News/Canada

You may be blessed, but Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation wants nothing to do with it. The provincial government won’t allow drivers to be randomly blessed on Ontario highways and byways.

Patty McConnell thought she had a simple, uplifting message staked out for a vanity licence plate for her car. She was willing to pay $250 to have URBLEST above her back bumper.

The ServiceOntario products and services office said, oh no you don’t.

Canada’s bishops are asking the government to explain a 68 per cent cut in CIDA funding to Development and Peace, but development experts and opposition politicians are offering explanations the bishops are unlikely to hear from the government.

University of Toronto development expert Wilson Pritchart says domestic politics is lurking behind CIDA funding decisions.

“What the government in fact is doing is cutting funding to organizations that are critical of it, that are critical of the aid agenda,” Pritchart told The Catholic Register. “And to some extent cutting funding to NGOs that are at all political in favour of using NGOs as conduits for service delivery.”

OTTAWA - Living with Dignity (LWD), a network of anti-euthanasia groups in Quebec, has condemned the province’s Select Committee on Dying with Dignity report’s support for euthanasia as “dangerous” and a “profound act of political betrayal.”

After holding consultations across the province last year, on Mar. 22 the committee recommended the legalization of euthanasia for people experiencing constant, unbearable physical or psychological suffering.

Now that Ontario’s highest court has found most laws surrounding prostitution in Canada are unconstitutional, people on all sides of the debate are urging Parliament to act.

In a landmark ruling likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Ontario Court of Appeal rendered a decision on March 26 that legalizes brothels and allows prostitutes to hire protection and other staff.  Public solicitation and pimping remain illegal but the court ruled that prostitutes have a constitutional right to work in safe environments.

However, the Ontario court suspended implementation of its decision for one year to give Parliament time to amend the criminal code.

Aggrieved North Bay parishioners claim their attempt to overturn a decision to close and sell their churches was turned down “on procedural grounds.”

Former St. Rita’s and Corpus Christi parishioners are appealing a Congregation for the Clergy decision to the Vatican’s highest court, the Apostolic Signatura. The parishioners hope to get the Apostolic Signatura to rule “on the substantive merits of our two cases,” said former Corpus Christi parishioner Phillip Penna in an email to The Catholic Register.

Decrees issued by the Congregation for the Clergy Jan. 13 disallowed the former parishioner’s attempt to overturn Sault Ste. Marie Bishop Jean Plouffe’s decision to reduce the two churches “to profane but not unbecoming use” because their petition was launched too late under the Code of Canon Law.

Development and Peace is facing significant program reductions and staff cuts after the 45-year-old Catholic lay movement was hit by a 65 per cent cut in government funding.

“It’s going to be a very difficult period for the organization,” said D&P executive director Michael Casey. “It’s not just staff here or the institution here in Canada. You look at the impact it’s going to have on the partners.”

OTTAWA - The Canadian government has recognized two outstanding defenders of religious freedom and human rights when awards were granted to the assassinated Pakistani Minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Argentinian anti-trafficking activist Susana Trimarco.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird presented the awards at the 2012 John Diefenbaker Defender of Human Rights Award ceremony Mar. 14 at the former Ottawa City Hall.

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition is telling Ontario’s Liberal government what it didn’t want to hear from economist Don Drummond — raise taxes.

The McGuinty government mandated the Drummond Commission to come up with ways to balance the province’s books but forbade the former bank economist from considering more taxes. ISARC makes no bones about urging action on the revenue side of the equation.

OTTAWA - Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, who reached retirement age last June, and appointed Christian Lépine to succeed him as Archbishop of Montreal.

Named last July as auxiliary Bishop of Montreal, Lépine, 60, was ordained to the episcopacy last September with auxiliary Bishop Thomas Dowd. His installation will take place on April 27.

The archbishop-elect served as director of the Grand Seminary of Montreal from 2000 until 2006, and since 2006 as pastor for two parishes in the diocese before becoming an auxiliary bishop. With degrees in theology from the University of Montreal, and philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Lépine also served for a year in the Vatican's Secretariat of State and for a year in the Congregation for Divine Worship.

OTTAWA - The same week a student group came under fire for distributing condoms on the Saint Paul University (SPU) campus, a pro-life group hosted a panel on the benefits of natural family planning (NFP), revealing the contrasts between artificial and natural means of preventing pregnancy.

SPU administrators ordered the student group to stop leaving a bowl of condoms for free pickup by students. That prompted a student to write an open letter, backed by 100 others, that led to stories by the news media.