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December 29, 2025
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It delights us to affirm that whether readers who engage with the Register through our website or traditional newspaper in 2026, they will join the ranks of the trendy and uber cool.
Okay. We might be getting a wee bit New Year’s Eve giddy a few days early.
We can, however, soberly say that as a media outlet attached at the spiritual hip to Holy Mother Church, we are part of the latest fashionable wave washing over the wider culture.
Strictly factually, the news of Catholic coolsville comes from the pen of Toronto literary lion Randy Boyagoda, a justifiably noteworthy communicant of the Church of Rome and professor of English at the University of Toronto.
The very fact Boyagoda was able to publish a long opinion column in the Dec. 20 issue of the Globe and Mail headlined “Catholicism is cool again” confirms his thesis.
When Globe founder George Brown’s historically anti-Papist Orange Order tip sheet permits something good to be said about the Catholic Church, we’ll accord it the credibility normally reserved for angels singing sweet hosannas.
Boyagoda, in fact, points to further convincing evidence of the nouveau fashionability of all things Vatican-aligned: he was recently told at a Toronto dinner party – of all places – that he is lucky to be Catholic.
“This is a phrase I never expected to hear in my adult life,” Boyagoda writes. “Under normal circumstances, I would wait for the punchline.”
No mocking blow landed, though. Esteemed academic that he is, the author of the forthcoming novel Lords of Serendipity set about gathering data to support his inkling that the culture is coming home to Rome.
Among the substantiations:
All these and others in Boyagoda’s text are points well taken and worth celebrating, although one slightly impertinent question arises: Does this mean people will now stop burning down our churches?
Fashionability can only go so far, after all, in countering the fanatical hatred of the Faith that exists in certain precincts such as, oh, say, Quebec as well as in pockets of the federal political establishment that intend to have our Holy Scriptures deemed hate literature.
And fashion itself is, of course, a flashing warning sign of a dead end to faith. The generational proof is the point in human maturity when we look back at the fashion-dictated costumes our younger selves wore and realize how idiotically ephemeral they were. The euphoria of crowds is, by definition, the antithesis of faith that endures. Having a moment is fine. Eternity? Infinitely better.
Boyagoda rightly points out it is the Church’s unfailing endurance as the path to eternal life through Christ the distinguishes the pitfalls of mere popularity from the graces of genuine conversion. It requires, he warns, “knowing and accepting, living with” the reality that the Church is full of sinners – if only to avoid the inevitable spiritual discouragement that arises from “romanticizing (it) as some kind of impregnable fortress where you can be kept safe from godless modern living.”
Those cautions considered, it is great news that Boyagoda’s observations about new-found popular receptivity to the Church’s proclamation of the Good News passed even the Globe and Mail’s editorial sniff test.
It is sufficient cause for us at the Register to say “hip-hip-hooray” and wish our readers a Happy New Year for 2026
A version of this story appeared in the December 28, 2025, issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Our Catholic moment".
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