OTTAWA - An all-party Senate report on children’s rights that recommends creating a children’s commissioner and abolishing spanking has raised concerns among some traditional family advocates.

{mosimage}TORONTO - In the new year a young Chinese man approached Redemptorist Father Peter Chin and asked him whether he was a Catholic priest. When Chin said “Yes,” the young man was ready to unburden himself of a secret he had carried across an ocean and through 12 time zones.

OTTAWA - Will Catholic schools continue in Ontario? That is among the questions Saint Paul University’s first holder of The Mercy and Presentation Sisters of Newfoundland Chair in Religious Education and Catechetics said she faces as she assumes her new role.

{mosimage}Calgary Bishop Fred Henry has withdrawn his support from the Calgary-based Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform.

TORONTO - Prayers and peace have been linked for as long as soldiers have marched off to war. A couple hundred people gathered at St. James Anglican Cathedral April 22 to take Canada’s turn at praying for peace, for endangered Canadian soldiers and for the men trying to kill them.

{mosimage}Toronto - St. Clare’s parish is seeing new faces these days, demonstrating how an aging inner-city parish community can find new life within its young, diverse parishioners.

WINDSOR, Ont. - Next year’s 49th International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City will allow a renewal of faith by connecting with the “source and summit” of Christian life, the Eucharist, said Cardinal Marc Ouellet.

TORONTO - Buoyed by a big bank but pulled down by its lack of oil stocks, the Jantzi Social Index fell off the pace set by mainstream stock indexes in March.

TORONTO - Pastoral care in Ontario’s Catholic high schools is now on the right side of canon law. School  chaplains are now called Co-ordinators of School Chaplaincy Services. The Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops came up with the new name after consulting with the Catholic School Chaplains of Ontario.  Canon 564 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law defines a chaplain as a priest. Since almost no school chaplains in Ontario are ordained, the bishops wanted a new title for the job prior to issuing a statement concerning pastoral care in the schools later this year.

TORONTO - The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace has jumped into the debate on whether to abolish the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).