TORONTO - Toronto hosted 620 delegates of the Catholic Women’s League from Aug. 14 to 17 as they gathered for the 91st annual CWL National Convention, themed “Centred on Faith & Justice.”

The four-day conference, held at the Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre Hotel, presented four new resolutions that will be initiatives of the League in the coming year. The resolutions include prohibiting practices involving the destruction or manipulation of human embryos, providing support for children of missing and murdered aboriginal women, creating a national organ and tissue donation and transplantation registry, and mandating caffeine warning labels on energy drinks.

The resolutions were chosen from a group of more than a dozen proposals that had risen through the diocesan and provincial councils to the national level from parishes across the country.

CCCB to launch web site for new missal

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OTTAWA - A new web site for the Canadian edition of the Roman Missal will help Catholics across Canada to understand the contents of the new book.

The web site can be found at www.romanmissal.ca.

Available this fall, the web site includes resources for preparing parish bulletins and workshops. It also has links to Roman Missal-related materials from the National Liturgy Office and the Publications Service of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, who will be producing the missal.

Also, parishioners can access the web sites of Catholic dioceses across Canada concerning the Roman Missal as well as links from the Vatican and English-speaking conferences of bishops around the world.

Archbishop Burke turned aside a hockey career for the priesthood

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Archbishop emeritus Austin-Emile Burke passed up a promising career pursuing the Canadian dream in the National Hockey League to take a shot at another goal: to become a priest.

Archbishop Burke died peacefully on Aug. 12 at Evans Hall, Parkstone Enhanced Care. He was 89.

In his 61 years of priesthood, including 23 years as bishop of Yarmouth, where he was born, Archbishop Burke far exceeded his goals, says Halifax Archbishop Anthony Mancini.

Archbishop Burke's pastoral approach endeared him to parishioners during his years in Yarmouth, Mancini said.

“He was one of their own, very much appreciated by the people there,” said Mancini. “He was like a native son,” referring not only to Archbishop Burke's pastoral ministry but also his Acadian heritage.

Welfare payments via debit card welcomed

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TORONTO - When the City of Toronto stops sending out welfare cheques over the coming winter it could be a very good thing, maybe something worth expanding to the entire province, said Catholic observers of the welfare system.

Instead of welfare cheques, the city intends to issue debit cards to Torontonians on Ontario Works. While 65,000 Toronto recipients already receive welfare payments via direct deposit into their bank accounts, there are still about 35,000, most without bank accounts, who receive cheques.

"(The debit card plan) doesn't seem to degrade anybody's dignity or anything like that. It sounds like a good idea," said Bishop John Pazak, chair of the social affairs commission of the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Ontario.

For many cheque recipients the only way to turn the cheque into spendable cash has been to frequent payday loan companies that charge hefty fees for cashing a cheque. Money Mart charges $2.99 per cheque, plus three per cent of its value. The Cash Store, which operates 574 Cash Store and Instaloan branches across Canada, reported third quarter profits of $1.15 million as of June 30 on quarterly revenue of $49.7 million. The company's profits were down because of a $3 million class-action payout. The courts ruled brokerage fees charged by the payday loan company pushed interest rates above the legal limit.

Jesuit congress marks four centuries in Canada

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About 200 Jesuits and their lay collaborators gathered at Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ont., from July 27 to 31 to “remember and renew without counting the cost.”

The congress for the Jesuits in English Canada celebrated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Jesuits to Canada on May 22, 1611.

“We decided that we would use this celebration not only to remember this foundational event but also to gather all the Jesuits from English Canada plus those who work with us in significant roles in our ministries across the country,” said Fr. Erik Oland, a member of the organizing committee which began meeting about two years ago to plan the congress.

In addition, a substantial delegation of French Canadian Jesuits and one member of the Hungarian Jesuits in Canada were in attendance.

Mass for Faithful Departed unique in letting people resolve their grief

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TORONTO - Catholic Cemeteries’ Annual Mass for the Faithful Departed offers families who have lost loved ones a great source of spiritual strength, said Amy Profenna.

“By celebrating the Mass on the grounds where their loved ones are interred, it’s very special and very emotional for a lot of people,” said Profenna, manager of marketing and public relations at Catholic Cemeteries of the Archdiocese of Toronto. “The Mass plays a unique role in the resolution of grief.”

Taking place Aug. 17 at 7 p.m. at seven different cemeteries throughout the GTA, Profenna is expecting more than 12,000 people to attend the annual outdoor summer Masses. Catholic Cemeteries has been holding the Masses for about 24 years — and they typically fall close to the Feast of the Assumption.

By celebrating the Annual Mass, Catholic Cemeteries aims to fulfill its mission as a vehicle of compassion to the bereaved, said Profenna.

