News/Canada

TORONTO - The fight over assisted suicide isn’t over yet. A day after a government advisory group released 43 recommendations calling for wide access to assisted suicide, the Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL) held its annual general meeting Dec. 15 to discuss its concerns and plans for the year ahead, a year when it seems likely Canada will legalized assisted suicide.

The Most Reverend Douglas Crosby, O.M.I., Bishop of Hamilton and President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), has videotaped his message for Christmas and the New Year. Entitled Goodness abounds, Bishop Crosby refers similarly to the theme of mercy which the Church celebrates this month and throughout the coming year as the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. The production of this video has been made possible thanks to the collaboration with Salt + Light Television.

If Catholics are going to have any chance of limiting the damage of legal assisted suicide they’re going to have to get beyond outrage and suggest practical solutions, the lone Catholic representative to the Provincial- Territorial Expert Advisory Group On Physician-Assisted Dying told The Catholic Register.

OTTAWA - The battle to bring euthanasia to Canada heated up Dec. 22, when the Quebec Court of Appeal said the province could go ahead with its so-called 'medical aid' in dying law.

TORONTO - A 13-hour flight to Toronto was nothing after three years spent living as refugees in Amman, Jordan, as an Armenian Orthodox family from Aleppo, Syria, launched its Canadian odyssey.

OTTAWA - Canada’s Catholic bishops and the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus are asking the Canadian government to make helping persecuted Christians in the Middle East and Africa, whom Pope Francis and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks say face genocide, a priority.

TORONTO - The human rights of doctors would be “violated” by proposed guidelines that would require Ontario doctors, even against their conscience, to refer patients for assisted suicide, said the executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Society.

OTTAWA - As Ottawa petitions the Supreme Court for a six-month extension to draft an assisted suicide law, Quebec has implemented its controversial euthanasia legislation pending a decision by the province’s Court of Appeal.

OTTAWA - The papal nuncio to Canada says Pope Francis is aware of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for the Pope to deliver an apology for past Church abuses in Canada’s Indian residential schools and is sure he “is listening with all his heart as a pastor.”

OTTAWA - The legal phase of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools is over, but the doors are now open to a new reconciliation phase, say Catholics involved in the process.