said numbers have declined since its original retreat headquarters, St. Joseph’s Morrow Park, was sold three years ago, and he hopes the word will spread New Beginnings is still dedicated to the retreats and discussion groups via new locations.

A group of leader-volunteers brings years of experience and expertise to the ministry.

{mosimage}TORONTO - There are 17,000 people living in 19 high-rise buildings crammed into just two city blocks in St. James Town — Canada’s most densely populated neighbourhood. Two of those 17,000 chose St. Jamestown over an historic, six-bedroom brick home in a quiet, leafy neighbourhood near High Park.

Jesuit provincial superior Fr. Jim Webb, and his right hand man, or socius, Fr. Peter Bisson have been living in a three-bedroom apartment in one of Toronto’s poorest neighbourhoods for 10 months.
Webb believes the Jesuit vow of poverty has to be more than a theory.

“If you say that material things are not important but then there’s no sign of it, it lacks credibility,” he said.

{mosimage}TORONTO - “Peace is hard,” Justin Trudeau told more than 4,000 Catholic students gathered in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Peace Garden Sept. 29.
Nobody disagreed with him.

“We need your ideas, we need your vision, we need your dreams,” the Liberal Member of Parliament and ex-teacher declared.

Twenty-five years after his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, turned the sod on Toronto’s Peace Garden, his son was entrusting the ideals of peace and social justice to teenagers struggling with homework and hormones.

For Sr. Marilyn Larocque things that were true, essential and necessary 350 years ago are just as true, essential and necessary today.

Larocque and her religious community, the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, have been celebrating the 350th anniversary of their arrival in Canada this year, and discovering how much they are in sync with their founders.
“We’re still pioneers,” said Larocque. “Our founder Jerome (Le Royer de la Dauversiere) and our first sister (Venerable) Marie de la Ferre, they were pioneers.”

Back then the RHSJs pioneered by establishing hospitals and teaching in the first schools in New France. There are new needs today, and therefore the sisters are pioneering new ministries.

TORONTO - The demand for eucharistic adoration appears to have grown in Toronto, thanks in part to a Serra Club of Downtown Toronto member who discovered a calling to promote it.

Zinnia Milburn has been praying for both an increase in vocations and a stronger devotion to eucharistic adoration since becoming a Serran in 2002. The Serra Club is an organization that promotes and fosters vocations to the priesthood and consecrated religious life.

“Adoration is very important,” Milburn said. “He is there body, soul and divinity. You are talking right there to Him.”

{mosimage}TORONTO - Christopher West, a popular speaker on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, will be in Toronto Oct. 16-17 for a presentation on “discovering the master plan for your life.”

Invited by the God, Sex and the Meaning of Life Ministry, West hopes to crack open difficult theology, as he usually does, for the average person.

“My goal is to stir hope that there is a banquet that corresponds to the hunger of the human heart,” West said. “Every human being has this ache, this yearning, this longing. We’re looking for something and what this seminar does is it taps into that hunger and awakens us.”

{mosimage}Before world leaders gather for their G20 summit in Muskoka next year, world faith leaders will be at the University of Winnipeg to pray that the world’s rich countries get their act together.

The G20 are on track to achieve 51 per cent of the Millennium Development Goals — promises made in 2001, by the G8, which was replaced on Sept. 25 by the G20. World leaders promised to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, fight AIDS, ensure environmental sustainability and establish a new global partnership for development by 2015. The 2010 World Religions Summit aims to remind the G20 of the unfilled promises.

{mosimage}More women are having more babies, but still not enough to sustain Canada’s population, reports Statistics Canada.

The latest numbers are from 2007 and show a 3.7-per-cent increase in births over 2006. It’s the fastest increase in the birth rate since 1989.

The question for some observers is whether the uptick in births has anything to do with public, government policy.

“I don’t think there’s any government policy that can come around and change this way of thinking,” said Andrea Mrozek, the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada’s manager of research. “For decades now we’ve been told that we don’t need a lot of kids — kids are economically a burden, it’s difficult, it’s expensive, will there be day care? — all these sorts of things. I think it’s too late. You can’t turn around now and say, ‘By the way, we think you should have lots of kids.’ ”

{mosimage}TORONTO - Canadian Catholics are funnelling money as fast as they can to bishops in the Philippines as the dioceses in and around Manila struggle to deal with massive destruction and loss of life left by Typhoon Ketsana.

The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace immediately sent $50,000 and set up toll-free phone lines and a web site to accept donations. In Toronto, where a majority of the city’s 172,000 Filipinos are Catholic
parishioners, ShareLife is also accepting donations.