Fr. Naranjo ministered to migrant workers

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TORONTO - Fr. Jose Maria Naranjo took his mission as an Ardorini Missionary of serving people in rural areas seriously. As chaplain of the seasonal Mexican workers labouring in the Holland Marsh lands north of Toronto, he ran a weekly Mass in Spanish.

“When they were losing their faith or depressed, he was there for them,” said Ricardo Boscan, national president of the Hispanic Cursillo Movement. “And that definitely did a lot for this group of people.”

Fr. Naranjo passed away July 31 after months of battling cancer. Only 42 years old, he was in his 11th year of the priesthood with the Ardorini Missionaries. He was pastor of St. Mary Margaret parish in Woodbridge, Ont., where he had previously served as associate pastor and administrator.

Born in Colombia, he came to Canada in 1994 with the sponsorship of Fr. Eugene Filice, local superior of the Ardorini Missionaries. Fr. Naranjo studied philosophy at the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Colombia and theology at the Toronto School of Theology.

MP to target market for prostitution, human trafficking

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OTTAWA - Conservative MP Joy Smith plans to introduce five pieces of legislation to combat human trafficking, including a change in prostitution laws to punish men who buy sex, particularly from underage women.

“What I want to do is target the market,” she said.

Though the details of her legislation are embargoed, Smith said she likes the Nordic model that treats the women and children involved in prostitution as victims and criminalizes the men who buy sex or make money off exploiting prostitutes. Penalties could include fines and/or jail time.

The Nordic model was adopted after hard evidence showed the harms that developed in some countries that had tried legalizing prostitution, she said. Legalized prostitution leads to an increase in violence against women, increase in child rape and child pornography, and a rise in human trafficking, she said.

St. Augustine's student conquers Lake Ontario

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TORONTO - When she was eight, Rebekah Boscariol wanted to swim across the Pacific Ocean. And while it’s not quite her childhood dream, Lake Ontario — which Boscariol crossed on Aug. 6 — is still no small feat.

Boscariol, a 17-year-old student at Markham's St. Augustine Catholic High School, swam from Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to the Toronto lakeshore, where she was welcomed by a roaring crowd of supporters as she touched land for the first time in 15 hours.

"I was really happy that I was done and thankful that it's over," said Boscariol shortly after completing the swim, amidst a slew of family, friends, reporters and cameras. "And I just can't believe that I just actually did it."

Boscariol, among the youngest of the 55 registered swimmers to have crossed Lake Ontario, finished only 23 minutes shy of the current women's record. Exhausted, she admitted she was disappointed she didn't beat the record with her time of 15 hours, 33 minutes and 15 seconds.

But she had more motivation than just breaking a record.

Pro-lifers go down to the Crossroads

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TORONTO - Since the days of Terry Fox, it’s not uncommon to find people walking, running or cycling across Canada. What’s unorthodox about the Crossroads walkers is that their cause is life.

This summer, a group of Catholic university age students has been trekking across the country via highways, country roads and city streets, donning t-shirts that read “Pro-life” in large, capital letters. The group, totalling 13 young people from across Canada and the United States, began the 2011 Crossroads Pro-Life Walk in Vancouver on May 21. After traversing six provinces, they will arrive in Ottawa on Aug. 13 where their three-month journey will end with a pro-life rally. The group passed through Toronto July 30-Aug. 1, where they were joined by about 50 local supporters.

“We have to keep awareness of the plight of the unborn and their mothers in the forefront of our complacent society,” wrote John Paul Meenan, a professor at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy, who walked with the group for two weeks. “Crossroads provides just such a witness for life, for the unborn, their mothers and fathers, and all those who may be ignorant of the great and inestimable dignity of each and every human being as a person made in the image of God.”

Lahey’s sentencing hearing examines nature and scope of his child porn collection

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OTTAWA - At Bishop Raymond Lahey’s sentencing hearing here Aug. 4, his lawyers tried to show his child porn collection was smaller, less sophisticated and less hard-core than others examined by an Ottawa Police detective.

Detective Andrew Thompson, who found 588 child porn images, 60 videos and a file containing fictional stories on the bishop’s laptop and other devices, agreed Lahey’s collection was smaller than some he had investigated which had included hundreds of thousands of illegal images. And while Thompson agreed many of Lahey’s images were on the soft-core end of the spectrum, showing adolescent boys in nude poses, he stressed some were “quite graphic” and included “torture and stuff like that.”

The expert in child pornography investigations and computer forensics admitted he has seen worse child pornography than those in Lahey’s collection, but some of the bishop’s worst images “were right up there.” None of the material depicted infants, for example, but “the explicit images of torture are disturbing,” he said.

He told the court that the unusual combination of images, videos and stories showed that “Mr. Lahey has gone out and searched for stuff like that.”