NEWS

{mosimage}TORONTO - In setting out to protect a Toronto heritage home, Mary Fay discovered the story of a man so fascinating she spent years researching his life and deeds.

Four years ago, while walking by Senator O’Connor College School, Fay fell in love with a stately old home that sat boarded up on the school’s property, surrounded by a wire fence. Moved by its Colonial Revival-style architecture, she thought it deserved a second chance at life and began to research its history and its pending fate.

{mosimage}MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - All eight of Helen Steffler’s children celebrated their First Communion and Confirmation at St. Joseph’s Church in Mississauga, Ont., just a few of the thousands who have done the same over the parish’s 150-year history.

The parish was to mark its 150th anniversary with an Oct. 5 Mass celebrated by Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Mary White-Reel remembers when St. Theresa’s Shrine of the Little Flower parish was the only parish in her area. In fact, she had to be baptized at St. Augustine’s Seminary because the church was not yet built.

“I remember when we first came here, there were only three or four families (in the parish),” she said.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The pre-Wall Street meltdown market was a calm, even dull affair for Canadian ethical investors judging by the Jantzi Social Index results for August.

The JSI rose 1.4 per cent in August, keeping pace with the best known conventional indexes.

{mosimage}CORNWALL, Ont. - The president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops raised concerns about the war in Afghanistan and the Canadian government’s not making clear the goals of the mission there in his annual report to the bishops’ plenary here.

“If these goals are not articulated, it is difficult to determine bench marks, and almost impossible to evaluate successes and failures,” said Archbishop James Weisgerber.

{mosimage}JERUSALEM - The Vatican invitation to participate in the upcoming world Synod of Bishops on the Bible is a “signal of hope,” said Israeli Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, who will lead a one-day discussion on the Jewish interpretation of the Scriptures.

Cohen, co-chairman of the Israeli-Vatican dialogue commission and chief rabbi of Haifa, is the first non-Christian ever invited to address the world Synod of Bishops. He will speak the second day of the Oct. 5-26 synod at the Vatican.

{mosimage}CORNWALL, Ont. - Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine made an historic plea for reconciliation with the Catholic Church while speaking to a gathering of Catholic bishops here Sept. 22.

“What I want to talk about here is the future,” Fontaine told about 80 bishops attending the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual plenary.

Tough-on-crime election promises released this week by the Conservative Party don't much impress the Church Council on Justice and Corrections.

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition isn't shy about criticizing the federal Conservatives while the election is on. In an editorial in it's September newsletter the Ontario coalition of faith communities takes the Conservatives to task.

Religion and politics are constant bedfellows, so it's no surprise that Catholics aren't the only ones weighing in on this election. Among the religious voices raised in the early going of the short, six-week campaign, Muslims and Jews each have their concerns.