{mosimage}ROME  - Did Prime Minister Stephen Harper consume communion at the Catholic funeral of former Governor General Romeo LeBlanc on July 3? Or did he put it in his pocket as anonymous YouTube film of the funeral alleges?

Those were the questions that consumed journalists who followed Harper to the 2009 G-8 Summit in L’Aquila while colleagues at home tracked down the story.

{mosimage}It's almost as if Pope Benedict XVI had Canada and its controversies in mind as he penned the first social encyclical of the 21st century.

By updating Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio, and making an explicit link between church teaching on economic development and Pope Paul's teaching on human sexuality, abortion and contraception — Humanae Vitae — it was as though Benedict had the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace in mind, said Michael Casey.

"It will certainly inform our discussions on policies and on our orientation. It will be stuff to work on over the next few months," said Casey, executive director of Development and Peace.

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - Receiving the woolen pallium from the Pope underlines an archbishop's unique ties to the vicar of Christ in Rome and to his own flock of parishioners back home, said a number of archbishops from Canada and the United States and Canada.

Archbishops J. Michael Miller of Vancouver and Pierre-Andre Fournier of Rimouski, Que., were among the 34 bishops from 20 countries who received the white, narrow circular band called a pallium during a special Mass in St. Peter's Basilica June 29.

Allegations against the Canadian bishops' development agency are a "counter-witness to that Gospel spirit that should guide all Christians," say Bishops Martin Currie and Francois Lapierre.

Currie and Lapierre's inquiry into LifeSiteNews.com stories that accused the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace of giving money to groups which advocate for legal abortion in Mexico clears the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace of involvement in pushing for legal abortion in Mexico. Having consulted with Mexico's bishops and interviewed five Development and Peace partners whom LifeSiteNews.com said were promoting legal access to abortion, the bishops "did not find any evidence that they have been implicated in promoting abortion," said the report released publicly June 29 (see http://tinyurl.com/mcrpk4 ).

{mosimage}TORONTO - Toronto Auxiliary Bishop emeritus Pearse Lacey remembers the first time parishioners at Etobicoke’s Transfiguration of Our Lord got a taste of Vatican II.

Responding to the Council’s 1963 Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Lacey introduced what was then considered a novel idea: highlighting the laity’s role in the Eucharist.

So Lacey tried something new. He placed a ciborium at the church’s entrance and asked people to put a host in it as they walked in.

{mosimage}Canada Day celebrations will almost certainly praise this country as a tolerant, peaceable nation with a highly developed, secular and multicultural, democratic culture.

That wasn’t what St. Jean de Brebeuf had in mind when he established the first European settlement in Upper Canada in 1639. The mystic Jesuit priest and missionary had a vision of a Christian kingdom in the heart of North America — a theocracy, really — where European and Huron cultures would be mutually transformed by faith in Jesus Christ.

Brebeuf’s vision lasted just 10 years, and the Jesuits ended up burning down their tiny experiment at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons near present-day Midland, Ont., in 1649 to prevent the village falling into the hands of the Iroquois (proxies for the Dutch, whose commercial interests in the fur trade opposed those of France).

{mosimage}The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace’s Mexican partners were “imprudent” when they signed a civil society submission to the United Nations on human rights, but Canada’s bishops have found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Development and Peace or its partners, Archbishop James Weisgerber has declared.

The report into allegations made by LifeSiteNews.com that Development and Peace funded Mexican groups lobbying in favour of legal abortion will include recommendations for tighter protocols on future partnerships, but those recommendations won’t be revealed until all the bishops have had a chance to read the report, said the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ president.

{mosimage} TORONTO - Who ever thought the Bible could be improved? Well, as Hebrew Scriptures Professor Eugene Ulrich told a packed audience June 23, it has been. And it took the unearthing of the now famous Dead Sea Scrolls, on display at the Royal Ontario Museum until Jan. 3, to do so.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that the text of the Bible was remarkably faithfully transmitted over the past 2,000 years. So we all can breathe a big sigh of relief,” Ulrich said during his lecture, The Impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Bible, one of fourteen presentations in a special lecture series about the scrolls that will feature a variety of scholars until Dec. 15.

{mosimage}The Canadian Council of Churches wants to know who you will be praying with and for between Jan. 18 and 25 next year.

Using its web site and Twitter account, the CCC has launched a pair of surveys to find out how parishes and congregations are praying during the annual Week of  Prayer for Christian Unity. If the answer is that your Catholic parish doesn’t do much to observe the world-wide, Vatican-supported week for Christian unity, they want to hear that too.

{mosimage}TORONTO - There have been protests with thousands of Tamils out on the streets, but on June 11 the young Tamil activists organized a different sort of gathering in a basement classroom on the campus of the University of Toronto.

A student-organized Tamil multi-faith prayer service featured prayers from Sikhs, Christians, Hindus and Muslims and testimonials from young Tamils whose families have been devastated by the war in Sri Lanka.